Logic (review)

238 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Logic. By Immanuel Kant. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Robert Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. 1974. Pp. cxv + 164) In 1798 Kant gave the manusript of his lectures on logic to his colleague and friend, J~ische, with instructions to edit it and have it published as a "compendious manual." J~ische followed instructions, and the first edition appeared in 1800. But the resulting Logic, the complete text of which is now available in English for the first time, is far more than a record of a perennial course offering. Indeed, Kant frequently supplies elements omitted from his major critical works. Among the more significant items are an elaboration and defense of his distinction between general and transcendental logic, and an explanation of the differences between analysis and synthesis with respect to concepts, judgments, and methods. He also provides a series of comments on how he views the unity of the critical philosophy--including some comments which become pivotal in the controversy over whether his philosophy is best seen as a philosophical anthropology. The Logic is even noteworthy in point of form, for Kant becomes relatively generous with definitions (though he would call few of them "definitions"). Hartman and Schwarz introduce the text with a long commentary which is primarily concerned with the treatment of analysis and synthesis, often comparing it to earlier discussions in Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz. The editors' main argument is that "philosophical" and "scientific" strains must be distinguished in the Critique ofPure Reason before there can be any assessment of whether (or how) it succeeds in its aims. They make a rather straightforward distinction between the Critique as a "transcendental philosophy" which "deals with the relation of concepts to reason" in order to determine "the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason," and as a "science of metaphysics" insofar as it must show in outline how such a science would proceed if it were not ensnared in the illusions of a transcendent metaphysics (pp. Ixxviii-lxxxviii).Here much of their argument is taken up with showing how a "science" is generated through the isolation of axioms (as a result of the analysis of a given subject matter) and the formalization of this "phenomenal core" in a systematic discipline. They conclude that the Critique itself is "literally scientific" only in the metaphysical deduction where it constructs transcendental logic by using the table of judgments as a "guiding thread" (Leitfaden) for elaborating the ways in which we can create a cognitive unity in the manifold of intuition. The Critiqueas a whole, however, is an "analogical science" (as well as a "transcendental philosophy") because it conducts thought-experiments in order to test the assumption of reason that the unconditioned is given with the conditioned, and to this end it seeks to pinpoint ambiguities and resolve contradictions. But although it is clear enough how Hartman and Schwarz could defend the claim that only a small portion of the Critique is devoted to "literal science," it is less clear how the notion of "analogical science," taken as the primary scientific character of the Critique as a whole, can accommodate Kant's insistence on a self-validating completeness for his project. "Analogical science" is supposed to have merely a probing function and uses general logic as a negative criterion of truth. But even if we are look for only "the formal conditions of a complete system of pure reason" (as opposed to the system itself), the discovery of these conditions would require more than a hypothetical method of "experiment" if such a method were nothing more than a test of metaphysical theories by the principle of noncontradiction. For Kant, however, a method is more than simply a procedure applicable to a given subject matter: it is "the manner in which we can completely cognize a certain object to the cognition of which the method is to be applied," and it must tell us, among other things, what would be required in order to complete the probe (p. 22, emphasis mine). Even if the science of the Dialectic is only analogical, it must contain a principle to show that we have completely examined...