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288 BOOK REVIEWS Kant and the Transcendental Object. By J. N. FINDLAY. New York and Oxford: University Press, 1981. Pp. xxiv + 392. $24.00. Findlay has long had a profound and sympathetic interest in the philosophy of Kant, and the present volume brings together the results of many years of research and reflection on the critical philosophy. The book's avowed purpose is " to conduct a comprehensive examination of Kant's metaphysic of transcendental idealism". There can be no doubt that the book is " comprehensive " in the sense that its treatment of Kant is extremely inclusive. More questionable is its claim to have conducted a " comprehensive examination " in the sense of an inquiry held together by a unifying theme or common purpose. Insofar as there is a common aim to the various parts of the book, it is stated in the opening chapter. Here Findlay sets out to defend the coherence and plausibility of Kant's much maligned doctrine of the " transcendental object,'' otherwise known as the " noumenon " or " thing in itself ". On this topic the book has much to say which is thoughtful, illuminating , and (in my opinion) right-headed. Findlay) defends the view that Kant is best interpreted as a " problematic realist", holding that the world is made up of real, mind-indepen,dent things, of whose existence we can be confident, but whose nature we can know only as it conforms to the conditions of our sensibility and understanding, and not as it is in itself, Findlay decisively (and cogently) rejects two common revisionist interpretations of Kant: the positivist one, which would commit all thought and language about transcendental objects to the Bedlam of meaninglessness , and the idealist one, which would dispense with transcendental objects as superfluous additions to the critical metaphysics, and regard the objective world simply as the product of a transcendental subject. Not only does Findlay argue that these two interpretations distort Kant's actual doctrines (a point which should be obvious to anyone who cares at all what Kant actually thought about the matter); he also argues (more controversially , but no less cogently) that Kant's problematic realism is philosophically superior to these two revisionist attempts to save Kant from himself. This argument, as I have said, constitutes the closest thing there is to a unifyilljg theme in the book, and is doubtless meant to justify the book's title. But in fact it is impossible to regard the volume as having any single purpose or any successfully unifying theme. What Findlay in fact gives is an extremely inclusive discussion of a variety of topics in Kant's philosophy and some other matters related to it. The book's scope in this regard is awesome. After the opening chapter defending the doctri1* mentioned in the book's title, we get a chapter expounding the thought of BOOK REVIEWS ~89 two neglected predecessors of Kant, Wolff (" an eighteenth century Germanic Aquinas") and Crusius ("an eighteenth century Germanic G. E. Moore"). Then we get a chapter surveying in detail Kant's critical writings from 1755 to 1770. Next there are four chapters expounding and criticizing the main doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason. Then a chapter on Kant's philosophy of nature, treating not only the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science but even plumbing the murky depths of the Opus Postumum (although here Findlay's accoulltt is admittedly derivative from Erich Adickes's 1920 study). After this, there is a chapter on Kant's philosophy of morality and religion, and one on his metaphysic of beauty. Finally, there is a concluding chapter containing such diverse matters as comparisons of Kant's doctrine with Plato's myth of the cave and with certain doctrines in oriental religions, a brief discussion of Kant's idealist successors in Germany, and comparisons of Kant to Husserl, Wittgenstein, and Strawson. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that Kant and the Transcendental Object is rather a hodge-podge, a collection, presented in roughly historical order, of all the things Findlay wants to say about Kant, with too little concern whether or not they add up to a single, well-motivated treatise . This conclusion is the harder to resist on...

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