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xiii Introduction Metaphysics after “Metaphysics” The career of metaphysics since Kant has not been rosy. Some might wonder even if it has had a career at all. Kant sets a tone insofar as many think he is to be thanked for his demotion, even demolition, of traditional metaphysics . I have always had my doubts about this demolition, and when I went looking among earlier philosophers for the dogmatists Kant clearly sought to superannuate, it was not always easy to come up with bona fide candidates. More often than not one found thinkers whose work was marked by a symbiosis, sometimes fruitful, of skepticism and dogmatism, laced here and there (more rarely) with bold speculative daring. I mean skepticism here in this sense: the readiness to confess to hesitations about the philosophical claims one was surely entitled to make. I mean dogmatism thus: the willingness to venture some determinate philosophical affirmations , all things considered and all difficulties being reconsidered. I mean speculative daring in this sense: fidelity to a noble calling, solicited to say something about what is most ultimate for thought, all things skeptical considered, all the braggadocio of dubious dogmatism to the contrary . Kant, I concluded, was proximately much more disillusioned with the rationalism to which he himself had been committed in the earlier part of his career. To identify simpliciter metaphysics with such rationalism struck me as risking tarring the entire tradition of metaphysics with the brush of “dogmatism,” a dubious and dangerous simplification.1 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), on dogmatism and skepticism, see A ix, also B 23–24; Kant claims not to be against the “dogmatic procedure of reason” but against “dogmatism” which is dogmatic procedure “without previous criticism of its own powers” (B, xxxv). He goes on to praise “the celebrated Wolff, the greatest of all the dogmatic philosophers” in whom is to be honored the “spirit of thoroughness” still “not extinct in Germany”, and without which philosophy as science is not possible, and work will be turned into play, philosophy into philodoxy (B xxxvi–xxxvii). xiv  Introduction Of course, Kant wanted to rescue his version of rationalism, one centrally concerned with the power of pure practical reason to open us in thought to the ultimate realities about which theoretical reason can offer no warranted cognition.2 Moreover, it has often been noted that in the generation immediately succeeding Kant metaphysics seems to have undergone a resurrection in the work of Fichte perhaps, Schelling undoubtedly , and Hegel certainly. Some now excoriate this resurrection, prefer the cautions of Kant, or call for a return to his more critical enterprise. What “metaphysics” might mean in their philosophies is not simple, however, and there are perhaps hidden equivocations here for which we need philosophical finesse. To try to put a name on some of these equivocations is part of the present work. I find significance in the fact that when Hegel, in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, devotes his preliminary discussion to different attitudes of thought to objectivity, the first to which he pays close attention he calls “metaphysics” (the others are: empiricism and the critical philosophy, immediate knowledge, and then his own conception ).3 What he means by “metaphysics” is, in fact, the rationalism of the eighteenth century which, as I have just noted, reflected the philosophical ethos of the early Kant and against which he critically turned. Interestingly, Hegel is not at all destructive in his attitude to it. I take him to endorse the philosophical thinking of the things of reason to which traditional metaphysics, it seems, was devoted. His difficulty is the standard Kantian one: the categories we use in this rational thinking are not subject to critical reflection. I take Hegel to be seeking a rethinking of these same matters, in a post-Kantian perspective. Again interestingly, he goes out of his way to note that a philosopher like Aristotle cannot be dismissed as a “metaphysician” in the more constricted sense of this eigthteenth-century rationalism. The spirit of genuine speculative philosophy lived in the ancients . I take from this a salutary warning against too totalizing a claim that “metaphysics” has been “demolished” by the critique of Kant. Much more discrimination in needed. 2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor, intro. Andrews Reath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830), ed...

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