Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" within the Tradition of Modern Logic (review)

479 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY I997 deeply learned and amazingly broad, destined to become a benchmark in discussions of the British Moralists. ~ ELIZABETH S. RADCLIFFE Santa Clara University Giorgio Tonelli. Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" within the Tradition of Modern Logic. Edited from the Unpublished Works of Giorgio Tonelli by David H. Chandler. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994. Pp. xxx. + 381. Cloth, DM 128. In the paper he read at the Fourth International Kant Congress in Mainz in 1974, Tonelli announced a volume designed to crown his life-long research on Kant and to give final evidence for his interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. Unfortunately his sickness, resulting in his untimely death, prevented him from carrying out his project. We owe to David Chandler's careful reconstruction of Tonelli's manuscripts the publication of the materials prepared for the first part of that book. The main body of the book, preceded by a reprint of the Mainz paper and by two memorial articles by Claudio Cesa and by Norbert Hinske, consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 concerns the notions of organon, canon, discipline, and doctrine in Kant; Chapter 2 is an investigation of the precedents of Kant's use of organon and canon; and Chapter 3, supplemented by sixteen illustrative tables, is a discussion of the plan and subdivision of sciences in the evolution of Kant's thought. The Critique of Pure Reason is far from being a work of epistemology or theory of knowledge (a discipline which properly speaking did not even exist prior to the early nineteenth century), let alone a groundwork for the Newtonian world-view. For Tonelli the Crit/que is a work on the methodology of metaphysics. Transcendental philosophy is a special logic which does not consider any special object but pure reason itself. When Tonelli argues for this interpretation of the Crit/que as a work of logic and for Kant's incorporation of ontology into logic, he takes particular care to remind the reader of the understanding of logic typical of Kant's time. In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century understanding of logic, questions regarding sensible and rational knowledge, theory of division, methods of invention and demonstration, and even theories of correction and emendation of errors were included in logic. Logic was in this sense eminently practical and had to establish origin, proper method, extents and limits of human knowledge. That Kant calls the Cr/t/que the high road to metaphysics hints at the fact that it is constructed "in accordance with the blueprint of the major philosophical problems at stake in that time, ontological, cosmological, psychological and theological" (129), but is not itself part of metaphysics proper. In order to drive this point home Tonelli engages in a close analysis of the notions of organon and canon. The shift in meaning that these two notions acquire in the evolution of Kant's thought are reconstructed in minute detail. Tonelli shows that 1 would like to thank Sam Bruton, Nicholas Bull, Richard McCarty, and William Prior for discussions of this book. aOOK aEVXEWS 473 Kant used the term 'organon' with three different meanings: as an instrument for extending knowledge; as an instrument for assessing and correcting knowledge; and as a dictionary of technical terms (84 and IO8--109). If only mathematics can be an organon in the first sense, the Critique as a whole can be considered an organon in the second and third senses. All three meanings are then considered in light of their historical precedents, and particular emphasis is laid on the notion of organon in Lambert (123 ff.). As to 'canon', it is "the compass of the a priori principles of the correct use of certain cognitive faculties" (1o3). While the Critique delivers a canon for the pure use of the understanding, of judgment and of practical reason, it does not stand in need of any organon as instrument for extending knowledge because of reason's natural inclination to go beyond the boundaries of sensibility. Chapter 2 explores the different meanings of organon and canon prior to Kant. It tries to place the Kantian understanding of organon within the tradition...