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Conclusion: Anthropology from Two Kantian Points of View; or, A Tale of Two Kants That division is entirely correct, provided there is also a difference in kind between the concepts that assign to the principles of this rational cognition their respective objects. (Kant, “On the Division of Philosophy,” introduction to Critique of Judgment 9/171) The hypothesis that has organized this book from the outset is that Kant, as the figure who precedes the analytic-continental split, could serve as a common ground on which the two traditions can recognize each other’s work as sufficiently similar or overlapping in nature to make a dialogue between them both practical and profitable. I have used Kant as a kind of Rosetta stone to cast continental thought in a vocabulary that would be more readily intelligible and demonstrably relevant to analytic philosophers . However, in endeavors such as these, we must always be careful not to lose distinctions by overemphasizing similarities. Indeed, my attempts to establish that the two branches have been talking about a common topic has more than historical interest only if they have different things to say about it, so that they might learn from each other. Accordingly, I will conclude this study of what is common to both analytic and continental thought with a brief discussion of their differences , in particular the different ways they have approached this shared topic. And just as I used Kant’s work to organize my analysis of the former, I will also use it for the latter purpose. To pursue my analogy a step further, the fact that the Rosetta stone contains a single message enables translation , but its precise juxtaposition of diverse languages also makes it a particularly useful site for examining the languages’ specific differences. Although Kant insists on the deep systematic harmony of his thought as a whole, the first two Critiques present accounts that differ in important 497 ways. There is, of course, the conflict between scientific determinism and ethical freedom which is only disarmed by the two perspectives of phenomena and noumena. But even if the two Critiques’ accounts are logically compatible, they are informed by and impart profoundly different outlooks , a rather vague notion that picks up some of the less definable senses of Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm, such as the ethos of a discipline, the sense of how to do it, and what its goal should be, derived in this case from particular conceptions of human thought. It is here that I see the seeds for the analytic-continental split. The first Critique,1 which I have focused on as the origin of the type of anti-realism I have treated in this book, portrays humanity as torn between absolute epistemological limits and unquenchable yearnings for the metaphysical knowledge that reason dangles before us. Scientific knowledge is universal yet essentially limited to our epistemological perspective, and we simply have to make our peace with the fact that we cannot escape this perspective, albeit a peace endlessly renegotiated. Autonomy too is characterized by this tension. On the one hand, the first Critique’s antirealism gives the knower autonomy in that we organize the realm of knowable phenomena, rather than objects dictating their natures to our passive wax tablet of a mind. On the other hand, it places a profound and essential limit on this autonomy by instructing us to accommodate ourselves to our inborn forms and concepts. Objects must correspond to our conditions of knowledge, but we in turn must make our investigations correspond to the conditions uncovered by critical philosophy. In Heidegger’s phrase, we are “thrown” into our forms, concepts, and ideas, and our “epistemological duty,” so to speak, is to submit to them. Nor does Kant allow for the kind of ersatz choice that Hegel does, through retrospective justification or explanation of these structures of our faculties as the best or only possible or inevitable ones. “This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition” (Kant, C1 B145–46; see also Kant, PFM 65/318). We explain nature’s regularity by recourse to the faculty of understanding (A5), but Kant rules out explanations of...

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