Abstract

This study is a critical and constructive examination of the inner structure of Kantian epistemology as formulated in the Critique of Pure Reason. The focus of this study is delimited to an analysis of what I have termed the critical framework, which restricts determinate knowledge to the given objects of empirical experience. Kant's argumentation in support of the empirical limits of determinate knowledge consists of three parts, related to the construction, the legitimation, and the grounding of the critical framework. Kant constructs the essential elements of the critical framework in his exposition of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic, and he attempts to legitimate the principle of the critical framework in the Transcendental Dialectic. I argue, however, that the actual ground of the critical framework is found in the concept of freedom that functions as the telos of Kant's entire critical project. ;In terms of the overall argument of the first Critique, the cogency of the critical framework hinges upon the validity and coherence of Kant's argumentation in the Transcendental Dialectic, and it is the engagement of Kant's argumentation in the Dialectic that constitutes the central core of this study. According to Kant, the Dialectic corroborates the principle of the critical framework by demonstrating the logical fallacies and contradictions into which reason is led if we extend the categories of the understanding beyond the limits of sense perception, indicating that reason has overstepped the boundary of determinate knowledge. This study, however, seeks to show that Kant's argumentation in the Dialectic is in error, and that the purported fallacies and contradictions of reason can be resolved on their own terms, thereby demonstrating that the principle of the critical framework is unsupported. With the removal of the critical framework, the transcendental method of argumentation utilized throughout the critical philosophy in explicating the epistemic conditions of knowledge can then provide warrant for the possibility of developing a realistic epistemology that elucidates the ontological conditions of existence. This ontological grounding can in turn provide the basis for a postmodern defense of normative ethics, the trajectory of which I outline in the introduction to this work