Abstract

This book is the revised version of a dissertation defended at the University of Chicago. It is also volume 3 of the series “North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy.” Its impressive title refers backward to Laywine’s purpose of showing “why Kant came to the view that sensibility and pure understanding are radically different faculties of knowledge governed by different principles—a view of central importance to the Critique of Pure Reason”. Such a research object is in itself not new. What is new, however, is Laywine’s seeing Kant’s late elaborations on sensibility and understanding as an attempt to provide an answer to the problem of the commercium between body and soul, a problem that was the subject of many discussions within post-cartesian philosophy and received a great deal of attention by Kant too, especially at the beginning of his scientific career, as testified by the presentation of a system of real interaction in his 1755 writing, Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio, whose details are investigated in chapter 2 and in chapter 3. But it is in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, published in 1766, that Laywine sees the “key moment” that gives momentum to her interpretation and are thus made the subject of chapter 1. Laywine dismisses some of the most renowned interpretations of this satirical and at the same time enigmatic writing of Kant’s. She maintains that most interpretations have been failures, and that we can understand the Dreams in a more fruitful way only if we understand the reason for this failure. The reason of the failures, says Laywine, is not having been able to “explain why Kant associates the question of spirits and spirit-seeing with the status and future of metaphysics”, and the more fruitful understanding of the Dreams centers in their connection to Kant’s earlier work in metaphysics, in particular to “his efforts during the mid-1750s to lay the foundation of a credible system of real interaction to supplant the system of pre-established harmony favored by Wolff and Leibniz”. Chapter 4 contains some remarks on the source of Kant’s Dreams, for example, Swedenborg’s Arcana coelestia, while chapter 5 provides a careful analysis of the Dreams, which, according to Laywine, contains not only a critique to Swedenborg, but also a critique to Kant’s Nova dilucidatio in so far as both falsely represent the realm of intelligible substances as though it were subject to the conditions of the sensible world. Chapter 6 is dedicated to Kant’s 1770 dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, which, Laywine remarks, contains the method for correcting the error of Kant’s early metaphysics, namely a method for avoiding false representation of immaterial substances as determined by the conditions of sensibility. Detailed conclusive remarks round out the volume by indicating the direction toward the critical philosophy.