Kant and the critic to the metaphysica specialis: The Transcendental Dialectic in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

The Project has as background the study already made by the same team on the concept of time in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason. In this second phase we aim to study the critic made to the metaphysica specialis by the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition which takes place in the Transcendental Dialectic, second section of the Transcendental Logic of the Critique of Pure Reason.

The philosophy scholars of the eighteenth-century have already pointed that the starting point of Kant in metaphysics is the concept of this discipline which offers him the Leibniz-Wolffian tradition. Recovering a former classification, the main agents of this tradition (Ch. Wolff, A. G. Baumgarten) divide the metaphysics into metaphysica general or ontology and a metaphysica specialis. This last one, the metaphysica specialis, is divided again into three specific disciplines: psychology, cosmology and rational theology (Cf. A.G. Baumgarten, Metaphysica).

This division of metaphysics has repercussions in the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason. In fact, as it is well known, one of it’s main chapters, the Transcendental Logic, is dividen into an Analytic and a Transcendental Dialectic. While in the first of this sections it is developed a radical critic to the metaphysica generalis or ontology; in the second one -the Transcendental Dialectic- it is verified an exhaustive critic to the transcendental illusion hidden in each of the disciplines of the traditional metaphysica specialis.

The task of the research that we have proposed ourselves consists in the identification of the function, the meaning and the projection in the history of philosophy of this detailed and exhaustive critic to the dogmatical metaphysica specialis that is found in the Transcendental Dialectic, those “critic to the dialectic appearance”. [KrV, A 62 - B 86].

Members: Lic. Marcos Thisted (Director), Dr. Fernando Moledo (Codirector), Dr. Ricardo Cattaneo, Dr. Macarena Marey, Dr. Hernán Pringe, Ana Inés Dutari, Hugo Figueredo, Miguel Herzenbaun, Melina Krimker, Luciana Martínez, Lucila Moreno, Jacinto Páez, Laura Pelegrín, Lucila Ojea, Martín Oliveira, Fiorella Tomassini, Alejandro I. Virué.