Wolff’s Empirical Psychology and the Structure of the Transcendental Logic (original) (raw)

Kant and his German Contemporaries

While there is a broad consensus that Kant models the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason on aspects of Wolff's system of philosophy, scholars have taken different views about the significance of this fact. When Erik Adickes comments on Kant's ability to "fill old bottles with new wine", for example, he means to fault Kant for presenting his arguments in a form that is singularly unhelpful for understanding their content. 1 Adickes' attitude toward the structure of the Critique echoes Schopenhauer's derision decades earlier of Kant's obsession with "systematicity" and has been echoed in the many decades since by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. 2 Others, most notably Georgio Tonelli, have argued that one cannot approach the content of the Critique without first understanding its form and that this form is borrowed largely from the conceptual and structure conventions common to the logic books of Kant's contemporaries, a tradition that bears the stamp of Wolff's influence more than that of any other thinker. 3 With respect to the Transcendental Logic, the standard reading, drawn from Tonelli and endorsed prominently by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, is that this portion of the Critique "replicates the traditional division of logic textbooks into three sections on concepts, judgments, and inferences". 4 More specifically, the first and second books of the Transcendental Analytic (the Analytic of Concepts and the Analytic of Principles) are thought to provide the analogue in transcendental logic to traditional accounts of concepts formation and judgments respectively, while the second book of the Transcendental Dialectic (the Dialectical Inferences of Pure Reason) is thought to provide the analogue in transcendental logic to traditional accounts of inference. 5 While it is undeniable that these parts of the Transcendental Logic contain elements that are similar to the accounts of concept formation, judgment, and inference one finds in the logic books of the Wolffian tradition, it seems to me that these similarities are largely incidental to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. One reason to think this is that the basic structure of this part of the Critique is not governed by the the single tripartite division these scholars reference but by two bipartite divisions, the analytic-dialectic division and the "two books and their various