Análisis integral de los resultados

Kant’s rejection of ontology, which is expressed in the opening

quotation of this paper, tends to be mentioned in the literature2 although not

discussed in great detail, i.e. there is not much treatment of what it is that Kant

is rejecting. Allison does specify that the ontology rejected by the

Transcendental Analytic (that is, in A247/B303) deals with “beings as such” or “things in general” and he equates it with “general metaphysics” or with a

science of “being qua being.”3 From what I have already said in the previous

chapters it is clear that this conception of ontology applies to Wolff’s

conception of ontology. There are some other instances that suggest that when Allison talks about ‘ontology’ he is talking about Wolff. For example, when discussing the question of whether spatio-temporal predicates can be predicated of things in general Allison argues that Kant rejects “the whole ontological framework in which the question had traditionally been posited.”

This, Allison continues, makes Kant’s move not a “novel move within

ontology” but a “radical alternative to ontology.”4 If I understand Allison

correctly, he argues that this is due to the fact that Kant does not intend to

ascribe an ontological status to spatio-temporal properties, i.e. to claim that they

do (or do not) apply to things themselves, but he intends to limit the

predication of those properties to the domain of possible experience.5 What

Kant limits, according to Allison, is consistent with ontology as conceived by Wolff and this limitation would indeed be an alternative to rather than a move within Wolffian ontology.

2 _{See Allison 2004, p. 308 and Grier 2012.}

3 _{Allison 2004, pp. 308, 327; cf. Allison 2015, p. 22.} 4 _{Allison 2015, pp. 28-9.}

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At the present moment, I am not interested in arguing whether Allison is correct or not about this. What I want to see here is whether Allison uses the term ‘ontology’ when talking about Kant in its historical sense, or in an

anachronistic sense. There are two things in Allison’s account that point

towards his, possibly unintentional, use of the term ontology anachronistically

when talking about Kant. Firstly, while I agree that Kant proposes a radical alternative to traditional or Wolffian ontology, and, in a sense, rejects the whole of the traditional ontological framework, I believe it is important to make this qualification (“traditional”) very explicit. This is because, as we shall

see later, Kant retains the concept ontology within his own system and what he

rejects is the traditional or Wolffian conception of it. While Allison seems to

implicitly, and correctly, identify the traditional ontology with Wolffian

ontology, there is no explicit or elaborate discussion of that philosophical

discipline, or an account what the term ontology is used for by Kant. Secondly,

if I am correct in reading Allison as claiming that Kant’s rejection of ontology is

exhaustively explained by his denial of the “ontological status” of certain properties (in this case space and time), then Allison seems to be using the

term ontology, or the adjective ontological,anachronistically. This is because

the phrase ontological status is not present in Wolffian philosophy. For Kant,

and the Wolffian tradition preceding him, the term ontology does not

immediately refer to possible ways of treating properties, but to a specific philosophical science. To say in that case, that spatio-temporal properties are not ontological predicates would mean that they are not to be derived within the discipline of ontology, and not, as Allison seems to be using it, that they do not apply to things themselves. For example, for Wolff, predicates of special metaphysics are not ‘ontological predicates’, but they still apply to things as they are in themselves.

Another approach to discussing Kant’s conception of ontology is

provided by Beiser.6 In discussing Kant’s pre-critical writings, specifically The

Dreams of the Spirit-Seer and the Inaugural Dissertation, Beiser argues that the

metaphysics Kant develops during this period is and should be an ontology. On

the other hand, Beiser argues, that this is not to be understood as ontology in

the traditional sense, by which Beiser means “a science about some kind of

thing.”7 By Kant’s new ontology, Beiser means a system of the most general

attributes or predicates of things which does nothing more than determine concepts that are the necessary limits and conditions of reason. According to

Beiser, the Inaugural Dissertation in this way limits metaphysics to an “ontology

of pure concepts,” by which he means “concepts about the conditions under

which anything can be thought.”8

While I find myself agreeing with the structure Beiser sets up, I find it necessary to draw certain distinctions in order, once again, to separate a potentially anachronistic employment of the concept of ontology from the traditional or Wolffian one. Beiser’s definition of traditional ontology seems somewhat vague, especially since we know that the tradition Kant comes from

understands ontology as a science of an entity qua entity. Unless we specify

what we mean by this it is unclear to me why ‘ontology of pure concepts’ would not be a ‘science about some kind of thing’, specifically of pure concepts. Moreover, it is insufficient to define traditional ontology as a “science about some kind of thing”, since all branches of special metaphysics are sciences about some kind of thing (God, Soul, World), while not being ontology. Now if what Beiser has in mind is that the difference between the traditional ontology and the ontology of pure concepts consists in the former

being a science about the thing in itself, a thing qua thing or an entity qua entity,

which would be the same in this case, while ontology of pure concepts is a science of “concepts about the conditions under which anything can be

thought,” while at the same time explicitly not being the science of things as

they are themselves, then we can recognise this as a distinction between Wolff and Kant. However, the question then arises why call this science of pure

concepts ontology? If such a discipline, while investigating, as was the practice

of traditional ontology, the most general attributes and predicates, limits the domain of this investigation to the objects of cognition should it not rather be

called an epistemology of pure concepts? The reason for that lies in the fact that

for Wolff there was no difference between the most general conditions of our

7 _{Beiser 1992, p. 50.} 8 _{Ibid, pp. 52, 50.}

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cognition and the most general structures of how the things, or entities themselves, are. So if Kant rejects the part of the traditional ontology that

claimed knowledge of the structure of ta onta, but retained the idea that we can

derive the principles of our cognition a priori, it seems strange to call his science

ontology.9 _{To emphasise, I am not here arguing that Beiser’s interpretation is}

incorrect, but rather that his use of the concept of ontology is ambiguous. It is

not clear whether he intends to use it in the Wolffian sense, to argue that Kant himself reconceptualises what ontology is supposed to be, or whether he uses it in a third sense that I am not understanding.

While the works of Allison and Beiser seem to at least touch on the conception of ontology developed by Wolff, although often without

referencing him or discussing its shape in details, there are authors discussing Kant and ontology who do not use the term in its traditional or Kantian sense at all. To identify such a practice one needs to look no further than Ameriks’ (1992) paper “The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology.” While Ameriks’ title sounds like a perfect title for this chapter, the way in which ontology in relation to Kant is discussed, and the topics Ameriks treats, are completely different from my approach and focus. For example, the mentioned paper does not provide a discussion of Kant’s understanding of what ontology is. Moreover, at various points Ameriks unproblematically equates ontology and metaphysics, either by using them interchangeably or by

equating “traditional ontology” with “rationalist metaphysics”.10 Furthermore,

when describing “traditional ontology” Ameriks talks, among other things, about Leibniz’s position that all events within the spatio-temporal field are

9 _{See de Boer 2011b, p. 56. As she argues Kant rejects the aspects of Wolff’s ontology}

that claims that pure concepts and principles can be attributed to any entity whatsoever, but retains the “epistemological strand of Wolff’s ontology.”

10 _{See Ameriks 1992, pp. 249, 272. One straightforward danger with equating ontology} (especially the traditional one) with metaphysics comes from the fact that, as we will remember, the latter served as a more general term than ontology. Metaphysics was itself divided into metaphysica generalis, which was called ontologia, and metaphysica specialis, which was not. Moreover, while one can equate traditional ontology with rationalist metaphysics, the inverse does not hold, as I hope to have shown in the previous chapter.

governed by the principle of sufficient reason, states that ontological questions deal with the exact nature of substance, cause, matter, etc., and categorises the question of whether there are simple substances as “the general ontological

question”.11 The problem with this approach is that it applies the concept of

ontology anachronistically, or at least imprecisely regarding the way we have seen it being developed by Wolff. For example, I have shown that “the general

ontological question” of Wolff was “what is an entity qua entity” and not any

sort of “what there is” question, which were the domain of special

metaphysics. In that case, what Ameriks exactly means when talking about ‘ontology’ or even ‘traditional ontology’ remains unclear.

This short excursion over these texts hopefully shows that the

discussion of ontology in Kant is alive and well in some of the contemporary leading Kant scholarship. The fact, however, which differentiates my approach from the ones that can be found above is that I intend to discuss Kant’s

relationship to ontology in a sense dominant in Kant’s own time and in a sense in which he saw himself using the term. As mentioned above, there are three

senses in which Kant uses the term ontology and them I will call: the

Architectonic, the Proud, and the Theological sense.