The Transcendental Doctrine of Method

Abstract

The “Transcendental Doctrine of Method” is the second of the two main parts into which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason divides after its introduction. This means that, prima facie , I have an unfair assignment! For my brief is to cover all but one of its four chapters in this chapter, while coverage of the rest of the Critique is accorded ten chapters altogether. In fact, however, this is a misleading way to put it, as anyone remotely familiar with the Critique will know. There is a reason of pure size as to why it is misleading: the second part of the Critique is only one sixth of the length of the whole. But even in a metaphorical sense of magnitude, the second part brooks no real comparison with all that has gone before. It is very common for commentators on the Critique not to pay it any attention at all. Even Norman Kemp Smith, whose 650-page commentary comes as close as any to being a section-by-section companion to the Critique , relegates discussion of this part to a twenty-page appendix and remarks: “[Its] entire teaching . . . has already been more or less exhaustively expounded in the earlier divisions of the Critique .”

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