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There have been countless publications on Kant's philosophy. By his death, in 1804, there were over 2800, and many more have appeared since. With such a body of literature weighing on our shoulders, any attempt to say something new may seem futile. But philosophical knowledge is not unified, linear, and cumulative. Kant studies, like similar fields, will always be centred around paradigms, with their own history of insights and illusions, dominance and decay. They leave open the possibility of discovering overlooked ideas, correlations and constellations, or seeing old ones in a new light. This applies to Edward Kanterian's monograph. He encourages us to undertake an aspect-shift. ‘We’ anglophone Kant buffs tend to see him as one of us—a contributor to today's philosophical disciplines, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, etc., offering arguments for familiar positions such as idealism, phenomenalism, deontology, etc. Underlying this approach is an assumption inherited from the Enlightenment: a philosopher, like a scientist, is a tabula rasa, encumbered with no unbracketed doctrinal commitments, but developing arguments for various positions, testing them, and eventually adopting the position with most ‘evidence’ in its favour. In his Introduction, Kanterian contrasts this with a broadly hermeneutic approach: explicit theories and arguments should be distinguished from more deep-seated beliefs and prejudices (in the sense of Gadamer's Truth and Method), the underlying Weltanschauung. Even in Kant's case the doctrinal commitments came first, and his arguments, especially transcendental idealism, came second. For as Kanterian establishes, Kant did not start as a tabula rasa. He was a child of his religious age, the son of a Pietist mother, educated in a Pietist college, mentored by Pietist professors, committed, for much of his career, to a theistic outlook on our place in the world, an outlook that he repeatedly tried to reconcile with the scientific worldview. Carl Becker's dictum, that Enlightenment philosophers ‘demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials,’ applies with equal force to Kant.
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