For the Love of Metaphysics: From the Revolution in Thinking towards the Renewal of Thinking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of Kant’s most original insights is the notion that we can construct a philosophical argument—a transcendental argument—whose central premise makes a first-personal appeal to our moral sentiments. Kant characterizes the epistemic force that accrues to the concepts and ideas that are justified by this form of philosophical argument as “moral belief” or “moral certainty,” and he calls the propositions that are demonstrated by such arguments “postulates of practical reason.” My dissertation has two interrelated aims. First, to exhibit the most significant repercussions of this basic Kantian insight for philosophical methodology, for our conceptions of human freedom and moral agency, and for the possibility of religious belief. Second, to show that Franz Rosenzweig’s theism is supported by what we may regard as a transcendental argument that reveals the conditions of possibility for understanding ourselves as beings endowed with ethical value. Because the repercussions of Kant’s discovery of a “moral proof” came into focus in the two decades after the publication of the first Critique, my dissertation starts by interpreting the philosophical significance of the early reception of Kant’s Critical philosophy. I argue that two of Kant’s earliest critics, Salomon Maimon and F. H. Jacobi, compelled the post-Kantian idealists to broaden the scope of Kant’s “moral proof” and transform his original insight into the idea that philosophy as a whole should be established on a practical foundation. My dissertation then examines how J.G. Fichte and F.W.J. Schelling appropriated Kant’s idea of a “moral proof” and transformed the idea into the more radical view that reason, as a whole, is practical. The final part of my dissertation brings the discussion about the nature of transcendental arguments to bear on topics in the philosophy of religion. I show how the metaphysical and theological framework that Schelling develops in his 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and in his 1811–1815 Ages of the World fragments grounds his conception of freedom and moral agency, and I argue that Schelling’s theology is the main source of inspiration for that developed by Rosenzweig in the Star of Redemption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".