Review of For the Love of Metaphysics: Nihilism and the Conflict of Reason from Kant to Rosenzweig, Karin Nisenbaum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant warns that freedom and morality 'give way to the mechanism of nature' if we defer to reason's speculative use, which, since it is restricted to the 'natural necessity' of appearances, renders its 'practical extension [. ..] impossible'.It is in light of this that he resolves to 'deny knowledge in order to make room for faith' of the sort that can withstand 'all unbelief conflicting with morality' (Kant Bxxvii-xxx).Kant concludes in the Doctrine of Method that, by preventing speculative 'devastations' to freedom and morality, critique allows us to 'return to metaphysics as to a beloved from whom we have been estranged' and to pursue the 'essential ends of humanity' to which mathematical, scientific, and empirical knowledge have 'value' strictly as 'means' (Kant A849-50/B877-8).This foregrounds Kant's claim in the Dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason that 'all interest is ultimately practical and even that of speculative reason is only conditional and is complete in practical use alone', from which he infers that we avoid 'a conflict of reason with itself', not by a 'contingent' juxtaposition of speculative and practical reason, but rather by a 'necessary' union of speculative and practical reason in which 'the latter has primacy' (Kant AA 5: 121, emphasis in original).It is for the sake of practical knowing, on whose actuality its object is grounded, that there is theoretical knowing, whose actuality by contrast is grounded on its object.And it is for the sake of practical self-knowing, which produces its object, that there is theoretical other-knowing, which by contrast receives its object (see Engstrom 2013, pp.145-6).German idealism radicalizes the primacy of practical reason, using various argumentative strategies to prove that reason is the all, that is, that reason is unconditionally self-knowing and unconditionally actual such that it produces and grounds its object in every respect (see Hegel GW 12: 238).It is only by proving the identity of reason and the all, or of thought and being, that idealism can overcome presuppositions that leave Kant's practical turn
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".