The task of the philosopher is to undertake this kind of scientific inquiry with respect to reason itself. Kant’s task is to put metaphysics on the same “secure course of a science” as mathematics and physics. Metaphysics, by contrast, “has to deal with objects too,” and therefore “logic as a propaedeutic constitutes only the outer courtyard, as it were, to the sciences” (B ix). The path of logic has been relatively easy, though, since it “has to do with nothing further than itself and its own form” (B ix). Logic has “travelled the secure course of a science” since Aristotle (B vii). Kant puts this point more strongly still in the preface to the second edition, where he compares the path of metaphysics to other sciences. Kant notes that Locke had attempted but failed to “put an end to all these controversies … through a certain physiology of the human understanding” (A ix). He traces a path between the dogmatism (despotic tyranny) and skepticism (complete anarchy) that he says have characterized most previous metaphysics. Kant famously calls metaphysics “the queen of all the sciences” (A viii). For the purposes of this essay, I will limit my discussion to metaphysics, which is also the subject of this first Critique. In his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sketches his vision of philosophy’s task after the transcendental turn.
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