Transformations of Transcendental Philosophy: Wolff, Kant, and Hegel

Kant's philosophy is generally known as transcendental philosophy or transcendental idealism, terms often thought to describe the inquiry into the subjective conditions of empirical knowledge carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason. On this conception of transcendental philosophy Kant is seen to pursue a project very different from both Wolffian metaphysics and Hegelian speculative science. This view is confirmed by scholars who compare Kant's conception of transcendental philosophy to the Scholastics' conception of ‘transcendentals’ such as unity, truth, and perfection. On their account, there remains a puzzling gap between, on the one hand, the scholastic conception of the most general determinations of all beings and, on the other hand, Kant's investigation into the conditions of possibility of experience. In this article I want to challenge this common view of Kant's transcendental philosophy for two reasons. The first reason concerns the question of how the Critique of Pure Reason itself should be read. I take the view that in the first Critique Kant's primary aim is to determine the conditions of synthetic a priori knowledge rather than to identify the a priori conditions of empirical knowledge. Since metaphysics was traditionally considered to be the discipline that possessed a priori knowledge of things, this view makes good sense of Kant's presentation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a work intended to transform metaphysics into a science. In this article I hope to clarify the nature of this transformation by determining the elements which Kant's transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolff's ontology, as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. I thus hope to solve some of the riddles posed by Kant's use of the term ‘transcendental philosophy’ in the Critique of Pure Reason.