The Fiery Test of Critique comprises a series of careful readings of Kant’s main arguments against traditional metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). The book is attentive to the texts and philosophically sophisticated. It also provides a great deal of “historical context for the conceptions Kant employs” (31). This is not mere stage-setting or ornamentation: it genuinely deepens our understanding of the primary text.1 Proops’s book is contemporary Anglophone Kant scholarship at its best.Because Proops aims to reconstruct all the major arguments of the Dialectic, he exceeds his subject in length: 411 pages in the Dialectic’s A-edition are met by 462 pages in Proops! But this should not be a deterrent. The Fiery Test of Critique is well organized and has the feel of a commentary: it starts where the Dialectic starts and treats Kant’s topics in roughly the same order that he does. Readers can easily skip around to find Proops’s views about the part of the Dialectic that interests them.Proops’s book bulks large against what has long been the standard reading of the Dialectic. This reading (found in Bennett 1974, for example) portrays the Dialectic as mainly a negative enterprise. Speculative metaphysics ventures beyond the bounds of sense into the sphere of nonsense. Reason is thus in need of stern Prussian discipline, which it encounters in the Dialectic. There Kant shows that traditional metaphysics inevitably leads to dead-end paralogisms, self-defeating antinomies, and illusory ideals. And although the appendix to the Dialectic explores a legitimate “regulative” use of reason, the only truly positive metaphysical claims are based on moral grounds.While Proops devotes much of his book to these negative arguments, he is more clear-eyed than previous readers about the Dialectic’s positive purpose. Using Kant’s metaphor of a “fiery test of critique [Feuerprobe der Kritik]” (A406/B433), Proops suggests that we construe the Dialectic as a metallurgical assay in which mixed metals are tested by fire, so that the impurities “go up in smoke” and we are left with precious metals. In other words, the Dialectic burns away the false ambitions of speculation but leaves behind something of great worth (12).Specifically, Proops identifies two precious nuggets—one gold, one silver—that emerge from the flames. The gold nugget is a series of indirect arguments for transcendental idealism (A506–7/B534–35). Proops argues that we get at least four such arguments, one from the resolution of each of the four antinomies (chaps. 10.10, 12.4, 13.4). The silver nugget, by contrast, consists in Kant’s positive arguments for the afterlife and God’s existence in the mode of doctrinal Belief (doktrinaler Glaube) (chaps. 7.8–7.9, 16.9–16.10).2 Proops thinks that the gold nugget holds greater philosophical value, but the silver nugget has some exegetical luster because “the topic of doctrinal Belief has, until recently, been largely neglected by scholars” (4).A lot depends on what “largely” means, since there have been quite a few recent discussions of this issue, some of which Proops acknowledges.3 We agree, in any case, that the arguments for doctrinal Belief are among the major positive results of the Dialectic and think that, if anything, Proops undersells their value by describing them as mere silver. For Kant, we would suggest, the arguments that Proops takes to be gold (for transcendental idealism) are in service of not merely the famous moral argument—as Proops notes (458)—but also of the theoretical arguments of doctrinal Belief. In the B preface, Kant says that he found he had to “deny knowledge in order to make room for Belief” (Bxxx). While the context of the passage concerns moral Belief (regarding the Highest Good, immortality, and God), we think Kant’s goal in the Critique as a whole is to make room for doctrinal Belief as well.Aside from selling gold for the price of silver, Proops omits to mention several key articles of doctrinal Belief along the way. Kant says that once we abandon the illegitimate aim of achieving metaphysical knowledge, a “principle that would otherwise be dialectical will be transformed into a doctrinal principle” (A516/B544). In addition to claims about immortality and God, then, we can include claims about the parsimony of nature and the harmony between mind and world. In what follows, we focus on three other examples: doctrinal Belief in (1) the Supreme Principle of Reason, (2) the Ultimate Ground, and (3) the Most Real Being.Start with the Supreme Principle. In the introduction to the Dialectic, Kant describes a transition from the “Logical Maxim” of Reason (“P1” in Grier 2001), which requires that we find the totality of conditions for conditioned cognitions, to the “Supreme Principle of reason” (Grier’s “P2”), which asserts that there is a totality of conditions behind any conditioned object (A307–8/B364–65). Kant diagnoses this slip from a benign prescriptive maxim to a heavyweight metaphysical principle as the root cause of all speculative mishaps. Therefore how one interprets the transition passage carries significant implications for how one understands the origins of dialectical error.Following Grier, Proops argues that transition happens because transcendental illusion tempts us to mistake a subjective principle for an objective one—“mistaking P for D” (46). Proops provides a three-step explanation of this mistake, each of which invokes a distinct “sub-illusion.” First, we confuse the Logical Maxim, which for Proops is a hypothetical imperative about cognitions, for a hypothetical imperative about objects; next we confuse the hypothetical imperative about objects for a categorical one; finally, we confuse a categorical imperative for an assertion about reality, claiming that there really are totalities of conditions (46–50). On Proops’s reading, then, any endorsement of the Supreme Principle rests on a triple confusion.We disagree with this, and think that by Proops’s own lights there can be justified assent to the Supreme Principle in the mode of doctrinal Belief. Proops correctly notes that “doctrinal Belief is justified … by the fact that it is an indispensable presupposition of the contingent aim” or end of theoretical reason (419; cf. A823–27/B851–55). What Proops doesn’t say is that the Logical Maxim itself specifies an end of theoretical reason—namely, to find the totality of conditions for one’s object-oriented cognitions. Moreover, this end can only be realized if one assumes that there really is such a totality among the objects. The Supreme Principle therefore is an indispensable presupposition that allows us to achieve a key end of theoretical reason—a perfect candidate for doctrinal Belief.4This reading also dovetails with Proops’s account of transcendental illusion as confusing something subjective for objective. Doctrinal Belief, like all Belief, rests on “subjective grounds” that are tied to our ends (A829/B857). The mistake of traditional metaphysicians is to confuse these subjective grounds for objective ones that allow us to know the Supreme Principle. And this mistake is a direct consequence of assuming transcendental realism (which Proops discusses in 52–56). Kant thinks the Supreme Principle is analytically true, and thus known, when applied to things in themselves (see A498–99/B526–27; Jauernig 2021: 352). Transcendental realists identify things in themselves with appearances and so claim to know the Supreme Principle applies to appearances too.Now to the cosmological argument for the Ultimate Ground. Here Kant provides a series of arguments that burn away illusions (about the epistemic status of the principle of sufficient reason, for example) that have haunted rational cosmologists since Aristotle. But Kant’s denial of knowledge in that context makes room for doctrinal Belief in the Ultimate Ground. “The entire whole would have to sink into the abyss of nothingness if one did not assume [annehmen] something subsisting for itself originally and independently outside this infinite contingency, which supports it and at the same time, as the cause of its existence, secures its continuation” (A622/B650). There are no moral grounds cited here, but we do have a strong theoretical need to evade abysses of nothingness. Thus the “assumption” or “acceptance” is best construed as an article of doctrinal Belief.Finally, there is Kant’s critical approach to his own early proof of the Most Real Being in the Only Possible Basis (OPB) essay of 1763. Proops writes:Proops is not explicit about what this subjectively necessary assent to the existence of a Most Real Being is. But it clearly looks like a good candidate for doctrinal Belief.5Why doesn’t Proops mention these three nuggets of doctrinal Belief in the Dialectic? The cases he does cite (afterlife and God) come from arguments that include empirical premises and analogical inferences (see 180, 186n43, 391, 418). So it may be that Proops assumes that all doctrinal Beliefs must be based on empirical premises and/or analogical inferences (but see 419).6 Since the arguments for the Supreme Principle and the ens realissimum don’t fit this bill, Proops may have thought that they don’t qualify. (Whether the argument for the Ultimate Ground invokes an empirical premise is controversial.) However, we disagree with the implicit condition: Doctrinal Belief needn’t be justified by empirical premises or involve analogical reasoning.7In sum: Proops is surprisingly coy about one of the main results of his masterful analysis of the Dialectic—the positive role of doctrinal Belief. Doctrinal Belief, we have suggested, is one of the Critique’s treasures, and there is more of it than Proops identifies. But a book whose chief fault lies in omission and restraint rather than in commission and exuberance is not thereby a bad book. The Fiery Test of Critique is excellent and will be a resource for decades for anyone interested in Kant and his Dialectic.

中文翻译：

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批判的激烈考验：康德辩证法解读


《批判的激烈考验》包括对康德在《纯粹理性批判的先验辩证法》（1781/1787）中反对传统形而上学的主要论点的一系列仔细阅读。这本书对文本很关注，哲学也很复杂。它还提供了大量“康德所采用的概念的历史背景”（31）。这不仅仅是舞台布景或装饰：它真正加深了我们对原始文本的理解。1 普罗普斯的书是当代英语康德学术的巅峰之作。因为普罗普斯的目标是重建辩证法的所有主要论点，所以他在以下方面超越了他的主题：长度：《辩证法》A 版有 411 页，《Proops》则有 462 页！但这不应该成为一种威慑。 《批判的激烈考验》组织良好，有一种评论的感觉：它从辩证法开始的地方开始，并以与康德大致相同的顺序处理康德的主题。读者可以轻松地跳转到普罗普斯对《辩证法》中他们感兴趣的部分的看法。普罗普斯的书与长期以来的《辩证法》标准读物大相径庭。这种解读（例如，贝内特 1974 年的著作）将辩证法主要描绘成一项消极的事业。思辨形而上学冒险超越了意义的界限，进入了无意义的领域。因此，理性需要严格的普鲁士纪律，这在《辩证法》中就遇到了。康德在那里表明，传统形而上学不可避免地会导致死胡同、自相矛盾和虚幻的理想。尽管辩证法的附录探讨了理性的合法“规范”使用，但唯一真正积极的形而上学主张是基于道德基础的。虽然普罗普斯在书中用了大量篇幅讨论这些消极论点，但他比以前的读者对辩证法的积极目的更加清晰。普罗普斯使用康德的“批判的火热测试[Feueprobe der Kritik]”(A406/B433)的比喻，建议我们将辩证法解释为一种冶金分析，其中混合金属通过火进行测试，以便杂质“在烟”，我们就只剩下贵金属了。换句话说，辩证法烧掉了投机的虚假野心，但留下了一些具有巨大价值的东西（12）。具体来说，普罗普斯识别出了从火焰中出现的两块宝贵的金块——一块金，一块银。金块是对先验唯心主义的一系列间接论证（A506-7/B534-35）。普罗普斯认为，我们至少得到了四个这样的论证，一个来自于四个矛盾的解决（第 10.10、12.4、13.4 章）。相比之下，银块在于康德对来世和上帝以教义信仰模式存在的积极论证（doktrinaler Glaube）（第 7.8-7.9、16.9-16.10 章）。2 普罗普斯认为金块拥有更大的哲学意义。价值，但是银块具有一些解释性的光泽，因为“教义信仰的主题直到最近才被学者们很大程度上忽视”（4）。很大程度上取决于“很大程度上”的含义，因为最近有相当多的3 无论如何，我们同意教义信仰的论证是辩证法的主要积极成果之一，并且认为，如果有的话，普罗普斯通过将它们描述为纯粹的东西来低估了它们的价值。银。 对于康德来说，我们认为，普罗普斯认为是黄金（先验唯心主义）的论证不仅服务于著名的道德论证——正如普罗普斯指出的那样（458）——而且也服务于教义信仰的理论论证。在 B 序言中，康德说他发现他必须“否认知识，以便为信仰腾出空间”（Bxxx）。虽然这段文字的背景涉及道德信仰（关于至善、不朽和上帝），但我们认为康德在整个批判中的目标也是为教义信仰腾出空间。除了以白银价格出售黄金之外，普罗普斯一路上省略了提及教义信仰的几篇关键文章。康德说，一旦我们放弃获得形而上学知识的非法目标，“本来是辩证的原则就会转变为教义原则”（A516/B544）。那么，除了关于不朽和上帝的主张之外，我们还可以包括关于自然节俭以及心灵与世界和谐的主张。接下来，我们重点关注另外三个例子：对（1）理性最高原则、（2）终极基础和（3）最真实存在的教义信仰。从最高原则开始。在《辩证法》的引言中，康德描述了从理性的“逻辑准则”（Grier 2001中的“P1”）到“理性的最高原则”的转变，这要求我们找到条件性认知的条件的总体性。格里尔的“P2”），它断言任何条件对象背后都存在条件的整体（A307-8/B364-65）。康德认为，这种从良性规定性格言到重量级形而上学原则的转变是所有投机灾难的根本原因。 因此，如何解释过渡段落对于如何理解辩证错误的起源具有重要意义。 继格里尔之后，普罗普斯认为，过渡的发生是因为先验幻觉诱使我们将主观原理误认为是客观原理——“将 P 误认为 D”（ 46）。普罗普斯对这个错误提供了三步解释，每一步都引发了一个独特的“子幻觉”。首先，我们混淆了逻辑准则（对于普罗普斯来说，逻辑准则是关于认知的假设命令）和关于对象的假设命令；接下来，我们混淆了关于对象的假设命令和绝对命令。最后，我们混淆了绝对命令与关于现实的断言，声称确实存在条件的总体性（46-50）。那么，根据普罗普斯的解读，任何对最高原则的认可都建立在三重混淆的基础上。我们不同意这一点，并认为根据普罗普斯自己的观点，可以以教义信仰的方式合理地同意最高原则。普罗普斯正确地指出，“教义信念是合理的……事实是，它是偶然目标不可或缺的预设”或理论理性的终结（419；参见A823-27/B851-55）。普罗普斯没有说的是，逻辑格言本身指定了理论理性的目的——即找到一个人面向对象的认知的全部条件。而且，只有假设对象之间确实存在这样一个整体，这一目标才能实现。因此，最高原则是一个不可或缺的前提，它使我们能够实现理论理性的关键目标——教义信仰的完美候选者。4这种解读也与普罗普斯对先验幻觉的描述相吻合，即先验幻觉混淆了主观与客观的事物。教义信仰，像所有信仰一样，建立在与我们的目的相关的“主观基础”之上（A829/B857）。传统形而上学家的错误在于混淆了这些主观依据与使我们能够了解最高原则的客观依据。这个错误是假设先验实在论的直接后果（普罗普斯在 52-56 中对此进行了讨论）。康德认为最高原则在应用于事物本身时在分析上是正确的，因此是已知的（见A498-99/B526-27；Jauernig 2021：352）。先验现实主义者将事物本身与表象等同起来，因此声称知道最高原则也适用于表象。现在讨论终极基础的宇宙论论证。在这里，康德提供了一系列论证，消除了自亚里士多德以来一直困扰着理性宇宙学家的幻想（例如，关于充分理由原则的认识地位）。但康德在这种背景下对知识的否认为终极基础的教义信仰腾出了空间。 “如果一个人不假定[annehmen]某种东西最初独立地存在于这种无限的偶然性之外，那么整个整体就会陷入虚无的深渊，这种偶然性支持它，同时作为它存在的原因，确保它的存在。它的延续”（A622/B650）。这里没有引用任何道德依据，但我们确实有强烈的理论需要来逃避虚无的深渊。因此，“假设”或“接受”最好被解释为一篇教义信仰的文章。最后，康德对他自己早期证明“唯一可能基础上的最真实存在”（OPB）论文的批判性方法。 1763年。 普罗普斯写道： 普罗普斯并没有明确说明对最真实存在的存在的主观必要同意是什么。但它显然看起来像是教义信仰的一个很好的候选者。5为什么普罗普斯没有提到辩证法中教义信仰的这三个金块？他引用的案例（来世和上帝）来自包括经验前提和类比推论的论证（见180、186n43、391、418）。因此，普罗普斯可能假设所有的教义信仰都必须基于经验前提和/或类比推论（但见 419）。6 由于最高原则和现实主义的论点不符合这一要求，普罗普斯可能有认为他们没有资格。 （终极基础的论证是否援引了经验前提是有争议的。）然而，我们不同意隐含的条件：教义信仰不需要通过经验前提来证明或涉及类比推理。7总而言之：普罗普斯对以下之一出人意料地含糊其辞：他对辩证法的精湛分析的主要成果——教义信仰的积极作用。我们已经指出，教义信仰是《批判》的宝藏之一，而且其内涵比普罗普斯所指出的还要多。但是，如果一本书的主要缺点在于遗漏和限制，而不是在于委托和丰富，那么这本书并不是一本坏书。 《批判的激烈测试》非常出色，对于任何对康德及其辩证法感兴趣的人来说，几十年来都将是一个资源。