Abstract:Over the last 25 years, Kant scholarship has seen a dramatic rise of interest in the first Critique’s Transcendental Dialectic. Following Michelle Grier (2001), scholars have held that the Dialectic traces the errors of special metaphysics to the endorsement of the 'Supreme Principle' (sometimes identified with the PSR), and attempts to identify a misuse of the Supreme Principle in each book of the Dialectic. In this talk, I argue that this standard interpretive approach is misguided. We cannot explain the sources of rationalist metaphysics as resulting from the endorsement of the Supreme Principle. First, I show that the standard approach fails to provide a philosophically or textually compelling account of either the Ideal or the Paralogisms. Second, I present a new approach to understanding the unity of Kant's Dialectic.
