Kant and the Double Government Methodology

This is a book about dreaming and knowing, and about thinking that one can ascertain the difference. It is a book about the Bernards of the world who would have us believe that there is a humanly uncreated world existing en Boi that freely dis­ closes its forever fixed ontology, even though they too must accept that -many of the worlds we make as we try to under­ stand ourselves are counterfeit. It is a book about the real estate of the human mind. The book is about Leibniz and Kant, and about methods of science. It is also about what is now called pseudo-science. It tries to show how Kant struggled to mark the limits of the humanly knowable, and how thi s strug­ gle involved him in trying to answer questions of importance then and now. Some are philosophers' questions: the epistemo­ logical status of mathematics, the role of space and time in knowing, the nature of the conceptual constraints on our ef­ forts to hypothesize the possible. Some are questions of per­ ennial human interest: Can spirits exist? How is the soul re­ lated to the body? How can we legitimately talk about God, if at all? Finally, Kant teaches that these are all questions bearing on our entitlements in claiming to know. Leibniz fashioned a way of talking about nature and super­ nature that I call the Double Government Methodology.

Inhalt

Kant as Physician of the Soul.- Spiritual Medicine: Placebo and Prevention.- Data and Regulation.- The Anomaly of the Supersensible.- The Limits of Knowledge.- The Leibnizian Background.- Kant and DGM.- A Summary of Things to Come.- I/Metaphysical Explanation in Leibniz: The Monads.- The Monadology.- Perception and Perspective.- Results to be Noted.- The Received View of the Origins of the Monadology.- Stress Yield Points and Pain Thresholds.- A New Reading of Leibniz.- The Monads Again.- Leibniz' Gnostic Background.- The Transition to DGM.- Some High Stress Yield Points of Leibniz.- From the Monads to Kant.- II/Leibniz on the Side of the Angels.- The Methodological Angel.- Angelic Explanation.- Galileo and Plato.- The God's-eye View.- Empirical Adequacy.- Mechanical Methodism.- Angelic Alchemy.- Angelic Logic.- A Metaphysical Problem.- A Speculative Postscript.- III/Kant, ESP, and the Inaugural Dissertation.- Kant's Departure from Leibniz: First Stage.- Kant's Interest in the Paranormal.- Departure from Leibniz: Second Stage.- Swedenborg, the Ghostseer.- Why did Kant Write Träume?.- Broad's Sociological Explanation.- The Question of Anonymity.- The Second Letter to Mendelssohn.- Can Spirits be Located?.- Spiritualism in the Lectures on Metaphysics.- Supersensibility and the Inaugural Dissertation.- The Corpus Mysticum.- Sceptical Conclusions.- Afternote to This Chapter.- Appendix to Chapter III/A Translation of thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (Sect. 4).- How the Origin of Motion in Active Force can be Explicated in General.- The Argument Restated and Applied to the Problem of Soul/Body Connection.- IV/Soemmering and Euler: Space and the Soul.- Space and the Paralogisms.- Sömmering and the sensorium commune.- Euler and the corpus callosum.- Transition to the Critical Philosophy.- V/Kant: Space and the Soul.- Kant's Space.- The Soul Paralogized.- The Presumed Idealism/Realism Tension in Kant.- VI/Rules, Images and Constructions: Kant's Constructive Idealism.- Prelminaries.- Kant's Schemata as Semantical Rules.- An Example of Schematization.- Schemata and the Schwärmerei.- Schemata and Dreams.- Kant's Constructivist Theory of Mathematics: Intuition and Sensation.- Appearances as Apparitional Contents.- Terminology Summarized.- The Epistemic Rôle of Sensations.- Construction and A Priori Intuition.- Defining and Inventing Concepts.- Application and Objectification.- Construction in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science: an Example.- Rules and Examples.- Again: the Question of Applicability.- VII/Kant's DGM: Two Fundamental Principles of Methodology.- A World Without the Angels.- The Needs and Demands of Reason.- The Phenomenal and the Noumenal.- The Regulative Employment of Ideas of Reason.- The Phenomenal and the Regulative.- VIII/Kant's DGM: Hypotheses in Science.- Double Government and Other Methodologies.- Methods as Part of the Empirical Content of Science.- Methodology: the Hypothetical and the Possible.- Methodology: Hypothesis and Explanation.- Hypothesis and Explanation.- Nature and Lawlikeness.- Points of Logic.- Hypotheses and DGM.- The Question of Ontology.- IX/Kant's DGM: The Restoration of Teleology.- Remembering Leibniz.- The Solution of the Third Antinomy.- Two Concepts of Freedom.- Twists in a Famous Argument.- Two Unpromising Alternatives.- Again: the Epistemological Turn.- The Problem of the Thing-in-Itself in General Form.- Lewis White Beck's 'only way out of the dilemma'.- Understanding and Understandability.- Teleology and the Supersensible Substrate.- The Mechanism/Teleology Antinomy.- Leibniz and Kant: the Double Government Methodology.- Central Nervous System/Philosophers as Dieticians of the Mind.- Kant's Interest in Psychopathology.- Diseases of the Head.- The Schwärmerei in Religion.- Kant's Late Nosology of Mental Diseases.- Kant's Dietetic of the Mind.- A Gerontological Dietetic of the Mind.- The Point of All of This.