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The Mother Of Chaos And Night: Kant's Metaphilosophical Attack On Indifferentism, Matthew Allen Kelsey

Dissertations

Kant positions the Critical philosophy as a response to the crisis of metaphysics - a crisis that is still with us. But his diagnosis of that crisis in terms of a struggle between dogmatism, skepticism, and indifferentism is given short shrift in the secondary literature, despite its promise to help us understand Kant's claim that transcendental philosophy represents a radical alternative to these philosophical modi vivendi. After a consideration of Kant's remarks on what philosophy is in general, I argue that all four of these mutually-exclusive ways of philosophizing are best understood as metaphilosophical stances: ways of conceiving of the …