PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION: A KANTIAN PERSPECTIVE (REASON, SYSTEM, TRANSCENDENTAL)

The main thesis, developed in Chapter 3, is that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is most comprehensively interpreted as addressing the possibility of knowledge organization (or systematization).;In Chapter 2, the import of knowledge organization is recovered by recourse to a sketch of the role which it played in the development of modern philosophy from Descartes on. It is against this historical backdrop that Kant's work is interpreted.;In Chapter 3, it is argued that recent interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason fail to capture the constructive aspects of Kant's philosophical program. The critique of metaphysics unfolded by Kant in the "Transcendental Dialectic" is merely a first step in the transformation of the conception of metaphysics and its central concepts.;In "The Architectonic of Pure Reason," Kant presents metaphysics as the system of pure speculative reason, a system which includes several disciplines. Having detailed this system (and the greater system of which it is but a part), the author recovers Kant's account of the possibility of such a system of knowledge. Central to this account is Kant's theory of transcendental Ideas.;Chapter 1 serves as a survey of contemporary work in knowledge organization, and concludes that recent attempts to articulate a philosophical theory of knowledge organization are lacking.;Of equal and related importance is Kant's conception of reason as having two distinct employments. On the one hand, reason is viewed as the faculty of mediated judgement or inference; so construed, the syllogism becomes the focus of Kant's developing theory of knowledge organization. Yet this employment of reason is insufficient to thoroughly and correctly explain the possibility of knowledge organization. Thus, Kant argues that reason must be viewed as having a transcendental employment; so construed, reason is the faculty which supplies a priori the concepts of "soul," "cosmos," and "God," not as concepts of objects of possible experience, but as respective wholes which function to embody the several concepts which constitute the metaphysical disciplines. In addition, Kant presents reason as supplying a priori three transcendental principles (or rules) whose employment makes possible the systematization of the concepts included within each a priori concept qua whole.