Wolff, Kant and the conditions of transcendentalization of Logic

• Grant number: 24/13509-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): October 01, 2024
• Effective date (End): September 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Maurício Cardoso Keinert
• Grantee: André Rodrigues Ferreira Perez
• Supervisor: Heiner Friedrich Klemme
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Martin-Luther-University of Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/05249-3 - The polysemy of the transcendental: an inquiry on the development of Kant's Theoretical Philosophy, in the light of German Dogmatism, BP.DR

Abstract

Kant asserts that logic, a concluded and finished science, has not been able to advance a single step, nor has it needed to retreat, since Aristotle (KrV: BVIII). Also Jäsche, in his preface to the organization of reflections in a manual, attributes to Kant refinement, but not enrichment, greater solidity, or better foundation (AA 9: 5). Despite the permanence of some elements, such as the primacy of the first syllogistic figure, it would be hasty to assume that such a science without history could have enjoyed this bimillennial doctrinal univocity. Despite this completion, Kant held necessary to neutralize the referential claims, regarding given objects, of a logic of universal use, and to superordinate it to a logic of particular use, which properly asks about this referential capacity of related extensions in judgments. If this is so, it is interesting to note that, in the lectures from 1789 onwards, Wolff occupies a prominent role in the history of logic: Kant attributes to the Preceptor of humanity the realization of the best available logic (V-Lo/Pölitz, Busolt, Wiener, Hechsel, Warschauer); a universal logic on the safe path of science, and which no longer needs any discovery or addition (V-Lo/Warschauer). Wolff asserts (LL, DP, §89) that logic, a non-founding but founded science, borrows its principles from empirical psychology (regarding the operations of the soul, LL, I, I, 1, §§30-58), and from ontology (regarding the classes and determinations of beings, LL, I, I, 2, §§59-76). For Kant, to found logic in a descriptive science like empirical psychology would mean to make it empirical as well, since effects give us the occasional cause to seek their conditions, but do not offer their ground through their description. To found it in ontology would mean not recognizing the irreducibility between a being integrally determined by positive realities and a concept to which only one of two contradictorily opposed predicates belongs, presupposing a pre-established harmony. We will argue, focusing on the principle of individuation in both authors, that Kant's alteration in the foundation of logic later obliges him to empty this same logic in order to subsequently transcendentalize it, or to think of a transcendental use of it - without prejudice to Wolff's logic, as a science that guides the intellect in the knowledge of truth (LL, DP, §61).