Corey Dyck makes an important point, but (as I will claim below) does not go far enough in his review of Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Dyck writes, "Hogan and Winkler both succeed in illuminating the points of convergence and divergence between Kant and his predecessors, yet I find that there is something of a missed opportunity in the decision to limit the consideration of background to the old opposition between the rationalists and empiricists. There is some, but only some, justification for this since, as both Guyer in his introduction and Winkler point out, Kant himself makes use of (a version of) this distinction when he contrasts intellectual philosophers or noologists (Plato and Leibniz) with sensual philosophers (Aristotle, Epicurus, and Locke) or "empirists [Empiristen]" (A853/B881-A854/B882; cf. also AA 5:13). Yet, this rather simplistic classification hardly captures the complex rationalism of the eighteenth-century German tradition that constitutes the most proximate context for the Critique and which, especially as elaborated in the systems of Christian Wolff, J. H. Lambert, and J. N. Tetens, aimed precisely at a syncretism of key elements of Leibnizian and Lockean thought, thus anticipating Kant's own grand synthesis.[1] Given that Eric Watkins' recent book (Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials [Cambridge, 2009]) has now made central portions of these texts from this tradition readily available to students, it is to be regretted that this volume was not bolder in challenging the exhaustiveness of this rather stale historical distinction when it comes to understanding the background to Kant's text."
Why stop here? The center of philosophic thought in the period was Paris (and its representatives in the Academies of Berlin and St. Petersburg, and more indirectly, of course, in Edinburgh). Wolff and Lambert, for example, are responding to it. Yet research on Kant proceeds as if Euler, D'Alembert, Maupertuis (etc) and their complex responses to (the historical) Newton and Dutch Newtonianism barely existed. (The analogy would be to write about some early 21st political philosopher, and to never mention Rawls or Nozick.)
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