The Scientificity of Metaphysics in Lambert and the Precritical Kant

Abstract

In the Inquiry (1764) Kant provides a comprehensive meta-metaphysical perspective that includes several issues concerning metaphysics, but he does not address the question of its scientificity. He is subsequently led to do so through his encounter with the account of scientificity Johann Heinrich Lambert provides in his Neues Organon (1764), where he identifies systematicity and especially a priori nature (i.e. independence from experience) as the fundamental features of scientific cognition, thereby conceiving of science as a system of a priori cognitions of the understanding. Kant adopts this account already in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770) by conceiving of metaphysics as the science of pure understanding in virtue of its pure cognitions. Moreover, Kant goes beyond Lambert with his science of sensibility grounded on the pure intuitions of space and time, which science Lambert could not have conceived since the only a priori cognitions he admits are concepts which, as such, belong to understanding.