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Reading this article, I found the following:

Kant is sympathetic to the dominant strain in modern philosophy that banishes final causes from nature and instead treats nature as nothing but matter in motion, which can be fully described mathematically (Part 7.1)

For some reason, I could not help but to wonder if Kant's Transcendent is naturalistic or not. If Kant's excludes the Transcendent from the pure reason (as every science is bound by the appearant and its categories), does he still keep the Transcendental as an expression of natural reality?

I can't chase the feeling that I am maybe experiencing some linguistic confusion.

I am also sure that Kant's Transcendent is not an alternative for the supernatural in any religious meaning (or so I think, at least).

The question could be asked in a different way (different question maybe but highly linked): how does Kant qualify the Natural?

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  • You might find Kant's Philosophical Revolution- A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason helpful. Once the realization that Kant pinned his conviction that he had obtained to certainty on the absolute empirical truth of scientific principles hits home, Kant's system begins to appear as one, very long, circular argument. But the mental exercise of tracing the entire set of his works is irreplaceable as a philosophical study. – user37981 May 31 '20 at 13:29
  • Thanks for the recommandation. As to Kant pinning any notion of certainty on empirical truth, that's only partially true, the transcendental aspect of his philosophy almost avoids any talk of certainty as pure reason would attempt it. – Gloserio May 31 '20 at 17:56
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    I think there are several separate questions. Was Kant a naturalist? No, his noumena, especially with his hints of them being the realm of the Divine in CJ and Opus Postumum, are not naturalistic. But noumena are transcendent as opposed to transcendental, the "transcendental" relates to subject's constitutive role in forming her worldview, and many modern naturalists do endorse something like that. Does Kant banish final causes? From the world of phenomena ("nature"), yes, he only places "purposiveness of nature" into subject's cognitive faculties (reflective judgment) as a sort of maxim. – Conifold Jun 1 '20 at 7:32
  • Sorry for the mismatch between the transcendent and transcendental (thinking in french). So I take it the natural in kantian philosophy is in the phenomena's scoop (as "parsed" by a human). For some reason I thought his definition of the transcendent (and Godly by extention) is just an abstractive way of saying (that which is out of our cognitive reach), but it might just turn out he really meant God as a supra-natural span of being/reality. Could that be a fair interpretation of his thoughts ? – Gloserio Jun 1 '20 at 8:48
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    His official position is that any talk of the noumena is indeed empty of substance, abstract talk about something formally consistent that we should stay agnostic about because it is beyond possible experience, and hence synthetic reasoning, either empirical or a priori. But he was a Christian, and while he renounces any talk of it in his epistemology, he makes a point that faith is consistent with it:"I had to limit knowledge to make room for the faith". We just can't know of the supernatural what the theologians tell us of it, or anything else. But we can live it via practical reason. – Conifold Jun 1 '20 at 9:38

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