Reflection on the Mind as the Origin of Metaphysical Concepts in Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant: An Explanatory Circle in Early Modern Philosophyand Kant’s Qualified Lockeanism

Abstract

It is now commonplace in scholarship that Kant’s description of the project of the Critique of Pure Reason (Critique) as "the determination of the sources and the scope and limits of metaphysics” (AXII) closely parallels Locke’s in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Essay) to inquire “into the Original, Certainty, and Extent of human Knowledge” (I.1.§2). However, there are not many detailed analyses of how to understand this relationship. This essay aims to provide such an analysis regarding the first and most foundational of these common themes, specifically the sources or origin of representations (ideas, notions, concepts), focusing on the origin of metaphysical concepts. In this analysis, I discuss views on the matter influentially expressed by Descartes and Leibniz. Alongside Locke, they are among the most important references regarding the origin of metaphysical concepts in the history of early modern philosophy, both as a matter of historical fact and as Kant understood that history. I attempt to treat the early modern philosophers before Kant both in their own right (which is a task mostly of Part_1) and from Kant’s perspective (which is a task mostly of Part_2) to thereby relate the history of early modern philosophy as it unfolded to how Kant saw it. One major upshot of this essay will be an understanding of how exactly Kant goes beyond his early modern predecessors in his explanation of the origin of metaphysical concepts; but an understanding of how exactly he builds on early modern views will be just as important to the story.