In this exciting book, Marco Sgarbi traces the importance of the local context of philosophical activities at Königsberg University in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century in order to understand the emergence of Kant’s critical philosophy, and it turns out that this context in large part thrived on doctrines originating in Aristotle. Rather than focusing on Aristotle himself, as the title suggests, the focus is actually on philosophers of relatively minor importance who were concerned with topics discussed in the Aristotelian corpus, sometimes expanding, sometimes developing, and interpreting these ideas in novel ways. In many cases, these philosophers had in turn been influenced by their predecessors of a similar attachment, so that a complex transmission and multifaceted variation of Aristotelian thought already occurred before Kant came into contact with it. Together with the excellent volumes in the Bloomsbury series ‘Kant’s Sources in Translation’ and the comprehensive background information on the texts in question provided in them, Sgarbi’s contribution helps evoke a fascinating overview of what had been going on philosophically in Kant’s immediate surroundings, beyond the radar of standard historiography of philosophy. Sgarbi has thus provided us with an important piece of a mosaic, which nonetheless is still far from complete.
At first view Sgarbi’s strategy may seem to be at odds with the standing of Kant as a thinker of undisputed pre-eminence on the world stage of philosophy, given the alleged provincialism of Kant’s hometown. Whether Königsberg was indeed as small-town as often suggested – and a certain degree of what Karl Ameriks (Reference Ameriks, Yashushi and Gerhard2019: 279, n. 44) has described as ‘cultural provincialism’ is not unlikely (of which Kant himself, sadly enough, is sometimes guilty) – is not something I wish to address here. The point is rather that there are indeed significant examples of local context reconstruction which have turned out to be extremely helpful for broadening our understanding of works of genius in other fields, for example, music and art. Along this line of thought, Kant’s Königsberg turns out to be like Bach’s Leipzig and the specifics of musical performance practice there, or Dürer’s Nuremberg with its local medico-philosophical discourse on melancholy.
Of the various traditions of philosophy in Königsberg, Sgarbi identifies two which stand out in particular for their Aristotelian leanings, namely philosophers influenced by Renaissance Aristotelianism on the one hand, especially the variant developed in Padua by Jacopo Zabarella and Giulio Pace, and Protestant scholastics on the other, such as Abraham Calov. It is Calov’s case which illustrates that, while Königsberg’s Albertina was a Lutheran University, something like an inter-confessional debate in philosophy was going on there, as it was Calov who introduced Francisco Suárez’s account of metaphysics there. The interest shown in Clemens Timpler also indicates an exchange with the Reformed wing of Protestantism. In any case, the latter point hints at an important, rather specific constellation in Prussia: while the population was mainly Lutheran, the royal family had switched to Calvinism. This peculiar mélange of Protestant creeds has recently been suggested to be crucial for understanding Prussia and its general mentality, and this is certainly something of significance for Kant’s Religion book as well, but that is for a different story.
Sgarbi’s book in which he presents to us his ‘different Kant’ – different from a widespread picture of him as being ‘in conversation’ with the major representatives of modern rationalism and empiricism – is structured as follows. Its three chapters are preceded by a substantial introduction which spells out the main line of the overall story Sgarbi wishes to tell in great detail. A succinct conclusion helpfully summarizes the main claims he is making. Chapter 1 is concerned with what Sgarbi calls ‘facultative logic’, i.e. a conception of logic which – sometimes drawing on disciplines such as hexiologia or the ‘doctrine of habits’ (e.g. pp. 26–7) – aimed at isolating and determining a normative account of the various operations of the cognitive faculties of the human mind. In this chapter, most importantly, a detailed account of the emergence of the disciplines of gnostologia and noologia is also provided, emphasizing their role in prefiguring the analytic of concepts and the analytic of principles within the Critique of Pure Reason. Gnostology investigates the conceptual dimension of cognizing an object, and Sgarbi identifies something like a subjectivist turn towards the conditions of being an object for the human cognitive subject among the Königsberg Aristotelians. For Sgarbi, Calov’s focus on the cognizable in his transcendental approach altogether foreshadows Kant, in particular given Calov’s disagreement with Timpler (cf. p. 29). Noology is concerned with the fundamental principles at the level of propositions, indispensable for acquiring knowledge about an object, for example the principle of non-contradiction.
Chapter 2 is dedicated to transcendental logic and explores, for example, the background of Kant’s all-important matter–form distinction in Aristotelian treatises, and the subjectivist tinge the concept of form had received. This reading is markedly different from other accounts claiming to be in line with Aristotle, in which form is closely associated with essence. As Sgarbi points out, the matter–form distinction was virtually absent in the approach of the Wolffians. Sgarbi also investigates attempts at syllogistic and combinatorics before and in Kant as far as their role is concerned in an ontological account of all there is in terms of simple elements and their possible combinations.
In this chapter, Sgarbi also relates his contextual studies to one of the classic questions regarding Kant’s Entwicklungsgeschichte, namely how Kant’s various own testimonies to this effect can be interpreted coherently. Two of these are the famous Hume passage in the Prolegomena (4: 260) and – from the thick of it, as it were – the letter to Marcus Herz of 21 February 1772 (10: 129–35). These ‘genetical’ issues, and in particular Hume’s role for the emergence of the critical philosophy, have recently attracted considerable attention again. For Sgarbi, the Prolegomena passage does not refer to Hume’s analysis of causality in particular, but to a much broader problem raised by Hume, namely that causality, together with the other concepts later to make up the table of categories and considered to be of intellectual origin, are after all not capturing features of a mind-independent reality (in the conventional, and hence non-Kantian sense of the term ‘reality’). For Sgarbi, the Herz letter, by contrast, indicates that by then Kant had already found the main contours of his solution, namely that these intellectual concepts ultimately need to relate to sensory intuition in their function of both generating knowledge of objects and constituting these objects in the first place.
Although leaving out many important details, such as the question of the textual source of Hume’s ‘reminder’ (as the German Erinnerung in the Prolegomena passage should most probably be translated) which, as Kant explicitly says, ‘interrupted’, even ‘initially’ or ‘first interrupted’ (zuerst … unterbrach, rather than ended) the dogmatic slumber, and also the role of the problem of antinomy, highlighted by Kant in other testimonies, Sgarbi certainly adds an important further twist to the story by drawing on the contents of Paul Rabe’s all-important commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, i.e. Rabe (Reference Rabe1704). According to Sgarbi, in this commentary categories are construed, as one might wish to say, in an antirealist or perhaps epistemic sense, and this in line with Zabarella and Pace. As indicated above, they are taken to be indispensable for something to become an object of human cognition. This so-called ‘formal’ reading of the categories is contrasted by Sgarbi with a material reading favoured by most of the scholastic authors according to whom categories must be regarded as the highest genera of being. Moreover, this formal reading accords well with the subjectivized conception of form taken as modus considerandi rem or the mode of considering things in the first place according to Sgarbi.
As important as these findings are, in all likelihood, however, the final word has not yet been spoken about how Kant’s wrestling with the categories fits into the overall story of the emergence of the Critique of Pure Reason. A key stumbling block remains with regard to the Herz letter. As L. W. Beck (Reference Beck and Eckart1989: 22) has shown, there are two fundamentally different ways of reading this document, namely (a) as forward-looking, insofar as the problem of how pure concepts of the understanding can refer to objects is taken to concern objects accessible by sensory perception, or (b) as retrospective, insofar as the problem is seen as concerning noumena. The latter option connects well to Kant’s claim in the Dissertation that in its so-called ‘real use’ (ID, 2: 21) the understanding does have access to this realm of objects after all. Without further argument, Sgarbi reads the letter in the forward-looking manner and therefore takes it as even indicating the terminus ad quem for Kant’s encounter with Rabe’s commentary (which, to be sure, is not mentioned explicitly by Kant). Not everybody will be prepared to go along with this suggestion, but independently of the precise chronology of events, Rabe’s take on the categories is indeed most likely to have played a key role precisely in reconfiguring the question as to how categories can refer to objects, i.e. with regard to which type of objects this question is supposed to arise.
In chapter 3, Sgarbi investigates questions of scientific methodology which – as he maintains – were a major concern in all the different quarters of the Königsberg philosophical environment. He contrasts both Aristotelian and modern, e.g. mainly Cartesian and Baconian conceptions of methodology, as well as Kant’s own pre-critical versus his critical attempts at it. Particular attention is devoted to Aristotelian dismissals of both Bacon and Descartes, as well as to Kant’s stance on the topic. One could perhaps summarize Sgarbi’s points by saying that, despite his admiration and even endorsement of modern science and mathematics, the required methodology in metaphysics is domain-specific for Kant. The doctrine of elements (or parts of it) and the doctrine of method in the first Critique were meant to replace combinatorics, with the categories as fundamental, but formal features out of which a system of cognition of objects is to be construed (p. 202). For Sgarbi, Calov’s conception of architectonic (rather than Lambert’s), i.e. the outline of a hierarchically structured system of principles, as well as the distinction between arguments kat’ anthropon (i.e. in accordance with humans) and kat’ aletheian (i.e. in accordance with truth) in Aristotelian treatises serves as a model for Kant’s own efforts in this direction. Kat’ anthropon in Kant indicates that an argument draws on the specifically human way of cognition when this by itself does not guarantee establishing the truth as in arguments kat’ aletheian. Given Kant’s rejection of mathematism – i.e. the idea that mathematical reasoning provides the paradigm for metaphysics, which, surprisingly enough, occurred under the very influence of Wolff, as Sgarbi claims (p. 221) – Kant’s quest for a unique methodology for metaphysics drew on these ultimately Aristotelian conceptions.
So much for the exposition of Sgarbi’s main points. Turning to a brief assessment of his overall approach, one can say that, on the one hand, a source-historical account always faces the danger of reducing the author under consideration to their influences. Sgarbi is well aware of the problem and on the whole skilfully avoids falling into this trap. In this vein, a source-historical approach is, when handled with the necessary care as in Sgarbi’s case, to some extent at least perfectly valuable in its own right. It is indeed fascinating to see how Kant could and did draw on a rich fundus of material when creating his masterpiece which certainly did not emerge ex nihilo. Even conceptions often thought to be Kant’s original invention, such as that of a schema, turn out to have been preconceived by the Aristotelians, more precisely by Rabe. On the other hand, one would perhaps have wished Sgarbi to have gone a step further in his approach to Kant and shown how his detailed contextualization might support a particular reading of Kant’s critical project altogether, or at least how context reconstruction can contribute to solving controversies about key Kantian doctrines. Sometimes Sgarbi simply adopts a certain reading of Kant and then associates it with a doctrine he finds in Kant’s Aristotelian Königsberg predecessors, but this may at times be a bit hasty. That said, the material presented is so rich that something along the lines indicated can be done much more easily now.
The local context of Königsberg philosophy in particular and (to a lesser extent and with prominent exceptions) of German so-called Schulphilosophie in general are perhaps still somewhat underrepresented in English-speaking Kant scholarship, and Sgarbi’s book is a hugely successful important step towards filling this gap. To be sure, though, wide-angle views of more conventional historiography of philosophy and the close-ups provided in local context reconstruction should not be seen as mutually exclusive nor should any of them be regarded as necessarily superior to the other. A certain pluralism in methodology is preferable. This is also true on a more general level: attempts at rational reconstruction on the one hand and historical accuracy on the other should coexist. There is and there should be space for all these types of approaches; each of them as well as their interplay are undepletable sources of insight. In this respect, Sgarbi’s fascinating portrait is also a piece of this larger mosaic.
