Critical Idealism and Transcendental Materialism: A Speculative Analysis of the Second Paralogism (Essay‪)‬

'Idealism is a kind of cancer in metaphysics which until now was deemed untreatable'. (1) This paper begins from the commitment that the project of contemporary metaphysics, which for good reason has recently rallied around the recuperation of philosophical speculation, should not abandon Kantian critical or epistemological concerns lest we restage the metaphysical battlefield properly maligned in the Preface to the first Critique as the source of the denigration of the queen of the sciences. The purpose of speculative philosophy, as Hegel rightly saw, is not to overcome epistemological questions of the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, but to construct a metaphysical architecture that can account for the intelligibility of both objects and the philosophical comprehension of those objects. Speculative philosophy, I claim, remains internally bound to transcendental philosophy and opposed to philosophical dogmatism inasmuch as it requires a moment of metaphysical self-comprehension and epistemological self-validation. That is, in addition to grounding the intelligibility of objects it must also finally ground the intelligibility of its initial act of speculative construction and so show it to be more than capricious fantasy. What separates philosophical speculation from dogmatism, then, is this retroactive epistemological validation of its initially axiomatic assertion of the speculative identity of the subject and object. This essential connection between speculative metaphysics and transcendental philosophy indicates the necessity of a continued engagement with Kantian critical philosophy even as we attempt to move beyond the correlationism he inaugurated.