Abstract

TODAY it would seem to be rather generally assumed that Kant had posed a problem for any future metaphysics which no future metaphysics has either been able to solve, or perhaps even tried very hard to solve. And it would further seem to be the consensus that Kant's famous challenge to metaphysics really turned on what, in the broad sense of the term, might be called a set of simple logical considerations, viz. that any judgment, and hence any metaphysical judgment, must needs be either analytic or synthetic; that if metaphysical judgments be analytic, then, in modern parlance, they cannot be truths about the world; and that if they be synthetic, they cannot very well be empirical truths, since they would then be lacking in those very properties of necessity and universality which Kant felt had to characterize metaphysical truths, if such there be. Accordingly, on the Kantian analysis there is no logical slot left for metaphysical judgments save that of the synthetic a priori. And into this slot, for the well-known Kantian reasons, metaphysical judgments cannot seem to be fitted.