We are glad to give notice of the release of the volume Perspectives on Kant’s Opus postumum, edited by Giovanni Pietro Basile and Ansgar Lyssy (Routledge, 2022).

From the publisher’s website:

This book offers new perspectives on the theoretical elements of the Opus postumum (OP), Kant’s project of a final work which remained unknown until eighty years after his death. The contributors read the OP as a central work in establishing the relation between Kant’s transcendental philosophy, his natural philosophy, practical philosophy, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and his broader epistemology.

Interpreting the OP is an important task because it helps reveal how Kant himself tried to correct and develop his critical philosophy. It also sheds light on the foundational role of the three Critiques for other philosophical inquiries, as well as the unified philosophical system that Kant sought to establish. The chapters in this volume address a range of topics relevant to the epistemological and theoretical problems raised in the OP, including the transition from the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science to physics as an answer to a deficiency in critical thought; the notion of ether and, more specifically, its transcendental deduction; self-affection and the self-positing of the subject; and the idea of God and the system of ideas in the highest standpoint of transcendental philosophy.

Perspectives on Kant’s Opus postumum will be of interest to upper-level students and scholars working on Kant.

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Table of Contents

Introduction Giovanni Pietro Basile & Ansgar Lyssy

1. Kant’s Paradoxical Reception of Lavoisier Henry Blomme

2. Filling Out Space: The Ether and the Dispositions of Matter in Kant’s Opus postumum Ansgar Lyssy

3. Physics as System in Fascicles X/XI of Kant’s Opus postumum Stephen Howard

4. The Analogical Use of Schematism from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Opus postumum Lara Scaglia

5. The Forms of “Composition” and the Role of Mediating Concepts in Kant’s Opus postumum Gualtiero Lorini

6. Self-Affection in Kant’s Opus postumum and in the Critique of Pure Reason Dina Emundts

7. A Kantian Answer to Aenesidemus: Appropriating Kant’s Doctrine of Self-Positing in the Opus postumum Bryan Hall

8. Fichte or Baumgarten? On Kant’s Use of “Positing” in the Selbstsetzungslehre Lorenzo Sala

9. Kant’s “Deification” of Reason in the Opus Postumum: An Attempt at Reconciling God and Autonomy Anna Tomaszewska

10. François Marty’s Interpretation of Kant’s Opus postumum Giovanni Pietro Basile