Kant on Ideas

This essay concerns ideas in Kant. It comes in three parts. In Part 1, in which Book One of the Transcendental Dialectic, the Appendix and the Architectonic of the first Critique are the central texts, it distinguishes transcendental, systematic-methodological, and regulative ideas and discusses the implications of their difference. In particular, it deals with the genesis of ideas in Kant’s philosophy and his relation to Plato, transcendental ideas and the difference between world and nature, and regulative ideas for cognition. In Part 2 the essay focuses on conceptions of ideas other than theoretical. Ideas indeed are also practical and aesthetic. Quite strikingly, unlike theoretical ideas practical ideas are archetypes and at the same time enjoy a practical reality; aesthetic ideas, in turn, are ideas of the imagination and an individual intuition. Part 3 is devoted to ideas in history, which are regulative for interpretation as well as ends to be realized by reason. Here the relation between natural and moral teleology, and the cognate one of ultimate and final ends, is investigated along with the notion of a purposive design that philosophy seeks in history.