Constructing the World: The Kantian Origin of the Very Idea

Raoni Padui in the St. John's Review.

"I want to argue that this idea, which finds an explicit articulation in Nietzsche’s work and becomes a recognizable position to hold by the twentieth century, has its origins in Kant’s philosophy. I hope to show how it arose historically in Kant’s text in an essentially ambiguous entanglement between mathematical theories of construction, the role of transcendental imagination, and the systematic unity demanded by reason. Its sources have little to do with the “subjectivism” that it later came to represent."

See Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 7; The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and The Critique of Judgement, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 42, and (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 39.