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In his works, Kant never explicitly intended to write a history of philosophy. The few pages he devoted to this subject at the end of the first Critique, which he entitled "The History of Pure Reason", do not claim to be an exhaustive discussion; far more modestly, as Kant himself pointed out: "I will content myself with casting a cursory glance from a merely transcendental point of view, namely that of the nature of pure reason, on the whole of its labours hitherto". This "cursory glance", for Kant, was supposed to simply point at "a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future" (KrV, A 852 B 880). The work What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, left unfinished and published posthumously by F.Th. Rink in 1804, is not a historical work, either, but rather a presentation, also including historical references and arguments, of the speculative positions of criticism in its final phase. Yet, despite the roughly sketched historical outline that ends the first Critique, it is worth emphasizing that, in concluding his greatest work, Kant declared the system of transcendental philosophy to be incomplete for the lack of an explicit, systematic, non-empirical treatment of the work carried out by reason in the course of history. And he took care to indicate, with a title at least, that void that demanded to be filled for the sake of completeness (which for Kant was the measure of the speculative consistency of a philosophical work), at least in the future.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9966-9_10

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