The Modesty of Kant’s Metaphysics

The specific contribution of Kant’s critical works to metaphysics can and should be characterized in terms of a modesty concerning the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. If one were to explain this modesty solely in terms of Kant’s ‘idealism’, as consisting primarily of the impossibility to know ‘things in themselves’, and a restriction of the necessary forms of intuition and the categories to possible experience, this still leaves Kant’s work vulnerable to so many twentieth century critiques of the alleged immodesty of the ‘necessary conditions for the possibility of experience’. In what follows, I would like to consider an account of these ‘necessities’ of Kant’s transcendental reflection which retains its intended philosophical ‘modesty’, by looking at the unity of Kant’s pre-critical and critical analyses of ‘existence’.