The Transcendental Dialectic deals with three different types of dialectical syllogisms: the
Paralogisms (pretended rational psychology) mentioned in the first section of this paper, the Antinomy (pretended rational cosmology), and the Ideal of Pure Reason.
(10) This marks a transition in Kant's remarks on the
Paralogism. Whereas the previous two objections--to possible proofs through concepts and experience--focused on the fruitlessness of speculation concerning the real simplicity of the soul, Kant now addresses the true meaning of the simplicity of the 'I think'.
Kant's target in the
Paralogisms is not the narrow rationalism of Leibniz or Descartes, but this Wolffian tradition of which Kant himself was a part: Kant has as his primary target the illusion that the T is originally given as an object of inner experience, mistaking the unity of inner experience with an inappropriately inferred substantial unity underlying that experience.
The reader of the quotations from the lecture notes will be startled; it is as if one were reading the
paralogisms positively signed.
Their transcendent use, that is, when we apply the categories to them in order to produce them as objects of knowledge, is only productive of
paralogisms (soul) and antinomies (world); the only proper application of categories, of course, is in relation to the manifold of sensation.
He examines the idea that intelligence creates existence, an existence that is nothing in itself; as he does so he examines the reality of the thinking subject in terms of
paralogisms and transcendental idealism including transcendental self-consciousness.
Here, "[t]he Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum is objectionable," an objection that begins along Kantian lines established most clearly in the restatement of"The
Paralogisms of Pure Reason" in the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason (1.276-77).
(35) At the same time he reassures us that, unlike other more elaborate romances, Cloria does not depend on and will not elicit the
paralogisms or "false conjectures, which in a Romance, is not proper." Instead, he assures us, the romance form of Cloria will "stir up the appetite of the Reader to a continuance," not only to continued reading but also to continued equitable reasoning and political allegiance.
In line with its documentary nature, the Academy edition includes in separate volumes the complete second edition and the first half of the first edition, through the
Paralogisms of Pure Reason, of the first Critique.
This fact provides an attractive interpretation, in chapters 7 and 8, of Kant's claim in the
Paralogisms that although we must think of the subject as one thing, we should not conclude that that subject is in itself a simple, persisting substance.
And Kant argues, in the
Paralogisms, the Antinomy and the Ideal of Pure Reason, that to consider the Ideas as objects leads to contradiction and Schwarmerei.
Ad arguments have been historically identified with fallacies and therefore considered as invalid or faulty arguments closely related to sophisms,
paralogisms, and other forms of pseudo-reasoning.