Review of Gualtiero Lorini: Fonti e lessico dell’ontologia kantiana. I Corsi di Metafisica (1762-1795). Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2017. 270 p. ISBN 9788846747389

Gualtiero Lorini’s book proposes a detailed and well-argued reconstruction of occurrences of the term “ontology” in those of Kant’s works that were printed during his lifetime, especially the transcripts related to his lectures on metaphysics. He considers many of the Kantian documents that are preserved today while negating the Doppelleben hypothesis, according to which Kant expressed himself one way in the works published for his fellow members of the République des lettres and another way in the various materials for his students (p. 20). Not true, shows Lorini, whose approach is rigorously lexical, based on the lexical analysis of cultural terminology that originated in the “unit ideas” of Arthur J. Lovejoy in the famous opening essay of the Journal of the History of Ideas and that fully blossomed in Tullio Gregory’s Lessico intellettuale europeo (1964 ff.) and, more specifically related to Kant, in Norbert Hinske’s Kant-Index (1982 ff.), according to which the meaning of a word is not given by any superimposed definition but finds its own definition in occurrence after occurrence. The substantial part of Lorini’s contribution lies in taking up the challenge of considering Kant’s re-conceptualization of the lexical patrimony of the Schulphilosophie and its eventual dissemination in the critical philosophy. It is important to underscore Lorini’s faithfulness to lexical analysis, which allows him to overcome the various neo-Kantian taboos already dealt with by Max Wundt and Heinz Heimsoeth (p. 11, 14) while practically ignoring Heidegger’s own re-conceptualization (p. 15). The first chapter concerns Kant’s pre-critical writings on science and metaphysics, and the second chapter considers Kant’s answer to the Preisfrage of 1763 on Deutlichkeit, with the goal of clarifying the extent to which Kantian terminology was misrecorded by the young Johann Gottfrie Herder, who in his transcript of Kant’s lecture on metaphysics from the winter term of 1762/63 offered a personal elaboration of Kant’s views. The third chapter reconstructs what Lorini considers the turning point for the constitution of Kantian ontology, namely his discovery of the intelligible character of “universitas” in the Dissertatio, which opens up the path to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft and the Nachschriften of the eighties and nineties. In the Metaphysik Volkmann, Kant speaks of ontology as the “Erkenntnis von den Eigenschaften der Dinge überhaupt” (p. 207), which brings Lorini to the question of the relation between transcendental philosophy and ontology, which he traces in the Metaphysik Pölitz, the Metaphysik Dohna and the Fortschritte der Metaphysik. Lorini convincingly observes that Kant distances himself from scholasticism as regards substance and accident, which cannot be reduced to cause and effect, “for accidents can exist only as determinations of something else; they are not particular things that exist on their own; they are only particular modes of dealing with existences” (p. 216). This is a very good example of how “Kant uses scholastic terminology to prove the impossibility of knowing the essence of a thing by denying that the relation between a substance and its accidents are of a causal nature” (p. 217). In fact, a substance that owes its being knowable to its accidents crashes against the notion of substance as something that remains permanent despite change at the level of its accidents, which, Lorini argues, is precisely the semantic shift that interests Kant. The objective is the modality of the reference, the actuality the substance has for the subject (p. 217). Lorini could not have expressed the distance between Aristotle and Kant in a clearer, more original way. It is to be hoped that other scholars will follow Lorini by extending research beyond auto-optical analysis to the lemmatized corpus of Kant’s metaphysical writings currently available in the Lessico Intellettuale Europeo and the Kant-Index. It is especially necessary to widen the textual basis by incorporating statutes, journals and correspondences, etc., i.e. the materials that form the basis of the history of ideas and intellectual history. Lorini reconstructs the intentio autoris that motivated Kant to reopen ontology, its strong academic, metaphysical and pedagogical constraints notwithstanding (p. 20), and he does this, with today’s resources at hand, in the best possible way.