Neither ghost nor machine : Kant, epigenesis, and the life of the mind

There are numerous studies devoted to Kant's early work on cosmology in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), and of course also to his interests in physics and his work on forces (1747), axial rotation (1754), the ages of the earth (1754), fire (1755), earthquakes (1756), winds (1757), and even to his discussion of volcanoes on the moon (1785). [...]I was interested in introducing this 'new' Kant to those versed in post-Kantian Continental philosophy, since I believed that part of their greater attraction to German Idealism lay precisely in the manner in which they had taken Kant's conclusions one step further than the Critical philosophy seemed prepared to go. [...]while I share Dalia Nassar's worry that Kant seems to have smuggled in a set of innate characteristics after all, I want to resist the need to embrace intellectual intuition as the only means by which a genuinely autochthonous reason could also contain the stable grounds or internal constraints required for cognition. Kant was forever clear that intellectual intuition must be rejected at all costs, assigning its use to precisely those actors most responsible for the Queen's usurpation at the hands of dogmatic metaphysics. [...]while it is true that he struggled to explain his insights without trespassing barriers that he himself had erected between knowledge and speculation-and was forced thereby, to rely on odd couplings like 'indeterminate perception,' or 'non-sensible feeling' when referring to reason in his works-he never wavered in his dismissal of intellectual intuition as a possible mode of knowledge for humans, and he was comfortable in admitting the limits of our knowledge in these matters.