Abstract

In this paper, I aim to enrich scholarship on Georg Fredrich Meier and extend scholarship on Immanuel Kant’s critique of speculative metaphysics. Meier is a relatively underexamined philosopher who worked within the eighteenth-century Wolffian tradition of Rationalism and influenced Kant’s critical philosophy. Meier was critical of the metaphysical claims of the Rationalist school, particularly in his essay Thoughts on the State of the Soul after Death. Meier aimed his critique at Rational Psychology, which boasted proofs for the existence of the immortal soul and claims of certainty regarding its substantiality, simplicity, and maintenance of personality after death. Famously, in the Paralogisms section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant also critiques speculative metaphysics and claims about the qualities of the soul. In the Paralogisms, Kant directs his critique toward Rational Psychology but does not refer directly to the fallacious arguments of the Wolffian tradition of Rational Psychology. Kant’s avoidance of mentioning the Wolffian tradition has led to some degree of scholarly neglect for this essential context. I will argue that both Kant and Meier are critics of Rational Psychology who levy the same kind of argument against the claims of Rational Psychology: both argue that proof of the claims about the soul are beyond the capacities of human reason to obtain. In targeting the ground of these claims, the capacities of human reason itself, both Kant and Meier make room for faith, despite differing on the degree to which that faith is necessary for morality.