Kants Methodology

Kants revolution in methodology limited metaphysics to the conditions of possible experience. Since, following Hume, analysisthe method of discovery in early modern physicscould no longer ground itself in sense or in Gods constituting reason a new arch, origin and principle, was required, which Kant found in the synthesis of the productive imagination, the common root of sensibility and understanding. Charles Bigger argues that this imaginative between recapitulates the ancient Gaia myth which, as used by Plato in the Timaeus, offers a way into this originary arch. Since it depends on myth and the likely story rather than on a self-certain apprehension of Being, this facilitates an imaginative approach to the natural sciences which, through its synthetic a priori formations, can claim to be Kantian. Bigger explores Kants ethics as an alternative to metaphysics that holds open the prospect of a Good beyond Beingand phenomenologywhose traces nevertheless appear in original synthesis. Though wary of its reductive implications, Bigger uses Derridas difference, a medial, feminine arch, as a way into this creative and procreative metaxu (between). As Emmanuel Levinas suggests, this is Platos gap [chaos] between being and becoming, whose possibility, beyond both, lies in chora and the Good. This Open also presents the possibility for a new, yet still Kantian, understanding of the formal and material conditions for the natural sciences.