Metaphysics of Nature and Failure in Kant's Opus Postumum

By: Terrence Thomson

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Paperback | 17 September 2026

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Focusing on moments of continuity and rupture, as well as the thin lines of fracture in Critical philosophy itself, Metaphysics of Nature and Failure in Kantâs Opus postumum navigates the rough terrain of Kantâs final thoughts. Terrence Thomson argues that Opus postumum constitutes Kantâs last attempt to deliver on the promise of a system of speculative reason in a work called âmetaphysics of natureâ. He journeys through the drafts left on Kantâs desk when he died to encounter their failure to establish this work rather than their projected success. Far from this signaling that we give up on serious study of the Opus postumum, however, Thomson shows how failure is not something Kant shied away from but rather embraced as fuel for his continued thinking. Indeed, it is this failure that opens the door to a greater understanding of the dissonances at the core of Critical philosophy itself. Moreover, it indicates what it means to be in the process of philosophizing and that Kant was well-aware that to think often means to repeatedly fail.

Suggesting how the very call for a metaphysics to be established upon the Critical philosophy can only ever fail to abide by the threshold it sets up, this book offers a new perspective on the central bind Kant repeatedly confronts in Opus postumum within the modern European tradition of philosophy. To deliver the system of metaphysics Kant calls for means to transgress the bounds of Critical philosophy, but to attempt to deliver it is nonetheless an unavoidable part of Critical philosophy itself.

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