The Fiery Test of Critique comprises a series of careful readings of Kant’s main arguments against traditional metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). The book is attentive to the texts and philosophically sophisticated. It also provides a great deal of “historical context for the conceptions Kant employs” (31). This is not mere stage-setting or ornamentation: it genuinely deepens our understanding of the primary text.1 Proops’s book is contemporary Anglophone Kant scholarship at its best.
Because Proops aims to reconstruct all the major arguments of the Dialectic, he exceeds his subject in length: 411 pages in the Dialectic’s A-edition are met by 462 pages in Proops! But this should not be a deterrent. The Fiery Test of Critique is well organized and has the feel of a commentary: it starts where the Dialectic starts and treats Kant’s topics in roughly the same order that...
