The author analyses and compares a few basic senses in which Kant uses the term 'metaphysics' in his pre-critical writings and in the 'Critique of Pure Reason'. He argues that the essential meaning of the term is to be found in Kant's paper submitted to a contest, in which 'metaphysics' was defined as a philosophical investigation of the first principles of cognition. This idea has been later enlarged into an entire project of Kantian critique of reason, or into a metaphysical theory that explains the possibility of cognition and knowledge.
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