CRITICISM. - In a general sense, "criticism" denotes any philosophical system or tendency that, before constructing a metaphysics of the objects of knowledge (v.), poses the very problem of the value of knowing, of its possibilities, its conditions, its limits. As such it stands opposed both to dogmatism, for which the value of knowledge is a presupposition, and to skepticism, which denies in general the possibility of certain knowledge. In a narrow and more proper sense, criticism is the formulation and solution that Kant and the subsequent systems directly derived from Kantianism gave to the problem of knowledge, and therefore of metaphysics. In relation to this meaning, criticism is sometimes understood as any philosophical system that issues in a subjectivistic or idealistic solution of the problem of knowledge; or again, more generically, as any tendency that after Kant grants to the critique of knowledge a preponderant and totalitarian place in the construction of philosophy.
The fundamental lines of Kantian criticism, the historical result of the confluence of two antagonistic currents, Hume's empiricism and Wolff's rationalism, converge on the essential problem posed at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason: how is scientific knowledge possible, or, in another form, how are synthetic a priori judgments possible, that is, such that the predicate expresses an addition to the subject and that at the same time are universal and necessary. While, Kant reflects, mathematics and physics have long since set out on the sure path of science, metaphysics, as appears from its endless internal struggles, has not yet had this fortune. The reason must therefore undertake to examine itself anew, and see whether perhaps the failure of all attempts to construct metaphysics does not depend on a radical error of method. In fact, Kant affirms, the error of method exists: physics and mathematics progress because they have long since carried out a revolution in regard to the parts that in knowledge belong to the subject and to the object; inasmuch as in both the one and the other reason no longer sets out in pure search of an object in itself to which it must conform, but proceeds forward with its constructions and its principles, scientifically ordering nature. A similar inversion must perhaps be carried out in metaphysics, by supposing that it is not our conceptual knowledge that is modeled on objects, but rather that objects must be regulated by our knowledge. There then arises the necessity of a critique of pure reason that proceeds to a complete analysis of reason in its a priori structure, in order to discover in it all the elements, laws, and functions that are anterior to all experience, as conditions of scientific knowledge and of experience itself in general (Critique of Pure Reason, Ital. trans. by G. Gentile, 2nd ed., Bari 1940, p. 15 ff.). Kant carries out this investigation in the transcendental aesthetic, analytic, and dialectic, which establish respectively the a priori forms of sensibility (intuitions), of the understanding (concepts), and of reason (ideas). The result is the new conception of knowledge as a synthetic a priori activity, whereby knowing is no longer simply apprehending or receiving a datum that stands over against the subject, but rather the objects of knowledge are constructed within the subject itself, according to the formal elements deriving from its transcendental structure, applied to the matter offered by reality. The solution of the Critique also resolves the problem of science: mathematics and physics are possible as sciences because the concepts of the understanding, formal elements of the a priori synthesis and therefore of the universal judgments of which these two sciences consist, have their own objective and universal field of application, namely first the pure forms of sensibility (pure mathematics and pure physics), and then the phenomena or sensible representations given to us according to those forms in experience (empirical physics). Metaphysics, on the other hand, as a science remains beyond the possibilities of human knowledge, because the ideas of reason (the World, the I, God), with which metaphysics would have to deal, bear on objects (things in themselves, the noumenon) that are not given and can never be given in experience, and of which therefore every science is impossible: the I, the World, God, as objects of a possible metaphysics, are once and for all withdrawn from the domain of theoretical reason, which can pronounce neither for nor against them. The final result of the Kantian critique, which started from an inexact and artificial formulation of the problem, is therefore expressed in a radical relativism, whose only objectivity is the value that holds universally for every human experience; and in a metaphysical agnosticism, which however in reality underlies the Kantian critique itself, which is in its own way a metaphysics of knowledge.
Post-Kantian criticism assumes multiple forms and directions, according to the principles and methods that govern the solution of the problem of knowledge, and the various philosophical systematizations born on the trunk of the Kantian critique. Alongside idealism in its various expressions, which may well be considered a form of absolute criticism because of the totalitarian role that criticism assumes in it, transforming itself into a logic or metaphysics of the transcendental Subject, neo-criticism will bend toward psychologism in G. F. Fries and F. E. Benecke; will assume a physiological tendency in the founder of German neo-Kantianism, Lange, and in Helmholtz; a metaphysical tendency in O. Liebmann, a realistic one in L. Riehl, an empiricist one in R. Avenarius, a logistic one in H. Cohen; it will develop into the theory of values with G. Windelband and E. Rickert; and finally it will be accentuated into a resolute voluntarism with C. Renouvier, who will attempt to overcome through the free act of faith the phenomenal subjectivism of theoretical reason, which remains almost the common inheritance transmitted to criticism by Kant. Recently in Italy neo-criticism has been developed, besides in the ontologism of P. Carabellese, by F. Masci, and, in relation to pedagogical problems, by M. Maresca. V. CONOSCENZA; KANT.
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Ugo Viglino