This is a book about dreaming and knowing, and about thinking that one
can ascertain the difference. It is a book about the Bernards of the
world who would have us believe that there is a humanly uncreated world
existing en Boi that freely dis- closes its forever fixed ontology, even
though they too must accept that -many of the worlds we make as we try
to under- stand ourselves are counterfeit. It is a book about the real
estate of the human mind. The book is about Leibniz and Kant, and about
methods of science. It is also about what is now called pseudo-science.
It tries to show how Kant struggled to mark the limits of the humanly
knowable, and how thi s strug- gle involved him in trying to answer
questions of importance then and now. Some are philosophers' questions:
the epistemo- logical status of mathematics, the role of space and time
in knowing, the nature of the conceptual constraints on our ef- forts to
hypothesize the possible. Some are questions of per- ennial human
interest: Can spirits exist? How is the soul re- lated to the body? How
can we legitimately talk about God, if at all? Finally, Kant teaches
that these are all questions bearing on our entitlements in claiming to
know. Leibniz fashioned a way of talking about nature and super- nature
that I call the Double Government Methodology.