The Methods of Metaphilosophy advances a precise and ambitious scholarly stake: to show that Kant, Maimon, and Schelling each devise a method for philosophizing about philosophy that treats metaphilosophy as first philosophy and, crucially, as a discipline with its own experimentally inflected procedure. Schmid’s distinctive contribution lies in the reconstruction of a shared research programme—metaphilosophy-first—whose procedures are designed in explicit continuity with the experimental and mathematical sciences then in formation. She argues that Kant’s propaedeutic method, Maimon’s method of fictions, and Schelling’s method of nature-construction are not merely parallel proposals but interlocking versions of a single project: the experiment of reason, an a priori experimentalism that tests methodological hypotheses about the very possibility of philosophical cognition.
The book’s outer framing is explicit and programmatic: metaphilosophy is treated as the fundamental science tasked with securing philosophy’s scientific status by investigating its nature and method before issuing first-order claims; and that investigation, if it is to avoid arbitrariness or a merely verbal circularity, must itself be methodical in a way continuous with scientific practice. The introduction lays down this double thesis—metaphilosophy-first, and continuity with scientific method—while already fixing the lens through which Kant, Maimon, and Schelling are read as members of a single research family. Schmid’s table of contents is not a neutral itinerary but a compositional sequence that installs three methodological cores (propaedeutic, fictions, nature-construction) and then displaces them into a concluding synthesis, Experiments of reason, where their mutual illumination becomes explicit. This is not a linear story of influence but a constructive dynamic in which each method, once clarified in its own right, refracts the others, yielding a cumulative demonstration that experimental procedure can be adapted to the metaphilosophical task.
The intellectual situation that motivates this programme is described with historical and systematic sharpness. Schmid’s point of departure is Kant’s diagnosis that metaphysics has long groped among mere concepts and has lacked a rigorous procedure; consequently, the question of metaphysics’ scientificity reduces neither to a ban on metaphysics nor to a mere epistemological prologue, but to the design of a method appropriate to a self-investigation of reason. The introduction’s architecture marks the path: from a conceptual map of metaphilosophy, through the claim that philosophy must be metaphilosophy-first, to a survey of “scientific tools for metaphilosophy,” especially experimentation and idealisation in their early modern—and notably Galilean and Newtonian—forms. These tools are not imported to decorate philosophy with scientific metaphors; they are pressed into service to articulate how a priori experimental reasoning is even thinkable. The overview then announces the wager: each of the three principal chapters reconstructs a method explicitly crafted in dialogue with living scientific practices, not with a retrospective dogma of “the scientific method.”
The first concentration of the book’s argumentative mass is the account of Kant’s propaedeutic method. Schmid insists, and the text secures, that the Critique of Pure Reason is both a treatise on method and a work of a particular method. The propaedeutic does not legislate to metaphysics from nowhere; it undertakes a self-experiment of reason on its own cognitive structures under the hypothesis that the possibility of scientific metaphysics hinges on the correctness of a specific theory of cognition. That hypothesis is then tested—not by empirical observation but by a priori experimentation whose argumentative form is clarified by a two-layered analogy: to experimentalism in the line of Bacon, Galileo, and Newton, and to chemical analysis and synthesis as practiced in eighteenth-century chemistry. The intended upshot is to show how the propaedeutic can reach non-trivial, evidentially constrained conclusions about the composition of cognition without lapsing into vicious circularity.
The first layer of the analogy fixes the logic of experiment. Against the Bacon-Boyle-Hooke view that subordinates hypotheses to indefinite data-gathering, Kant’s “Galileo-Newton” experimentalism begins with hypotheses and treats experiments as principled interventions that adjudicate between rival explanations. Schmid secures this point in Kant’s own formulations: experiments must presuppose something from which inquiry proceeds, and must intervene in nature “like an appointed judge”—a maxim he adapts as a paradigm for philosophical procedure. The continuity with natural science lies not in any naive empiricism of philosophy, but in the methodological structure: hypothesis-guided, interventionist, and confirmatory reasoning, transposed to the domain where the object of inquiry and the inquiring power coincide.
The second layer supplies the operative model of proof: chemical analysis and resynthesis. Schmid argues textually that Kant’s B-Preface does not merely trade on the prestige of “experiment” but singles out reduction and the synthetic procedure of the chemists as the apt comparandum for a propaedeutic that decomposes and recomposes cognitive compounds. In chemistry, the analysis separates a complex into simple constituents; the synthesis recombines them to validate the analysis by reproducing the original compound (or accounting for its relevant properties). On Schmid’s reconstruction, the Aesthetic and Analytic perform an analysis of the representational “compound,” abstracting the idealised elements of cognition; the Dialectic then functions as a synthesis in which the reintroduction of the “necessary idea of the unconditioned” forces a Gegenprobe—a check—on the adequacy of the hypothesised elements. Where the re-combination yields contradiction, illusion, or instability, the analysis is corrected; where it yields systematic agreement, the analysis is confirmed. The proof is experimental not because it is sensory, but because it is procedural and reproducible in the domain of reason.
What, more exactly, is being tested? Schmid identifies two linked hypotheses as the real target: first, the Heterogeneity thesis, that the elements of a priori representation are irreducibly diverse in kind; second, the Cooperation requirement, that cognition as such requires the coordinated operation of these heterogeneous elements. The Dialectic’s regressive and then corrective maneuvers are not primarily metaphysical theses about things in themselves, but meta-epistemological demonstrations about the right composition of representational powers. The method thus promises impartiality by experimentally constraining its own inferences; and its acknowledged circularity—philosophy proving the method by using the method—remains non-vicious because, as in chemistry, analysis-guided synthesis is precisely how one tests an analysis. This is not a concession; it is the entire point of modelling metaphilosophical demonstration on experimental practice.
A further strengthening move comes from the discussion of Galilean idealisations. Schmid emphasises that all three figures—Kant, Maimon, Schelling—inherit the legitimacy of deliberate misrepresentation in the service of tractability and lawlike representation, together with the norm of eventual de-idealisation. Kant’s own construction of the conceptual “apparatus” employs idealised conditions not as flights from reality but as the only conditions under which the universality and necessity demanded of science can be articulated and tested. In her framing, idealisation belongs not only to physics but to metaphilosophy: one cannot otherwise model cognitive composition with the generality and precision that experimental proof presupposes.
With this Kantian core in place, the book pivots—without rupture—to Maimon. Here the composition sequence in the monograph matters: the Maimon chapter displaces the chemical-experimental idiom into a mathematical-modelling idiom and, in doing so, intensifies the hypothetical character of metaphilosophical procedure. Textually, Schmid shows that Maimon reads philosophy as “the science of the form of all sciences” and rejects the very project of a Kantian propaedeutic that would settle quid facti and quid juris about the application of understanding to sensibility. His alternative, the method of fictions, is not an ad hoc metaphor but a reflective appropriation of calculus as practiced in the sciences of motion and change. Infinitesimals, as actually used, are contradictory entities—indivisible “points” that nonetheless function as the building blocks of the divisible—whose use in modelling yields exact and general results; their success comes not from their truth, but from their systematic role within a rule-governed calculus. Maimon’s lesson is programmatic: philosophy must likewise proceed by useful fictions, rigorously constructed and assessed by their inferential and explanatory power rather than by naïve correspondence.
Schmid’s reconstruction of Maimon’s method is doubly edged. On the one hand, she secures that Maimon accepts the scientification imperative—philosophy must become a science—and that he seeks a method continuous with the best available sciences; on the other, she marks his decisive internal critique of the Kantian form of that continuity. Against Kant’s chemical analogy, Maimon models cognition immanently on the calculus: cognition proceeds through rule-governed generation of idealised constructs; justification consists in the stability and fruitfulness of the construct within a system; and what appears as contradiction at the level of concepts functions instrumentally within a broader modelling practice. The result is a metaphilosophy that is explicitly modelling-first: philosophy constructs fictions that make objects treatable as if they were thinkable without limit, and thereby articulates the principles of synthetic a priori cognition not as ready-made forms but as continuously regulative rules. This proposal, Schmid stresses, is not scepticism about science but a rationalist insistence that scientificity in philosophy is achieved by fictions that are constrained by their role within a calculus-like system of inferences.
A subtle tension is made explicit. Kant’s experiment of reason had promised impartiality by experimental recomposition; Maimon’s method of fictions embraces a more radical hypotheticality that risks loss of contact with any “check” beyond inferential systematics. Schmid’s text acknowledges this risk while indicating Maimon’s own way of managing it: the coalitional structure of his system—rational dogmatism conjoined with empirical scepticism—allocates to fiction-guided reason the task of framing, and to experience the role of limit-signal, without granting experience constitutive priority. One can infer here, with Schmid’s guidance, that Maimon thereby preserves the metaphilosophy-first commitment while displacing the chemical ideal of recomposition into a mathematical ideal of limit-process and model convergence. This is an inferential reconstruction, but it is licensed by Maimon’s explicit appeal to the method of fictions as the philosophical analogue of the mathematician’s practice.
Schelling’s chapter then performs the boldest transformation of the shared programme. The compositional sequence within the book brings Schelling last, not because he is epigonal but because his Naturphilosophie absorbs and transfigures the earlier lessons. Schmid shows—on the basis of texts from 1799, and with care for their internal chronology—that Schelling relocates the site of metaphilosophy in a systematic construction of nature. The first principle must be unconditioned; philosophy, if it is to be first science, must posit an absolute hypothesis about nature’s original productivity and then construct nature as the self-inhibiting sequence of its products. This is a metaphilosophy that treats nature as the medium in which the experiment of reason is presented. The test of the theory’s adequacy is no longer only intra-philosophical recomposition or calculus-style fecundity, but the capacity of the construction to organise experimental practice itself and to be put at empirical hazard by it.
Two theses are secured here. First, Naturphilosophie becomes first philosophy because it grounds the possibility of science by unifying an infinite collection of facts under a single methodological principle that conceives nature as a duplicity—productivity and product. Second, the relation between philosophy and experiment is inverted: experiments become not merely means of testing ready-made laws but media of presentation—they darstellen—through which nature’s ideal construction appears under controlled conditions. The absolute hypothesis bears its necessity within itself, yet it must be brought to an empirical test: any phenomenon that cannot be constructed according to the principle falsifies the hypothesis. The notion of a “philosophical experiment” thus returns in a new guise: empirical experimentation is scripted by philosophy and, in turn, judges philosophy’s absolute posit by success or failure in construction. This bidirectional accountability is the strongest form of the continuity thesis in the book.
At this juncture, the book’s final displacement is enacted by its concluding chapter, Experiments of reason, which explicitly redescribes the three methods as variants of a single a priori experimentalism. Schmid argues—backed by the cumulative analysis—that the unity of the programme does not rest on a vague affinity but on the shared argumentative shape: hypothesis-guided, experimentally constrained procedures that test the possibility of philosophical cognition by reconstructing, modelling, or constructing its conditions. The divergence between Baconian archival empiricism and the Galileo-Newton model is crucial here; Schmid secures Kant’s allegiance to the latter and traces how Maimon and Schelling extend it, respectively, toward mathematical modelling and toward a constructive integration with empirical laboratories. The conclusion clarifies that the experimentalism at stake is indeed a priori, not because it floats free of experience, but because it is the experiment of reason that sets the conditions under which empirical experiments can count as evidence at all.
Across the whole, Schmid is vigilant about the danger of circularity in metaphilosophy. The earlier introduction had flagged the two horns—partiality if one uses the philosophical method to validate that very method; regress if one proliferates meta-levels. The book’s answer is methodological rather than dialectical: adopt a procedure whose very structure is to validate its own steps through an internal cycle of analysis and synthesis (Kant), or through model-guided convergence and regulative control (Maimon), or through the empirical hazard of constructive presentation (Schelling). This is not a dismissive “all circles are benign” stance; rather, each method is crafted so that the only legitimate way to test it is to run it, and the only way to run it is to accept, provisionally, its initial posit—exactly as the sciences operate when they adopt a calculational scheme, an instrument model, or an absolute hypothesis to be put at risk by their consequences. The impartiality demanded of metaphilosophy is achieved by a calibrated discipline of method-internal checks. This is secured textually in Kant’s chemical analogy and his distinction between analysis and synthesis; it is explicit in Schelling’s requirement that the absolute posit must “besides this” be brought to an empirical test; and it is inferentially but plausibly present in Maimon’s strict separation between the epistemic role of fictions and their ontological status.
A further virtue of the book lies in the way it handles idealisation. The account is not a generic paean to “models,” but a historically keyed claim: early modern science succeeded by deliberate simplification with an expectation of de-idealisation, and the three philosophers appropriate precisely this logic. Kant treats the pure elements of cognition as idealised constituents discerned under simplifying conditions; their reality is not empirical but methodological, fixed by their indispensable role in re-composing experience under the idea of the unconditioned. Maimon elevates idealisation to the very criterion of philosophical construction: if a representation’s “deviation” from reality is rule-governed and inferentially fecund, it is useful and thus admissible as a fiction. Schelling radicalises the point: construct and causal idealisations are not concessions but the very means by which constitutive principles become experimentally presentable; the demand for de-idealisation appears as the demand that constructions be able to survive confrontation with experiments devised from within the system they organise. The thread of idealisation thus ties the three methods together as a single logic of scientificity.
One can now appreciate the book’s internal dynamics. The Kant chapter lays the scaffolding: metaphilosophy-first as propaedeutic discipline, experiment as reason’s own procedure, proof by chemical analysis/synthesis. The Maimon chapter enters as a challenge and an extension: once the calculus reveals that contradiction-laden entities can be indispensable tools when treated as fictions, the expectation that philosophy must prove its elements by recomposition is supplemented by the expectation that it must justify its constructs by model-theoretic work. The Schelling chapter then gathers these lessons into a principled wager: if philosophy is to be first science, it must posit an absolute hypothesis of nature’s productivity, construct the sequence of products, and delegate to empirical experimentation the task of presenting and testing that construction. What thereby congeals is a triptych whose panels push and displace each other: Kant anchors the experimental form, Maimon problematises and mathematizes it, Schelling exteriorises it into the world such that laboratory practice itself becomes a chapter of the experiment of reason. The final chapter’s rubric therefore names what the book has enacted: experiments of reason in three registers.
It is helpful to distinguish, as requested, what is textually secured from what is inferential. Secured: that Schmid frames the unity of the project as metaphilosophy-first and as continuity with scientific methods; that she attributes to Kant a two-layered analogy—experimentalism and chemical analysis/synthesis—and reads the Aesthetic/Analytic versus Dialectic as the loci of analysis and recombination; that she identifies Maimon’s method as an appropriation of calculus, construing infinitesimals as useful fictions and making method rather than truth the criterion of admissibility; that she reconstructs Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as grounded in an absolute hypothesis, treating experiments as presentations and holding the system falsifiable by phenomena that will not be constructed by its principle. Inferential: that Maimon’s coalition of rational dogmatism and empirical scepticism functions, at the methodological level, as a calculus-style discipline of convergence; that Kant’s impartiality claim should be read as the chemical impartiality of a procedure rather than as neutrality among first-order theses; that Schelling’s integration of experimentation amounts to a systematic scripting of laboratory practice by philosophical construction. These inferences follow Schmid’s lines of argument and are, I think, licensed by her reconstruction, though they articulate implications she sometimes leaves only implicit.
The book also answers a deeper worry left hanging in the introduction: if metaphilosophy is “philosophy about philosophy,” how can it be anything other than “just more philosophy,” and thus partial? Schmid’s decisive move is to relocate impartiality from a standpoint outside philosophy to a methodological discipline inside it. Philosophy cannot exit itself to judge itself; but it can design a procedure that constrains its self-judgment the way experiment constrains theory. Kant’s chemical analogy supplies the paradigm of an internal Gegenprobe; Maimon’s fiction-guided modelling supplies the paradigm of inferential discipline without ontological naiveté; Schelling’s construction-cum-experiment supplies the paradigm of empirical hazard without empiricist reduction. The result is a convergence of three strategies on a single ideal of scientificity: speculative yet experimental method. This is not a rhetorical flourish in Schmid’s prose; it is the throughline of the book’s architecture and its claim to novelty.
Finally, by concluding with Experiments of reason, Schmid clarifies the scope of her claim. This is not an antiquarian exercise in German Idealist method talk. The book holds that what made the late-Enlightenment attempt to scientify philosophy intellectually serious was precisely the willingness to import forms of constraint—hypothesis testing, analysis/synthesis, idealisation management, constructive presentation—from sciences that themselves were then becoming modern. In recovering the exact shapes those constraints took in Kant, Maimon, and Schelling, Schmid provides not only a historical map but a living template for what contemporary metaphilosophy could be when it refuses to choose between speculative ambition and experimental discipline. Clarifying, then: the book’s contribution is to identify, and to argue in detail for, a family resemblance grounded in method, and to show that the most promising route to the scientificity of philosophy lies in designing experiments of reason whose results are answerable—conceptually, inferentially, and empirically—to the standards of the very sciences from which they take their orientation.
Simon Gros 
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