The Wholeness (Universitas) within Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation. A Note Concerning Pantaleo Carabellese’s Interpretation

Pantaleo Carabellese is one of the most significant and original Italian philosophers in the first half of the 20th century. His entire thought is developed through a constant confrontation with Kant. The posthumous edition of his lectures in Rome between 1940 and 1943 on the problem of existence in Kant provides some interesting elements concerning his treatment of Kant’s Dissertation (1770). Here a central role is played by the concept of the contamination of the intelligible world by the sensible world, which results from the search for wholeness (universitas). The present paper focuses on this interpretation in order to assess its consistency and to find some further application of it. The goal of the paper is to restate the interpretation sketched by Carabellese by proposing a modified version of the contamination. To support this purpose, we will take into account some elements coming from the Leibnizian and Wolffian tradition, which were well known to Kant, in order to show how this tradition is still influencing Kant in this period, despite his formal rejection of it.