{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03442554956449606, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014102032351721278, 'mean_word_length': 5.264935064935065, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Kant, God and Metaphysics: The Secret Thorn by Edward Kanterian (Routledge2017, pp.444)

Fifty or so years ago, the German scholar Rudolf Malter took on the arduous project of compiling a comprehensive multilingual bibliography of articles, books and monographs on the life and thought of Immanuel Kant. The task was daunting enough in the early 1960’s, when an average of 168 such titles were published annually, but following the publication of P.F. Strawson’s classic Bounds of Sense, studies of Kant’s philosophy experienced a significant upsurge, more than tripling to 565 per year in the 1980s1. By the time of Malter’s death in 1994, the bibliography stood at over 9,000 entries, with the rate of publication only increasing. These remarkable numbers testify to the breadth and depth ofKant’s philosophical contributions and their continued relevance to contemporary philosophical concerns, but also to the difficulty of presenting an original interpretation. Despite this difficulty, Edward Kanterian’s new book Kant, God and Metaphysics, is precisely that: a novel and unorthodox interpretation of Kant’s fundamental philosophical motivations and the way they manifest themselves in the pre-Critical works. The subtitle of the book, ‘The Secret Thorn’, alludes to Heidegger’s claim that ‘the question as to whether and how and within which limits the proposition ‘God exists’ is possible... is the secret thorn that drives all thinking in the Critique of Pure Reason’,2 a line of interpretation explored to an extent in German language Kant scholarship, but something of an uncharted territory in Anglophone philosophy. Kanterian explores this central idea in an ambitious, at times provocative, way. He argues that the primary purpose of Kant’s metaphysical system in the pre-Critical period was to defend his pre-existing religious commitments. According to the author, Kant’s philosophy has a ‘doctrinal religious core, more or less stable since Luther’, a core to which the ‘various ontological, epistemological, and methodological positions’ serve as ‘the auxiliary part of [his] defensive project’ (325). The metaphor of a ‘fortress’ appears in the opening line of the book : ‘it is no secret that transcendental idealism is the key doctrine of Kant’s mature philosophy, offering a fortification behind whose walls the concepts of freedom...can be protected against any materialist or determinist