How metaphysics feigns what isn’t there: Wolff, Kant, and subreption

Kant accuses the traditional metaphysician of not only transgressing the bounds of possible experience, but also misjudging her favoured real entities to be given in experience – resulting in the error of subreption. Unfortunately, Kant’s general diagnosis of how and why subreptions arise is far from obvious. I argue that progress can be made by first reconstructing the neglected pioneering diagnosis offered by Christian Wolff. On Wolff’s view, subreptions are predicated on feigning notions in the imagination. I propose that Kant’s departure from Wolff can be fruitfully framed as an internecine dispute: not over whether the imagination underlies both the heuristic use of certain notions and subreptions involving them, but over how it does so.