 Kant had long insisted that mathematics could provide no model for  philosophizing.[14]  “Mathematics gives the most resplendent example of pure reason happily expanding itself without assistance from experience” (A712/B740). But metaphysics cannot follow its course. This is not simply a rhetorical point, since many of Kant’s predecessors had tried to do exactly this—Spinoza’s Ethics is one example, Christian Wolff’s philosophy another (see Gava [forthcoming]). Kant’s basic argument against such efforts is that mathematicians are justified in constructing objects or axioms a priori, because they can work with pure intuitions (albeit very abstract ones: a line or the form of a triangle, say), rather than being restricted to analysis of concepts alone. (See the entry on  Kant’s philosophy of mathematics.)  This sort of procedure is not available to philosophers, who have no right to assume any a priori intuitions or axioms about metaphysical entities. Attempts that rely on such claims have only produced “so many houses of cards” (A727/B755).