Definition of "antinomy" []

• Contradiction or opposition, especially between two laws or rules. (noun)
• A contradiction between principles or conclusions that seem equally necessary and reasonable; a paradox. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Kant calls the antinomy of pure reason “the most singular phenomenon of human reason” and praises it as “a very powerful agent to arouse philosophy from its dogmatic slumber and to stimulate it to the arduous task of undertaking a critique of reason itself”"
• "While the outcome of the doctrine of the antinomy is the destruction of the dogmatic metaphysics of both the rationalistic and naturalistic schools, in the context of Kant's own philosophy the antinomy also has an important constructive function."
• "The antinomy is the conflict inherent in the “cosmological idea” of the world as a whole; looked at historically, it is the conflict between opposing theories in rational cosmology (one of the four divisions of metaphysics in the Leibniz-Wolffian system then current in Germany)."