Kant: The Critique of Traditional Metaphysics

In the Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere, Kant uses the term ‘object’ in various ways and often without clearly signaling its different meanings. As a result, it is hard to gauge the extent to which Kant’s account of the object of cognition breaks new ground. In this article, I take the Critique to establish what is required to generate an object of cognition per se soleley by examining the various ways in which the human mind can objectify the content (...) of its representations. To clarify this endeavor, I distinguish four different ways in which the term ‘object’ is used in the Critique, namely, to refer to (1) material things, (2) the content of any type of thought, (3) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the broad sense of the term, and (4) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the strict sense of the term. On my reading, the fourth meaning of the term ‘object’ is key to the Transcendental Deduction and completes Kant’s unprecedented conception of the cognitive acts by means of which the human mind produces objects of cognition out of a manifold of representations. (shrink)

In this paper, we reconstruct Kant’s notion of the practically conditioned, introduced in the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, by drawing on Kant’s general account of the faculty of reason presented in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. We argue that practical reason’s activity of seeking the practically unconditioned for a given condition generates two different conceptions of the practically unconditioned and identify these as virtue and (the ideal of) happiness. We then account for how and why (...) reason proceeds to combine these two distinct ideas into the composite idea of the highest good. Last, we draw on our discussion to determine more precisely what Kant intends by the ‘supremacy’ of virtue within reason’s idea of the highest good. (shrink)

In his debut book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche presents what he understands as a metaphysics of art or metaphysics of the artist. As it becomes clear throughout the argument developed in the work, his aim is to favor a justification of the world and of existence as an aesthetic phenomenon. The path to his metaphysics passes through the interaction with Kantian and, mostly, Schopenhauerian formulations, and through a deep dialogue with Greek culture in general and, indirectly, with Pre-Socratic thought. (...) The objective of this article is to delimit the retentions and displacements of the critical tradition in his book from 1872, and highlight the importance of the interlocution with the Greek cultural repertoire in the conformation of his metaphysics of the artist. In particular, the working hypothesis is that Nietzsche, in these approaches and appropriations of critical and archaic philosophical tradition, finds the possibility of an immanent metaphysics in the post-Kantian context, conceived as a physiology (in the antique sense) of aesthetic bias. (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the concept of nature and how Kant and Hegel each conceive of it. Both agree that ‘nature’ cannot be an empirical concept but is rather presupposed in all experience and object-related thinking. Yet, Kant holds that we can only conceive of nature as a unified whole when we conceive of it as a mechanical system. Whereas, according to Hegel, the unity of all the different kinds of natural phenomena can only be accounted for by (...) means of his dialectical method. A crucial and novel point in my reading of Kant is that the concept of nature as a mechanical system is merely a regulative ideal, i.e., an imaginary end-point of science that we only approach asymptotically. It is this point that allows me to resolve long-standing puzzles in the scholarship regarding organisms and free will. For, this point allows for a coherent reading of Kant, a reading that involves that 1) we do in fact have experience of organisms and that 2) Kant’s distinctive kind of determinism is compatible with an open future. My reading of Kant furthermore provides a uniquely suited entry-point into Hegel’s dialectical account of nature, according to which not only human beings and organisms, but even solar systems do not fit the mould of a flat-footed mechanical determinism. This allows me to show that Hegel is—in several respects—both an inheritor and radicalizer of Kant. (shrink)

Review of Vols 1 & 2 of Stephen Houlgate's 'Hegel on Being'.

Este artículo examina el concepto del concepto en Kant y en Hegel. El modo de relación entre el principio de la apercepción y el concepto puro permite pensar a la filosofía de la forma transcendental como una metafísica crítica. La conexión sistemática entre las doctrinas del concepto, el juicio y el silogismo posibilita, en cambio, concebir la filosofía de la forma absoluta como una metafísica especulativa. En ambas lógicas el objeto corresponde, en último término, a la totalidad de las determinaciones (...) de aquella unidad suprema que Kant denominó apercepción y Hegel el concepto. (shrink)

Kant attacks the Leibnizians on various fronts but the objection that occurs most frequently in his writings is that they are committed to an untenable conception of the relation between sensible and intellectual representations. They regard the difference between intellectual and sensible representations as a merely ‘logical’ difference that concerns their form, namely, their different degrees of distinctness, while in truth it is a difference in kind that concerns their nature, origin, and content. In the first part of this essay, (...) I provide a detailed reconstruction of what exactly this objection amounts to, and show why Kant takes this misconception to be so significant that he keeps coming back to it over and over again. The misconception is so significant because virtually all of the other mistaken doctrines of the Leibnizians can be traced back to it. Several commentators have argued that Leibniz is not guilty of the confusion of sensible and intellectual representations that Kant accuses him of. But this does not automatically clear him from all the other errors that Kant takes to be closely connected with this confusion. In the second part of this essay, I take a look at Leibniz's theory of confused perceptions and examine whether he is committed to one of these errors, namely, the view that we could learn something about things in themselves by experience if our senses were acute enough or our powers of 'disfusing' perceptions were strong enough. (shrink)

The problem at the center of this essay is how one can reconcile the continuity of space with a monadological theory of matter, according to which matter is ultimately composed of simple elements, a problem that greatly exercised Leibniz, the Wolffians, and Kant. The underlying purpose of this essay is to illustrate my reading of Kant’s philosophical development, and of his relation to the Wolffians and Leibniz, according to which, (a), this development was fueled by ‘home-grown’ problems that arose within (...) the framework of the Wolffian philosophy from which Kant started out, and, (b), on his journey to critical idealism, Kant gradually moved away from Wolffianism, but closer to Leibniz, which, however, he came to realize only some years after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. This reading is illustrated by showing that the problem of how to reconcile the continuity of space with a monadological theory of matter is a problem that Kant inherits from Leibniz and the Wolffians, in whose thinking it already plays an important role, that Leibniz’s mature solution to the problem differs markedly from the Wolffian solution, and that Kant’s early, pre-critical solution is largely Wolffian, while his later critical solution is largely Leibnizian, as he himself notes with gleeful satisfaction. The discussion also reveals that this problem is one of the key problems that fueled Kant’s philosophical development and, eventually, led him to the discovery of transcendental idealism. (shrink)

This paper develops its exegetical claim by building mainly on a reconstruction of a central argument in the Critique of Pure Reason and supporting it with material from Kant’s other critical works. It argues that Kant’s philosophy does not permit us any judgment about things in themselves whatsoever. This could be called a form of ignorance, albeit a unique one. On the developed reading, Kant claims that there cannot be any objectively valid judgment about things in themselves, and since so-called (...) judgments without objective validity are actually no judgments at all, there is no judgment about things in themselves available to us – not even a negative one. The paper considers the theses and antitheses of the antinomies, analytic judgments, and the practical postulates as potential candidates for such judgments, each of which fail the objectivity test. It ends by concluding that we should read Kant’s critical writings in such a way that they do not feature any judgments about things in themselves and suggests one way to do so: putative judgments of this sort could be read as higher-order judgments about the concept of a thing in itself. (shrink)

I raise three questions relevant to De Boer’s overall project in Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. The first is whether Kant’s 1799 open letter to Fichte supports or threatens her contention that Kant had an abiding interest in developing a reformed metaphysics from 1781 onwards. The second is whether De Boer’s conception of the pure intellect and its place in Kant’s projected system of metaphysics captures the role of pure sensibility in the Analytic of Principles, rational physics and rational psychology. The (...) third is whether one might accept the outline of this system as De Boer develops it while still holding that it is more accurate to characterize it as revolution rather than reform. (shrink)

Kant’s Prolegomena is a piece of philosophical advertising: it exists to convince the open-minded “future teacher” of metaphysics that the true critical philosophy — i.e., the Critique — provides the only viable solution to the problem of metaphysics (i.e. its failure to make any genuine progress). To be effective, a piece of advertising needs to know its audience. This chapter argues that Kant takes his reader to have some default sympathies for the common-sense challenge to metaphysics originating from Thomas Reid (...) and his followers; this fact in turn explains his rhetorical strategies in the Prolegomena, particularly regarding the presentation of the problem of metaphysics. The chapter draws attention to the importance of Shaftesbury, who, with a nod to Horace, had argued for the deployment of humour to disarm fraudulent claims to epistemic and moral authority. Kant looks to Horace himself to poke fun at the common-sense challenge to metaphysics, and from there to indicate the general shape of the particular argumentative strategies of the Critique — that project that alone, in his view, can promise some kind of future for metaphysics. (shrink)

The focus of this chapter will be Kant’s understanding of Hume, and its impact on Kant’s critical philosophy. Contrary to the traditional reading of this relationship, which focuses on Kant’s (admittedly real) dissatisfaction with Hume’s account of causation, my discussion will focus on broader issues of philosophical methodology. Following a number of recent interpreters, I will argue that Kant sees Hume as raising, in a particularly forceful fashion, a ‘demarcation challenge’ concerning how to distinguish the legitimate use of reason in (...) (say) natural scientific contexts from the illegitimate use of it in (say) dogmatic metaphysics. I will then go on to argue that Kant sees Hume’s tendency to slide into more radical forms of skepticism as a symptom of his failure to provide a systematic or principled account of this distinction. This failure, I argue, can be traced (according to Kant) to Hume’s impoverished, non-hylomorphic account of our faculties – which both robs Hume of the materials necessary to construct a genuinely systematic philosophy as Kant understands this, and makes it impossible for Hume to clearly conceive of what Kant calls ‘Formal Idealism.’ In this way, the failings of Hume’s account of causation are (for Kant) symptoms of more fundamental limitations within Hume’s philosophy. I close by briefly discussing the similarities between Hume and Kant’s understanding of the relationship between, first, philosophical methodology and, second, the nature of our faculties. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt das Erbe der Kantischen Theorie der Konstitutions- und Regulationsleistung der Erfahrung – die Analytik der Grundsätze – dar, das unserer Auffassung nach zur Begründung der rein spekulativen Philosophie Hegels führt. In diesem Zusammenhang werden einerseits die transzendental-konstitutiven Grundsätze – Axiome der Anschauung und Antizipationen der Wahrnehmung – und andererseits die transzendental-regulativen Grundsätze – Analogien der Erfahrung und Postulate des empirischen Denkens überhaupt – als grundlegendes Material der Exegese benutzt. Als Resultat der Deutung erscheint das Problem des (...) Doppel-Verhältnisses zwischen Erfahrung und Verstandesgrundsätzen. Ein solches Verhältnis entfaltet sich nicht nur als die erfahrungsmäßige Verwirklichung der Grundsätze, sondern auch als die grundsätzliche Ermöglichung der Erfahrung. Der notwendige Charakter der Wahrheit in transzendentaler Hinsicht begründet sich dabei durch die allgemeine Beziehung der transzendentalen Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes zur Gesamtheit der Erfahrung. Es wird die These vertreten, dass die Auffassung der Natur – d.h. die das Dasein der Erscheinungen in der Zeit ermöglichende Einheit – das Hauptvermächtnis Kants für den Deutschen Idealismus im Allgemeinen und für Hegels Philosophie im Besonderen darstellt. (shrink)

The World According to Kant offers an interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s critical idealism, as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason and associated texts. Critical idealism is understood as an ontological position, which comprises transcendental idealism, empirical realism, and a number of other basic ontological theses. According to Kant, the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, comprises several levels of reality, most importantly, the transcendental level and the empirical level. The transcendental level is a mind-independent (...) level at which things in themselves exist. The empirical level is a fully mind-dependent level at which appearances exist, which are intentional objects of experience. Empirical objects and empirical minds are appearances, and empirical space and time are constituted by the spatial and temporal determinations of appearances. On the proposed interpretation, Kant is thus a genuine idealist about empirical objects, empirical minds, and space and time. But in contrast to other intentional objects, appearances genuinely exist, which is due both to the special character of experience compared to other kinds of representations such as illusions or dreams, and to the grounding of appearances in things themselves. This is why, on the proposed interpretation, Kant is also a genuine realist about empirical objects, empirical minds, and empirical space and time. This book develops the indicated interpretation, spells out Kant’s case for critical idealism thus understood, pinpoints the differences between critical idealism and ‘ordinary’ idealism, such as Berkley’s, and clarifies the relation between Kant’s conception of things in themselves and the conception of things in themselves by other philosophers, in particular, Kant’s Leibniz-Wolffian predecessors. -/- PS from the author: I maintain a list of errata plus corrections on my website (which can easily be found by googling my name). If you discover additional errors, typos, or unfortunate formulations, I would be grateful to hear from you. -/- . (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between the conspicuous and complicated terms of transcendence and immanence, which may equally be defined as essentially connected, or diametrically opposed. Recent developments in two largely unrelated sets of scholarship— the re-evaluation of secularisation, and the relationship between medieval and modern philosophy—provide a helpful means to arrive at a clearer understanding of this challenging problem. Charles Taylor and Jan Aertesn act as foci for these developments, particularly through their respective concerns with epistemic framing in relation (...) to transcendence and immanence, and the role of transcendentals in medieval philosophy. This examination brings these two concepts together, examining the idea of transcendentals offered by both Aquinas, a thinker of the transcendent frame, and Kant, a thinker of the immanent frame. From this juxtaposition we can offer two contrasting understandings of the relationship between transcendence and immanence from within both the transcendent and immanent frames. Finally, two brief literary examples demonstrate how these two ways of reading transcendence and immanence may be employed in the contextual understanding of religious writing. To understand the unity and division between transcendence and immanence is to better comprehend two primary terms in the study of religion, and to appreciate a fundamental development in the history of religion in the West. (shrink)

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber offers an interpretation of Kant’s “confession,” in the Prolegomena, that “it was the objection of David Hume that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber.” It argues that Hume roused Kant not, as has often been thought, by challenging the principle “every event has a cause” that governs experience, but by attacking the principle of sufficient reason, the basis of rationalist metaphysics and of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. (...) This proposal makes it possible to reconcile Kant’s declaration about Hume with his later assertion that it was the Antinomy of pure reason that first woke him from dogmatic slumber, because the Antinomy, like Hume’s challenge, is directed against the dogmatic use of the principle of sufficient reason. The proposal put forward here also makes it possible to understand why Kant speaks of “the objection of David Hume” after mentioning Hume’s attack on metaphysics; for the “objection” that Kant has in mind, it is argued here, is a challenge to metaphysics, rather than to the foundations of empirical knowledge. (shrink)

It is an essential part of Kant's conception of regulative principles and ideas that those principles and ideas are in a certain sense indeterminate. The relevant sense of indeterminacy is cashed out in a section in the Antinomies where Kant says that the regress of conditions of experience forms not a “regressus in infinitum” but a “regressus in indefinitum.” The mathematics that Kant appears to rely on in making this distinction turns out to be problematic, as Jonathan Bennett showed long (...) ago. But I suggest that despite this, there is another mathematically legitimate way to make Kant's point, one enunciated by, among others, Michael Dummett. This reading is corroborated, I suggest, by Kant's conception of reason as a radically open-ended endeavor. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper we look at a few of the most prominent ways of articulating Kant’s critical argument for Noumenal Ignorance — i.e., the claim that we cannot cognize or have knowledge of any substantive, synthetic truths about things-in-themselves — and then provide two different accounts of our own.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 110 Heft: 2 Seiten: 294-297.

While scholars have extensively discussed Kant’s treatment of the Principle of Sufficient Ground in the Antinomies chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, and, more recently, his relation to German rationalist debates about it, relatively little has been said about the exact notion of ground that figures in the PSG. My aim in this chapter is to explain Kant’s discussion of ground in the lectures and to relate it, where appropriate, to his published discussions of ground.

The Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and the one reality in which we live [English] Traüme eines Geistersehers usually constitutes a problematic work for Kant’s scholars for its unusual style and for the apparent break with the problems that occupied him at the beginning of the 1760s. However, this work is to a large extent the natural outcome of those themes, especially of the search for an appropriate method for metaphysics. In this paper we are particularly interested in highlighting two ideas (...) that appear there: the conception of metaphysics as a study of limits and intersubjectivity. As we will see, the backdrop of these issues and the idea that gives cohesion to Traüme is the need to base our knowledge on a single world that we all inhabit, and to which we all have equal access. Swedenborg, who embodies the opposite idea of being a privileged inhabitant of two worlds, serves as a reason to compare his visions with the excesses of metaphysics, and the "dream worlds" that he constructs. [Español] El escrito Traüme eines Geistersehers suele constituir una obra problemática para los intérpretes de Kant por su inusual estilo y por el aparente rompimiento con los problemas que lo ocupaban a principios de 1760. Sin embargo, esta obra es en buena medida el desenlace natural de aquellos temas, en especial de la búsqueda de un método apropiado para la metafísica. En este trabajo nos interesa particularmente destacar dos ideas que ahí aparecen: la concepción de la metafísica como estudio de los límites y el tema de la intersubjetividad. Como veremos, el telón de fondo de estos temas y la idea que da cohesión en general a los Traüme es la necesidad de fundar nuestro conocimiento en un único mundo que todos habitamos, y al que todos tenemos acceso por igual. Swedenborg, que encarna la idea contraria al ser habitante privilegiado de dos mundos, sirve de motivo para comparar sus visiones con los excesos de la metafísica, y los “mundos soñados” que esta construye. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the development of ontology as a philosophical discipline in the German philosophical tradition. It starts from what can be considered the invention of ontology and proceeds to the way it was received in the philosophy of Hegel. It is separated into two parts. The first part argues that what can be called the ‘traditional’ form of ontology is developed by Christian Wolff in his 1730 monograph Philosophia prima sive Ontologia, and it traces both the history of the (...) name ‘ontology’, as well as the history of the conception which led to Wolff’s formulation of it. The history of the name tracks the use of the concept ‘ontology’ from its first occurrence in 1606 up to Wolff. The history of the conception tracks the conceptions of various philosophical disciplines, found in thinkers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, and Spinoza, that ultimately give rise to Wolff’s conception of ontology as a science of an entity qua entity. The second part traces the development of this Wolffian conception through the philosophical systems of Kant and Hegel. The aim of this thesis is to argue that Wolff’s philosophy should be seen as the original formulation of the philosophical discipline of ontology and that the Wolffian conception of ontology is the one shared by subsequent German thinkers up to, and including, Hegel. I refer to this shared understanding of what ontology is as ‘the German ontological tradition’. The title of the thesis, The Possibility of Ontology, refers to the way in which this traditional understanding of what ontology is, is treated throughout the German ontological tradition. Specifically, Kant argues that the traditional conception is effectively impossible, while in Hegel one can find arguments that are intended to show that some aspects of this traditional discipline are in fact possible. Besides focusing on a fairly under-researched topic of the early history of ontology as a philosophical discipline, this thesis attempts to utilise its historical findings in order to provide novel ways in which the systems of the thinkers such as Kant and Hegel can be understood. There is a serious disregard for, or underplaying of, the Wolffian influence on the philosophical thought of Kant and Hegel, and it is my aim to contribute to the rectification of this situation by demonstrating the frequently overlooked dialogue these thinkers had with Wolff’s conception of ontology. (shrink)

Dilthey’s moral writings have received scant attention over the years, perhaps due to his apparent tendency toward relativism. This essay offers a unified look at Dilthey’s moral writings in the context of his Kantian-styled “Critique of Historical Reason.” I present the Dilthey of the moral writings as an observer of reason in the spirit of Kant, watching practical reason devolve into error when it applies itself beyond the bounds of possible experience. Drawing on moral writings from across Dilthey’s corpus, I (...) retrace Dilthey’s argument that moral theories from Kantianism and utilitarianism to natural law theory suffer significant motivational problems because of the way they transcend the “synthesis” of moral perception. Dilthey’s argument suggests that abstract moral theory is always bound to seem unmotivating and unreal from the standpoint of lived experience, and perhaps that, to avoid this, moral philosophy should confine itself to more situated, case-specific judgments. (shrink)

In this chapter I highlight the apparent tensions between Kant’s very stringent critique of metaphysical speculation in the “Discipline of Pure Reason” chapter and his endorsement of Belief (Glaube) and hope (Hoffnung) regarding metaphysical theses in the subsequent “Canon of Pure Reason.” In the process I will examine his distinction between the theoretical and the practical bases for holding a “theoretical” conclusion (i.e. a conclusion about “what exists” rather than “what ought to be”) and argue that the position is subtle (...) but coherent. In the second part of the paper I focus on Kant’s account of rational hope in the Doctrine of Method: its nature, scope, conditions, and role in the philosophy of religion generally. (shrink)

This major study of Kant provides a detailed examination of the development and function of the doctrine of transcendental illusion in his theoretical philosophy. The author shows that a theory of 'illusion' plays a central role in Kant's arguments about metaphysical speculation and scientific theory. Indeed, she argues that we cannot understand Kant unless we take seriously his claim that the mind inevitably acts in accordance with ideas and principles that are 'illusory'. Taking this claim seriously, we can make much (...) better sense of Kant's arguments and reach a deeper understanding of the role he allots human reason in science. (shrink)

Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects (...) of this response. The first is that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is also a response to Hume. The second is that aspects of this response are decidedly positive. In particular, I argue (1) that Kant believed Hume's scepticism manifested important elements of Pyrrhonian scepticism and (2) that both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Hume had a significant positive influence on the development of the Transcendental Dialectic. (shrink)

TODAY it would seem to be rather generally assumed that Kant had posed a problem for any future metaphysics which no future metaphysics has either been able to solve, or perhaps even tried very hard to solve. And it would further seem to be the consensus that Kant's famous challenge to metaphysics really turned on what, in the broad sense of the term, might be called a set of simple logical considerations, viz. that any judgment, and hence any metaphysical judgment, (...) must needs be either analytic or synthetic; that if metaphysical judgments be analytic, then, in modern parlance, they cannot be truths about the world; and that if they be synthetic, they cannot very well be empirical truths, since they would then be lacking in those very properties of necessity and universality which Kant felt had to characterize metaphysical truths, if such there be. Accordingly, on the Kantian analysis there is no logical slot left for metaphysical judgments save that of the synthetic a priori. And into this slot, for the well-known Kantian reasons, metaphysical judgments cannot seem to be fitted. (shrink)

In the 'Critique of Pure Reason' Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of “containment,” a second time in terms of “identity,” a third time in terms of the explicative–ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of “cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction.” The paper asks: Which of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—best captures Kant’s conception of analyticity in the first Critique? It suggests: “the second.” It argues, further, that (...) Kant’s distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject–predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction’s meaning, its epistemology, and its tenability. (shrink)

I seek to show in this paper how, in addressing the concept of “I” and the question of self-knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason, one encounters a paradox, which is essentially a consequence of the doctrine of transcendental idealism. I point to Kant's concept of “I” and its three co-constitutive perspectives. The importance of the concept of subject and its intertwining with the concept of reason is pointed out, as also how these two concepts appear in the text of (...) the Critique of Pure Reason as presuppositions. Subsequently, I deal with some basic questions of transcendental idealism. Finally, I briefly present the three perspectives of the "I": as a phenomenon, as a transcendental structure, and as a noumenon. I conclude by bringing back what Kant himself conceives as a paradox, which is the subject’s self-affection, and the relation between the subject as noumenon and as inner sense. (shrink)

On the historically dominant reading of the Fourth Paralogism, Kant pursues an antiskeptical strategy of a Berkeleyan stripe, aiming to secure our belief in the existence of the external world by reducing this world to a mind-dependent, mental entity. I propose a more charitable and realist interpretation of Kant’s strategy. On the proposed reading, Kant pursues a moderate antiskeptical strategy which sets radical skeptical worries aside; Kant’s Berkeleyan-sounding remarks merely express standard Kantian doctrine (his theory of space).

Thorough comparison of Immanuel Kant’s and Christian Wolff’s divergent appraisals of the science of psychology reveals various ways in which Kant fundamentally altered the Wolffian philosophical apparatus that he inherited. Wolff conceived of a thoroughgoing interplay between empirical and rational psychology, of combining different sorts of cognition in psychology, and of a mathematical science of the soul, or psychometrics. Kant however rejected each of these particular theses and deemed psychology to be no natural science, “properly so-called.” This chapter details these (...) departures from Wolff, explains their basis, and concretizes an underlying contrast in Kant’s and Wolff’s respective philosophical approaches. Namely, whereas Wolff’s philosophical system is malleable, allowing for the combination of various kinds of cognition and methods, in Kant’s Critical philosophy, everything has its proper, preordained niche. At bottom, it is the unyielding rigor of Kant’s system that results in his pessimistic evaluation of the prospects for psychology. (shrink)

These comments are my contribution to the author-meets-critics session on Katharina Kraus' recently published Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, at the APA Pacific meeting. In my comments, I challenge Kraus' characterization of my fictionalism concerning the idea of the soul, and contend for the importance of transcendental illusion in that idea's function of guiding the empirical investigation of inner appearances.

Since the classic works by Castañeda, Perry and Lewis, de se thoughts have been described as thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’. In recent years, various theoretical perspectives have gained ground, and even if the transcendental system does not seem to contemplate an explicit articulation of de se thoughts, apparently a few features of transcendental apperception and I think do anticipate a few points in Perry and Recanati’s claims on the so-called implicit de se thoughts in the specific terms of Transcendentalism.

Review of Béatrice Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

This paper takes issue with the widespread view that Kant rejects epistemic phenomenalism. According to epistemic phenomenalism, only cognition of states of one’s own mind can be certain, while cognition of outer objects is necessarily uncertain. I argue that Kant does not reject this view, but accepts a modified version of it. For, in contrast to traditional skeptics, he distinguishes between two kinds of outer objects and holds that we have direct access to outer appearances in our mind; but he (...) still considers objects outside our mind unknowable. This sheds new light on Kant’s refutation of idealism. (shrink)

: According to Kant, the arguments of rational psychology are formal fallacies that he calls transcendental paralogisms. It remains heavily debated whether there actually is any formal error in the inferences Kant presents: according to Grier and Allison, they are deductively invalid syllogisms, whereas Bennett, Ameriks, and Van Cleve deny that they are formal fallacies. I advance an interpretation that reconciles these extremes: transcendental paralogisms are sound in general logic but constitute formal fallacies in transcendental logic. By formalising the paralogistic (...) inference, I will pinpoint the error as an illegitimate existential presupposition. Since - unlike transcendental logic - general logic abstracts from all objects, this error can only be detected in transcendental logic. (shrink)

Israel Gottlieb Canz’s Uberzeugender Beweiß, first published in 1741 and reprinted here in its second, expanded edition stands as his most influential discussion of the soul’s immortality, with one contemporary pronouncing it to be “one of the best [treatments of immortality] that we have.” In this text, Canz seeks to augment and supplement traditional Wolffian proofs by considering, first, the grounds for the soul’s immortality that are contained in its own nature and, second, the grounds for the same that are (...) found in God. In addition, Canz extends his treatment to include a detailed discussion of the souls of children and he offers speculations concerning the soul’s condition in the afterlife. On account of its systematic presentation and original argumentation, Canz’s Beweiß represents a key contribution to Leibniz-Wolffian rational psychology, and through the critical reaction it generated it would help shape the debate concerning the soul’s immortality for years after its original publication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Demands of Self-ConsciousnessFrederick RauscherPierre Keller. Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp vii + 286. Cloth, $59.95.Pierre Keller finds an argument for transcendental idealism in Kant's conception of the self. Keller argues that, for self-consciousness to be possible, there must be not only an empirical distinction between representations in inner sense and objects outside us in space but also (...) a transcendental distinction between an ontological inner and outer: "We distinguish the inner from the outer within experience, and the outer as what is completely independent of the way we must experience the world, on the basis of the consciousness that we have of ourselves" (236).This ultimate conclusion is reached through an argument begun with a suggestive analysis of Kant's theory of self-consciousness. Keller agrees with many other recent commentators that Kant's theory of mind is functionalist. But to this analysis Keller adds an impersonal account of transcendental self-consciousness. This move can be understood as follows: Knowledge of the self as a particular identifiable empirical individual person depends upon objective evidence of the continuity of self accessible from a third person point of view. Objective knowledge is required because mere inner representation of the self as identical over time might err. This objective knowledge, however, is possible only if there is an empirical self-consciousness or awareness of self in inner sense in which different representations are connected together to form a point of view on that objective realm; thus empirical self-consciousness is the basis for [End Page 285] but not the same as personal identity. Empirical self-consciousness, the existence of a particular point of view, in turn depends upon the more abstract transcendental self-consciousness which is the transcendental condition for the existence of particular points of view as grounded in the totality of all possible points of view (72). The transcendental "I think" which Kant holds to be required for knowledge, then, is a single collection of all possible points of view, or, a possible grand function synthesizing all possible representations to generate an objective world. Keller holds each particular "I," then, to be a subset of this possible (not actual!) global self-consciousness.Here Keller's argument is unconvincing. Kant need not hold that particular points of view in inner sense require a conception of all possible points of view in a global whole of representations. Rather, in order to guarantee the objectivity required for a point of view in inner sense, Kant could hold that there must be objective relations among objects which account for the particular point of view even if those objective relations are not representable to any possible point of view. Keller's overlooking this option is puzzling given the emphasis on objectivity he develops in the remainder of the book.Keller's interpretation of self-consciousness ultimately leads to transcendental idealism through the requirement of objectivity. For since each individual self-consciousness can claim to be such only in reference to a possible global self-consciousness, that global self-consciousness provides the objective background for all subjectivity claims. I can become aware of my place in the world only by becoming aware of other possible relations to the objective world which I might have had. The Refutation of Idealism ultimately makes this claim regarding the necessity of the existence of real objects outside of me in space as the basis for my ability to have any subjective relations at all. Although some have taken Kant's argument here to also refute his own transcendental idealism, Keller holds that this empirical realism can be taken to support transcendental idealism. We must not only have knowledge of objects which we represent as outside of us, such knowledge also cannot ultimately arise from active, spontaneous self-affection, for then the represented object would not be truly able to provide an independent marker for our subjective relations. Thus, there must be objects to which we relate passively; moreover, this passive relation dictates that the objects are "radically independent of us" (216). Hence, the refutation of idealism proves not only that there must... (shrink)