Kant: The Synthetic A Priori

Talk at University of Turin, 'Kant, oltre Kant, May 5th 2023. --- -/- It is useful, while keeping in mind a holistic approach, to concentrate on a common theme in Kant’s text, which it will turn out is the quintessential element of his novel ‘way of thinking’, as he himself put it in preface of the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This common theme is the idea of synthesis, which is what holds together, and is the entryway (...) to, all the other familiar aspects of Kant’s thought: his concept of self-consciousness or how mind is involved in cognition, his ideas about the role of the imagination, his theory of knowledge and his metaphysics of experience, and not unimportantly, its relation to what is probably the most Kantian element here: the categories of the understanding as the first principles of knowledge. But the meaning of synthesis and its role in its various facets, though frequently the subject of discussion in papers and monographs alike, is hardly understood in contemporary Kant scholarship. Most readings of the text of the Deduction, the part in which Kant elucidates his concept of synthesis, exhibit a shallow, mechanical understanding of it. -/- A compounding factor is that synthesis can’t really be understood independently of the other aforementioned elements of Kant’s thought. Grasping the meaning of synthesis implies coming to grips with his concept of self-consciousness and the way both self-consciousness and the categories are intricately and intimately involved. Most interpretations consider these aspects too much as if they were indeed separable faculties or entities that serve separable functions, undercutting an important feature of Kant’s metaphysics: the possibility of a priori unified cognition, for which an indivisible self-legislating subject is responsible. Rather, they are expressions of various aspects of a singular function of the mind as the ground of possible unified knowledge. -/- One striking example of such a superficial reading of the text is the way the relation between figurative synthesis and intellectual synthesis—or in the case of the A-Deduction the threefold synthesis—is standardly interpreted, as if the two are independent or quasi-independent functions of different faculties of the mind, the imagination and the understanding. In this paper, I focus on the relation between figurative and intellectual synthesis, while arguing that failing to understand this properly, indeed the relation between the imagination and the understanding, leads to a vicious regress in the explanation of the ground of knowledge, for which a priori synthesis is specifically designed. In other words, failing to see the intimate relation between the imagination and the understanding, the very identity that lies at their root, risks losing sight of the primary aim of Kant’s thought: the possibility of a priori unified knowledge. (shrink)

There is little consensus about whether Kant intends his Critique of Pure Reason to change the mind of a skeptical empiricist such as Hume. I challenge a common assumption made by both sides of the debate. This is the thought that Kant can convince a skeptic only if he does not beg the question against her. Surprisingly, I argue, that is not how Kant sees things. On Kant’s view, skeptical empiricism is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying position, which skeptics cannot (...) help wanting to escape. Kant’s Critique, and especially its Transcendental Deduction, offers thinkers like Hume an appealing means of escape, by explaining a possible relation of the mind to the objects of knowledge which skeptics have overlooked. On Kant’s view of the skeptic as inherently dissatisfied with her position, the offer of an explanation can change her mind while neither refuting nor appealing to her skeptical empiricism. (shrink)

In the context of a critique of James Conant’s (2016) important new reading of the main argument of the Deduction, I present my current, most detailed interpretation of the well-known Leitfaden passage at A79, which in my view has been misinterpreted by a host of prominent readers. The Leitfaden passage is crucial to understanding the argument of, not just the so-called Metaphysical Deduction, but also the Transcendental Deduction. This new account expands and improves upon the account of the Leitfaden I (...) gave in Chap. 5 of Kant’s Deduction From Apperception. While I agree with the core of Conant’s critique of what he calls the ‘layer-cake’ reading of the Deduction argument, in this new account I make clearer my position on why the unity of judgement, in which concepts and intuitions are a priori synthetically unified, is wholly determined in virtue of the unity of apperception as the unitary function of the understanding, without this leading to a strong form of conceptualism such as that of Conant and others. (shrink)

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)

Este artículo presenta el modo de relación de la totalidad de lo condicionado y lo incondicionado en la lógica transcendental de Kant. Para ello el argumento reconstruye los elementos que abren el tratamiento de la dialéctica transcendental en la "Crítica de la razón pura", es decir, la apariencia ilusoria y las Ideas de la razón. Este modo de leer la doctrina de las síntesis transcendentales de lo condicionado y lo incondicionado exhibe la tesis de la complementariedad diferenciada entre ambas regiones, (...) dando a cada una su derecho, lugar y misión. (shrink)

In Chapter 8 of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics, one of Gabriele Gava’s aims is to argue that Kant’s critique of Wolff’s dogmatic method has two levels: one directed against Wolff’s metaphilosophical views and one attacking his actual procedures of argument. After providing a brief summary of the main claims Gava makes in Chapter 8 of his book, in this paper I argue two things. First, I argue against Gava’s claim that the two forms of (...) dogmatism he distinguishes between are incompatible. Second, I suggest, contrary to Gava, that Kant’s critique of these two forms of dogmatism both operate on the metaphilosophical level in the sense that they both target the dogmatist’s beliefs or theory about the method they take themselves to be following. (shrink)

The problem of Kant's first Critique is the problem of pure reason: how are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Many of his readers have believed that the problem depends upon a delimitation within the class of a priori truths of a class of irreducibly synthetic truths—a delimitation whose possibility is doubtful—because absent this it is not excluded that all a priori truths are analytic. I argue, on the contrary, that the problem depends on nothing more than the human knower's everyday (...) consciousness of her own finitude: her dependence in thinking and knowing on what is given to her. The problem is a difficulty about how the concepts which figure in metaphysical judgments could represent reality given that they cannot do so in the way in which concepts figuring in empirical judgments do. Empirical judgment here functions as exemplary of thought and knowledge because it is exemplary of finite thought and knowledge. Mere analysis could not, therefore, dissolve the problem even in principle, because to say that a concept can be analyzed is not yet to explain the possibility of its real representative power. The significance of the analytic-synthetic distinction in the context of the problem of pure reason is that its formulation allows Kant to say this. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a novel interpretation of Kant’s proof of the existence of the outer world in the Refutation of Idealism. According to this interpretation, Kant’s proof does not provide a regressive explanation of our capacity to determine the temporal order of our experiences. Rather, it expresses a counterfactual reflection on what it takes for something to be actual in contrast to being merely imagined. On the ground of this reflection, Kant argues against the Cartesian sceptic that, even (...) if all our representations of empirical objects other than ourselves failed to be veridical, we would still know a priori that in every situation in which we, as thinking things, actually exist, something outside us in space must necessarily exist. (shrink)

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)

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)

This paper aims to elucidate the Kantian notion of the “concept of an object in general”. In a passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers a clue to this by indicating that the categories are the concepts that define the object in general. This paper seeks to clarify the notion of “concept of an object in general” by analyzing how the relationship between categories and the object is to be understood. For this, it first explains the Kantian doctrine (...) of conceptual inclusion and of the highest genus, and relates it to the notion at hand. Secondly, it investigates the way in which the relationship between the concept of an object in general and the categories is to be understood, based on the aforementioned passage of the First Critique. Finally, it shows the role that referentiality plays in the way that this concept and its relation with the categories should be understood. (shrink)

I examine how Kant argues for the transcendental ideality of space. I defend a reading on which Kant accepts the ideality of space because it explains our (actual) knowledge that mathematical judgments are necessarily true. I argue that this reading is preferable over the alternative suggestion that Kant can infer the ideality of space directly from the fact that we have an a priori intuition of space. Moreover, I argue that the reading I propose does not commit Kant to incoherent (...) modal views. If we carefully distinguish between different senses of modality, the fact that our spatial form of intuition is (in some sense) contingent does not undermine the claim that this form can explain how our mathematical judgments are (in some sense) necessary. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the problem raised by the non-Euclidean geometries for the Kantian claim that the axioms of Euclidean geometry are synthetic a priori, and hence necessarily true. Although the Kantian view of geometry faces a serious challenge from non-Euclidean geometries, there are some aspects of Kant’s view about geometry that can still be plausible. I argue that Euclidean geometry, as a science, cannot be synthetic a priori, but the empirical world can still be necessarily Euclidean.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 110 Heft: 2 Seiten: 308-317.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 110 Heft: 1 Seiten: 74-125.

The importance of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e. the categories) within Kant’s system of philosophy is undeniable. As I hope to make clear in this essay, however, the categories are also an essential part of Kant’s critique of Christian Wolff. In particular, I argue that Kant’s development of the categories represents a decisive break with the Wolffian conception of the understanding and that this break is central to understanding the task of the Transcendental Analytic. This break, however, is (...) not merely that Kant affirms while Wolff and his followers deny a sharp distinction between sensibility and the understanding, which is the aspect of Kant’s rejection of Wolff that scholars most frequently note. Rather, this break concerns differences in their views about the understanding itself. For while Wolff conceives of the understanding as a mental capacity to extract and make distinct content already present in the senses, Kant conceives of the understanding in its “real use” as a capacity to produce purely intellectual content. (shrink)

In this paper I reply to the critiques of my recent book *Kant's Radical Subjectivism* by Andrew Brook, Anil Gomes, Robert Howell and Alexandra Newton.

A distinção entre filosofia e matemática enquanto modos de operação da razão tem presença marcante nos cursos de Lógica de Kant, mas igualmente articula diversas soluções de problemas no interior do pensamento crítico. No entanto, ela data do período pré-crítico, tendo se tornado bem explícita já na obra Investigação sobre a distinção dos princípios da teologia natural e da moral (1764). Quase duas décadas depois, essa distinção será retomada na “Doutrina transcendental do método”, contida na Crítica da razão pura (1781). (...) Ao contrário de Christian Wolff, que propunha uma divisão tripartite do conhecimento, distinguindo conhecimentos históricos, filosóficos e matemáticos, Kant aloca os conhecimentos filosóficos e matemáticos no interior da mesma divisão epistemológica: ambos são conhecimentos racionais. No entanto, um é conhecimento racional por conceitos (filosofia) e outro é conhecimento racional por construção de conceitos (matemática). Por meio dessa distinção e das oposições que ela comporta, Kant vai definir o método de trabalho do filósofo e do matemático e o modo de resolução de problemas específico de cada uma dessas disciplinas. Comparando os dois textos citados acima, pretendemos esclarecer os procedimentos metodológicos concebidos mediante essa distinção, e as respectivas tarefas epistemológicas que ela comporta. (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.

Kant's Notion of "Transcendental Truth". [English] The aim of this work is to elucidate the notion of “transcendental truth” and to show its role in the Kantian system. I will argue that this notion is in line with the traditional definition of truth, i.e., that it consists in the correspondence between knowledge and object. I will also argue that criteria of transcendental truth are provided by transcendental logic, and that it is this notion of truth what makes it possible to (...) establish the truth of a priori knowledge and delimitate the field of empirical truth. [Español] El objetivo de este trabajo es dilucidar la noción de “verdad trascendental” y mostrar su lugar en el sistema kantiano. Se defenderá que la verdad trascendental consiste, en línea con la definición tradicional de verdad, en un sentido de correspondencia entre conocimiento y objeto, que la lógica trascendental establece criterios de verdad trascendental, y que es esta noción de verdad la que permite establecer la verdad del conocimiento a priori y delimitar el territorio de la verdad empírica. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on three sets of issues that bear directly on our understanding of Locke and Kant. The first is whether Kant believes Locke merely anticipates his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or also believes Locke anticipates his notion of synthetic a priori cognition. The second is what should we as readers of Kant and Locke should think about Kant’s view whatever it turns out to be, and the third is the nature of Kant’s justification (...) for the comparison he draws between his philosophy and Locke’s. I argue (1) that Kant believes Locke anticipates both the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori cognition, (2) that the best justification for Kant’s claim draws on Locke’s distinction between trifling and instructive knowledge, (3) that the arguments against this claim developed by Carson, Allison, and Newman fail to undermine it, and (4) that Kant’s own justification for his claim is quite different from what many commentators have thought it was (or should have been). (shrink)

Kant's philosophy promises to explain various synthetic a priori claims. Yet, as several of his commentators have noted, it is hard to see how these explanations could work unless they themselves rested on unexplained synthetic a priori claims. Since Kant appears to demand explanations for all synthetic a priori claims, it would seem that his project fails on its own terms. I argue, however, that Kant holds that explanations are required only for synthetic a priori claims about (purportedly) experience-independent entities, (...) and that his project rests on a rationalist method of reflection that justifies certain basic synthetic a priori claims. (shrink)

Le texte traduit ici est tiré d’un recueil réunissant plusieurs écrits du philosophe allemand Franz Brentano (1838-1917) et publié en 1925 par son disciple Alfred Kastil sous le titre Essai sur la connaissance. La pièce maîtresse du recueil est un manuscrit de Brentano intitulé « À bas les préjugés ! », portant le sous-titre : « Une exhortation pour inciter l’époque actuelle à renoncer, dans l’esprit de Bacon et de Descartes, à tous les a priori aveugles » (1903). Nous avons (...) traduit la première partie de ce texte, dans laquelle Brentano s’attaque simultanément au common sense du philosophe écossais Thomas Reid et aux jugements synthétiques a priori d’Immanuel Kant. Cet extrait constitue l’un des rares documents dans lesquels Brentano expose sans détours son opposition radicale à un certain kantisme et, plus largement, à toute forme de constructivisme. Brentano s'attaque à l'idée kantienne du synthétique a priori, en jetant les bases d'un programme gnoséologique dont l'axe central est l'exhibition des sources empiriques de nos concepts fondamentaux (substance, cause, être, nécessité, etc.). Ce programme sera développé à son tour par Carl Stumpf ('Erkenntnislehre', 1939). (shrink)

Abstract: My aim is to reconstruct Kant's argument for the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception. I reconstruct Kant's argument in stages, first showing why thinking should be conceived as an activity of synthesis (as opposed to attention), and then showing why the unity or coherence of a subject's representations should depend upon an a priori synthesis. The guiding thread of my account is Kant's conception of enlightenment: as I suggest, the philosophy of mind advanced in the Deduction belongs (...) to an enlightenment epistemology. Kant's conception of enlightenment turns on the requirement that a subject be able to recognize herself as the source of her cognitions. The argument for the apperception principle is reconstructed under the guidance of this conception of the ideal of enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I (...) argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality. (shrink)

Kant's original version of transcendental philosophy took both Euclidean geometry and the Newtonian laws of motion to be synthetic a priori constitutive principles—which, from Kant's point of view, function as necessary presuppositions for applying our fundamental concepts of space, time, matter, and motion to our sensible experience of the natural world. Although Kant had very good reasons to view the principles in question as having such a constitutively a priori role, we now know, in the wake of Einstein's work, that (...) they are not in fact a priori in the stronger sense of being fixed necessary conditions for all human experience in general, eternally valid once and for all. And it is for precisely this reason that Kant's original version of transcendental philosophy must now be either rejected entirely or radically reconceived. Most philosophy of science since Einstein has taken the former route: the dominant view in logical empiricism, for example, was that the Kantian synthetic a priori had to be rejected once and for all in the light of the general theory of relativity. (shrink)

According to Alberto Coffa in The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap, Kant’s account of mathematical judgment is built on a ‘semantic swamp’. Kant’s primitive semantics led him to appeal to pure intuition in an attempt to explain mathematical necessity. The appeal to pure intuition was, on Coffa’s line, a blunder from which philosophy was forced to spend the next 150 years trying to recover. This dismal assessment of Kant’s contributions to the evolution of accounts of mathematical necessity is fundamentally (...) backward-looking. Coffa’s account of how semantic theories of the a priori evolved out of Kant’s doctrine of pure intuition rightly emphasizes those developments, both scientific and philosophical, that collectively served to undermine the plausibility of Kant’s account. What is missing from Coffa’s story, apart from any recognition of Kant’s semantic innovations, is an attempt to appreciate Kant’s philosophical context and the distinctive perspective from which Kant viewed issues in the philosophy of mathematics. When Kant’s perspective and context are brought out, he can not only be seen to have made a genuinely progressive contribution to the development of accounts of mathematical necessity, but also to be relevant to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mathematics in underappreciated ways. (shrink)

In a crucial passage of the second-edition Transcendental Deduction, Kant claims that the concept of motion is central to our understanding of change and temporal order. I show that this seemingly idle claim is really integral to the Deduction, understood as a replacement for Locke’s “physiological” epistemology (cf. A86-7/B119). Béatrice Longuenesse has shown that Kant’s notion of distinctively inner receptivity derives from Locke. To explain the a priori application of concepts such as succession to this mode of sensibility, Kant construes (...) the mind as receptive to its own activity. As Longuenesse understands Kant’s response to Locke, “motion” becomes little more than a metaphor for the action of understanding on inner sense. For Michael Friedman, in contrast, this passage evidences Kant’s deep concern with the foundations of Newtonian science. He reads it as a reference to inertial motion, the standard by which temporal intervals are measured. I show that Longuenesse’s and Friedman’s interpretations are in fact complementary. Both Locke and Kant are deeply concerned with the quantification of time. So Longuenesse is right that §24 is meant to supplant Locke’s account, and Friedman correctly takes it as the foundation of Kant’s account of the application of quantitative concepts to time. Kant aims, specifically, to explain cognition of time as continuous magnitude. However, Longuenesse leaves Kant without an answer to Locke’s challenge that continuous magnitude cannot be understood on the basis of discrete magnitude. And on Friedman’s view Kant’s account of the understanding’s activity presupposes, and thus cannot explain, the achievements of the mathematical sciences (such as the representation of temporal continuity). On my reading, Kant’s key contention is that we must regard the segregation of temporally ordered representation into units as the work of the understanding, rather than (as Locke views it) of sensibility. By giving the understanding this role, Kant succeeds where he takes Locke to fail. I show how the power to unify temporal representation can be ascribed to the understanding on the basis, not of assumed mathematical or scientific knowledge, but of its characterization as the power of judgment. (shrink)

It is argued that geometrical intuition, as conceived in Kant, is still crucial to the epistemological foundations of mathematics. For this purpose, I have chosen to target one of the most sympathetic interpreters of Kant's philosophy of mathematics – Michael Friedman – because he has formulated the possible historical limitations of Kant's views most sharply. I claim that there are important insights in Kant's theory that have survived the developments of modern mathematics, and thus, that they are not so intrinsically (...) bound up with the logic and mathematics of Kant's time as Friedman will have it. These insights include the idea that mathematical knowledge relies on the manipulation of objects given in quasi-perceptual intuition, as Charles Parsons has argued, and that pure intuition is a source of knowledge of space itself that cannot be replaced by mere propositional knowledge. In particular, it is pointed out that it is the isomorphism between Kantian intuition and a spatial manifold that underlies both the epistemic intimacy of the most fundamental type of geometrical intuition as well as that of perceptual acquaintance. (shrink)

In twentieth-century Kant scholarship, few have provided an account of the analytic-synthetic distinction and of the problem of the synthetic a priori that takes into consideration the views of Kant's idealist successors such as Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I first explain how Kant formulates the analytic-synthetic distinction in terms of the determinate-indeterminate distinction, which, in turn, is based on the distinction between general and transcendental logic. Kant's problem of the synthetic a priori , then, is the problem of showing (...) how the logical forms of judgment can be employed determinately (and not merely indeterminately). I then show that Maimon also formulates the distinction and the problem in the same way, and that his interpretation will shape how Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel each construe and address Kant's question, How are synthetic judgments possible a priori ? (shrink)

It is occasionally claimed that the important work of philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries made Kant’s critical philosophy of geometry look somewhat unattractive. Indeed, from the wider perspective of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the rise of quantificational logic, Kant’s philosophy seems “quaint at best and silly at worst”.1 While there is no doubt that Kant’s transcendental project involves his own conceptions (...) of Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic, the issue at stake is whether the replacement of these conceptions collapses Kant’s philosophy into an unfortunate embarrassment.2 Thus, in evaluating the debate over the contemporary relevance of Kant’s philosophical project one is faced with the following two questions: (1) Are there any contradictions between the scientific developments of our era and Kant’s philosophy? (2) What is left from the Kantian legacy in light of our modern conceptions of logic, geometry and physics? Within this broad context, this paper aims to evaluate the Kantian project vis à vis the discovery and application of non-Euclidean geometries. Many important philosophers have evaluated Kant’s philosophy of geometry throughout the last century,3 but opinions with regard to the impact of non-Euclidean geometries on it diverge. In the beginning of the century there was a consensus that the Euclidean character of space should be considered as a consequence of the Kantian project, i.e., of the metaphysical view of space and of the synthetic a priori character of geometry. The impact of non-Euclidean geometries was then thought as undermining the Kantian project since it implied, according to positivists such.. (shrink)

As most of its readers are aware, the Critique of Pure Reason is primarily concerned not with empirical, but with a priori knowledge. For the most part, the Kant of the first Critique tends to assume that experience, and the knowledge that is based on it, is unproblematic. The problem with which he is concerned is that of how we can be capable of substantive knowledge independently of experience. At the same time, however, the notion of experience plays a crucial (...) role in the central arguments of the Critique. For, again as most readers of the Critique know, Kant aims to show how we can have synthetic a priori knowledge by showing that the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding, are conditions of the possibility of experience. This means that, whether or not Kant is concerned with the notion of experience for its own sake, his account of a priori knowledge carries with it at least some commitments regarding the character of experience. If the account of a priori knowledge is to be successful, then experience has to be the kind of thing for which the categories can, in principle, serve as conditions of possibility. More specifically, experience must involve not only the senses, but also thought or understanding, for otherwise the claim that it presupposes a certain specific set of concepts is simply unintelligible. And indeed at least some parts of the Critique, in particular the so-called subjective deduction in the first edition, and the briefer passages which correspond to it in the second edition, seem to be intended to show how this requirement is met. That is, they are concerned not so much with showing that experience is governed by the categories, as with elaborating a view of experience as involving conceptual activity überhaupt. (shrink)

This paper is an exposition and defense of Kant’s philosophy of geometry. The main thesis is that Euclidean geometry investigates the properties of geometrical objects in an inner space that is given to us a priori (pure space) and hence is a priori and synthetic. This thesis is supported by arguing that Euclidean geometry requires certain intuitive objects (Sect. 1), that these objects are a priori constructions in pure space (Sect. 2), and finally that the role of geometrical construction is (...) to provide geometrical objects, not concepts, as some have claimed (Sect. 3). (shrink)

In this article, I want to argue that scepticism for Kant must be seen in ancient and not just modern terms, and that if we take this into account we will need to take a different view of Kant's response to Hume from the one that is standardly presented in the literature. This standard view has been put forward recently by Paul Guyer, and it is therefore his view that I want to look at in some detail, and to try (...) to correct. (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)

One of the central and most distinctive theses of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics is that mathematical knowledge is synthetic. In this context, synthetic judgments are defined in opposition to analytic ones, whose predicate concept is “contained in” the subject. Kant’s thesis has often been attacked as indefensible, but just as frequently critics have complained that the thesis itself, and even the analytic/synthetic distinction on which it rests, are simply unintelligible. Thus, even prior to questions of its correctness, the Kantian doctrine (...) has been rejected as unclear, based on general skepticism that there is a real distinction of “containment”—or indeed any tolerably clear distinction at all—between analytic and synthetic judgments. (shrink)