Abstract: This paper proposes a way to understand Kant's modalities of judgment—problematic, assertoric, and apodeictic—in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference. Other interpretations have tended to understand these modalities of judgment in terms of one or other conventional notion of modality. For example, Mattey (1986) argues that we should take them to be connected to notions of epistemic or doxastic modality. I shall argue that this is wrong, and that these kinds of interpretation of the modality (...) of judgments cannot be reconciled with a key claim made by Kant, namely, that the modality of a judgment does not contribute to its content, and has nothing to do with the matter that is judged. I offer an alternative interpretation based upon Kant's explicating these modalities in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference, whereby the modality of a judgment is determined by the role a judgment plays in a given course of reasoning. If I am right, then Kant in fact presents an intriguing thesis pertaining to the inferential status and potential of all our judgments. (shrink)

1.1 ContextIn the period following the demise of logicism, formalism, and intuitionism, contributors to the philosophy of mathematics have been divided. On the one hand, there are those who tend to focus on such issues as: Do mathematical entities exist? If so, what type of entities are they and how do we know about them? If not, how can we account for the role that mathematics plays in our everyday and scientific lives? Contributors to this school—let us call it the (...) analytic school—do not, on the whole, concern themselves with careful analyses of important historical developments in mathematics. On the other hand, there are those who contribute to an historical school in the philosophy of mathematics. Contributors to this school tend to concern themselves almost exclusively with detailed historical analyses of important developments in mathematics. They are typically interested in answering questions concerning the growth of mathematical knowledge.In recent years, interest in the historical school has been growing, as has its influence on the analytic school. This book marks another stride in this direction. Oliveri aims to employ tools developed for use within the historical school to address one of the major issues investigated by the analytic school, i.e., whether we should be realists or anti-realists about mathematics. This is a laudable objective, since even a successful partial integration of these two schools would be valuable to contributors within both.1.2 Noteworthy ContributionsIn attempting a partial integration of these two schools, Oliveri makes several noteworthy contributions. The most significant is his development of a new type of argument for structural realism about mathematics. This argument exploits tools for theorizing about mathematics that were developed by Imre Lakatos [1978] in his work on scientific research programs . It focuses attention on the progressive mathematical research program that started with …. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper I reconstruct Kant’s proof of the existence of a ‘most real being’ while also highlighting the theory of modality that motivates Kant’s departure from Leibniz’s version of the proof. I go on to argue that it is precisely this departure that makes the being that falls out of the pre-critical proof look more like Spinoza’s extended natura naturans than an independent, personal creator-God. In the critical period, Kant seems to think that transcendental idealism (...) allows him to avoid this conclusion, but in the last section of the paper I argue that there is still one important version of the Spinozistic threat that remains. -/- . (shrink)