The relation between transcendental idealism and philosophical naturalism awaits more careful determination, i. e. whether the issue of their compatibility hinges on their ontological view on the relation between physical and mental phenomena (i. e. whether it is supervenience or emergence) or on their epistemological view on our access to mental content. The aim of this paper is to identify a tension between transcendental idealism and philosophical naturalism, which lies not in their ontological view on the nature of substances, but (...) in their epistemological view on the relation between self-awareness and the first-personal access to mental content. I will first trace the (mis)understanding of transcendental idealism as Berkeleyan idealism to a misinterpretation of the self-knowledge premise in transcendental arguments. I will argue that transcendental idealism is not so much concerned with grounding reality of the external world as with establishing the agential nature of the first-personal perspective of experience, and it has an important implication on the meaning and function of self-awareness in transcendental idealism. (shrink)

: In this essay I argue that Kuhn's account of science, as it was articulated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was mainly defended on philosophical rather than historical grounds. I thus lend support to Kuhn's later claim that his model can be derived from first principles. I propose a transcendental reading of his work and I suggest that Kuhn uses historical examples as anti-essentialist Wittgensteinian "reminders" that expose a variegated landscape in the development of science.

This article argues that many (often Anglophone) interpreters of the Deduction have mistakenly identified Kant's aim as vindicating ordinary knowledge of objects and as refuting Hume's (alleged) skepticism about such knowledge. Instead, the article contends that Kant's aims were primarily negative. His primary mission (in the Deduction) was not to justify application of the categories to experience, but to show that any use beyond the domain of experience could not be justified. To do this, he needed to show that their (...) proper use in attaining metaphysical knowledge was restricted to (actual and possible) experience. The central theoretical claims of previous metaphysics were thus rendered void. Kant was not out to save ordinary knowledge from the skeptic, at least not originally, since he did not think such knowledge was in danger. Rather, he wanted to sustain the skeptical claim that we cannot justify metaphysical claims about things in themselves, hence that we cannot gain metaphysical knowledge about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, the beginning of time, and the least parts of matter. He wanted to achieve this result in a more theoretically satisfying manner than had skeptical authors. Doing so would also allow him to curb certain forms of skeptical empiricism, by showing that we cannot disprove, or rule out as unintelligible, human freedom, an afterlife, or divine providence. The article ends by considering the retrospective rereadings of the Deduction by Hermann Cohen and P. F. Strawson, concluding that these rereadings force Kant's text into an alien mold, thereby diminishing its philosophical value as a work with its own distinctive aims and methods. (shrink)

This paper discusses the main criticism launched against legal monism and the Pure Theory of Law, as envisaged by Hans Kelsen and the other proponents of the Vienna School of Jurisprudence, namely the criticism voiced by two of the most eminent legal theorists, HLA Hart and Joseph Raz. According to them, legal monism fails to offer a satisfactory theory of the identity of legal systems and it therefore simply cannot be considered a viable theory of legal systems, because it leads (...) to obviously absurd consequences. These arguments which take the form of an attack on the most basic tenets of the Pure Theory of Law and thus legal monism, will be duly addressed and consequently rebutted in this paper, particularly in order to be able to maintain legal monism in its juridico-epistemological manifestation as a working and viable theory of the law. (shrink)

What method should we use to determine the nature of perceptual experience? My focus here is the Kantian thought that transcendental arguments can be used to determine the nature of perceptual experience. I set out a dilemma for the use of transcendental arguments in the philosophy of perception, one which turns on a comparison ofthe transcendental method with the first-personal method of early analytic philosophy, and with the empirical methods of much contemporary philosophy of mind. The transcendental method can avoid (...) this dilemma only if it commits to our possessing a capacity for imaginative reflection, one which is capable of identifying certain formal properties of experience.This result indicates some of the commitments which must be made if transcendental arguments are to be used in the philosophy of perception, and it has implications for those views that take the philosophy of perception to be autonomous of the empirical science of perception. (shrink)

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger’s 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger’s reading of Kant, one must resolve two (...) questions. First, how does Heidegger’s Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger’s reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam’s model of a self-directed transcendental argument, and the second by examining the relationship between Kant’s doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume’s attack on metaphysics. I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger’s own thought. Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger’s commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality. (shrink)

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument (...) thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce the transcendental argument for Christian theism in the context of Reformed theologian and philosopher Cornelius Van Til’s thought. I then present the critique proffered by Barry Stroud against ambitious transcendental arguments, and survey various formulations of transcendental arguments in the literature, seeking how the objection bears upon them. I argue that Adrian Bardon’s (2005) interpretation is the most helpful in understanding the Stroudian objection. From this interpretation, two types of possible rebuttals are deduced. Proceeding to (...) survey the responses offered by Van Tillians to this objection in the recent literature, I discern two general strategies pursued in these responses, which map onto the previously deduced types of rebuttals: the Biblical justification strategy and the objection-undermining strategy. I argue that all the specific attempts to answer Stroud which I examine here (those of Butler, Bosserman, and Fluhrer) are inadequate and that these two strategies, in general, face serious problems. I conclude with considering the options before the proponent of the transcendental argument for Christian theism and with offering a new objection to the argument, which focuses on its inconsistency with the implications of Christian theism itself. (shrink)

Recent developments of transcendental arguments reflect the struggle to accommodate Stroud’s devastating objection by giving up on failed expectations in providing proof of what the external-world skeptic calls into question: knowledge of the existence of the outside world. Since Strawson's capitulation in 1984, the truth-direct transcendental arguments have given way to modest belief-direct transcendental arguments that concede that truth-direct transcendental arguments are doomed to fail to establish ambitious conclusions about reality but at the same time hold that they can nonetheless (...) successfully establish modest conceptual connection between the major beliefs within our conceptual scheme. This article seeks the “reactionary” rehabilitation of the old hubris: a new defense of the truth-direct transcendental argument. I set forth a new reconstruction of Kant’s Refutation as a successful truth-directed transcendental argument that meets Stroud’s objection. As with several papers and books about the theme, this article is of a systematic and a historical nature by connecting the contemporary debate about transcendental argument with Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

The epistemological problem of the external world asks: (1) “How is knowledge of the external world possible given certain obstacles which make it look impossible?” This is a “how-possible?” question: it asks how something is possible given certain obstacles which make it look impossible (cf. Cassam 2007; Nozick 1981; Stroud 1984). Now consider the following question, which asks: (2) “How is a philosophically satisfying answer to (1) possible?” Skepticism is the thesis that knowledge of the external world is impossible. It (...) therefore represents a negative answer to the first question. Meta-epistemological skepticism is the thesis that a satisfying philosophical explanation of how our knowledge of the external world is possible is itself impossible. It therefore represents a negative answer to the second question. In this thesis, I explore the prospects of meta-epistemological skepticism. In particular, I structure the thesis around two master arguments from for meta-epistemological skepticism. The first argument is that skepticism represents a kind of paradox which requires dispensing with a plausible principle or belief, or even 'platitude', which means that there's no philosophically satisfying response to the paradox (see, e.g., Stroud 1984), and the second argument is “Stroud’s dilemma” (cf. Cassam 2009), that either we explain how external world knowledge is possible by reference to what external world knowledge we have, thereby failing to answer the philosophical question adequately, or else we don't, but then we succumb to first-order skepticism. I argue that the first argument fails to provide adequate support for meta-epistemological skepticism. However, the second argument, Stroud’s dilemma, is plausible and withstands serious objections (e.g., from Sosa 1994, Williams 1996, and Cassam 2009). In short, while the worry emerging out of the 'skeptical paradox' view fails to adequately support meta-epistemological skepticism, Stroud’s dilemma succeeds. Fortunately, it doesn't show that we lack external world knowledge; we rather just can't explain, philosophically, how it's possible. We may have first-order knowledge without understanding how it's possible. This thesis therefore represents a partial defense of meta-epistemological skepticism. Meta-epistemological skepticism is a live option in epistemology. (shrink)

How we read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has a huge influence on how convincing we find the parts of which it is composed. This thesis will argue that by taking its arguments and concepts in isolation we neglect the unifying architectonic method that Kant employed. Understanding this text as a response to a single problem, that of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgement, will allow us to evaluate it more fully. We will explore Kant's attempts to relate the (...) a priori and the synthetic in the Introduction, Metaphysical Deduction and Analytic of Principles of the Critique of Pure Reason. Having developed this reading at length we will be able to reassess Kant's relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's critique of Kant and his tendency to make selective use of his work has so far characterised their relations. However, by reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of its unifying method we will open up a new means of relating these two thinkers. Whilst Deleuze rejects many key Kantian concerns and concepts he embraces his methodological concern with the ability of problems to unify our thought. The problem-setting and forms of argument that emerge within Kant's architectonic method will be related to Deleuze's account of experience. This thesis will contribute to both Kant and Deleuze studies on the basis of the reading of the Critique of Pure Reason it will present. By showing how Kant's text is to be read as a whole we will be able to challenge the conclusion that the arguments he makes ultimately rely upon a notion of 'subjective origin'. The problem of accounting for 'the actual' through its relation to 'the virtual' in Deleuze's thought will be re-assessed on the basis of his newly established relation with Kant. Understanding Kant's method in the Critique of Pure Reason will be shown to strengthen both his own account of experience and that offered by Deleuze. (shrink)