The aim of this paper is to cast new light on an important and often overlooked notion of perspectival knowledge arising from Kant. In addition to a traditional notion of perspectival knowledge as "knowledge from a vantage point", a second novel notion — "knowledge towards a vantage point" —is here introduced. The origin and rationale of perspectival knowledge 2 are traced back to Kant's so-called transcendental illusion. The legacy of the Kantian notion of perspectival knowledge 2 for contemporary discussions on (...) disagreement and the role of metaphysics in scientific knowledge is discussed. (shrink)

A collection of essays investigating key historical and scientific questions relating to the concept of natural purpose in Kant's philosophy of biology.

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (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)

This article explains Kant’s claim that sciences must take, at least as their ideal, the form of a ‘system’. I argue that Kant’s notion of systematicity can be understood against the background of de Jong & Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2010) and the writings of Georg Friedrich Meier and Johann Heinrich Lambert. According to my interpretation, Meier, Lambert, and Kant accepted an axiomatic idea of science, articulated by the Classical Model, which elucidates their conceptions of systematicity. I show that (...) Kant’s critique of the mathematical method is compatible with his adherence to this axiomatic conception of science. I further show that systematicity furthers traditionally accepted logical ideals of scientific knowledge, which explains why Meier and Kant think that sciences must be ‘systematic’. (shrink)

Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim formation: Kant's theory of reflective judgment. Kant tasks reflective judgment with picking out salient empirical particulars for formation into maxims, associating it with purposiveness, or intentional activity (action on ends). The unexpected resources in Kantian reflective judgment suggest the possibility of a (...) particularist universalism, where recalcitrant particulars directly inform, and in some cases revise, moral principles. Such an account improves on particularist accounts of moral salience and moral perception: rather than deriving moral sensitivity solely from an agent's upbringing or cultural resources, the reflective dimension is situated alongside the universalist dimension of moral principles typically identified with Kantian ethics, allowing for a critical approach both to moral universals and to the reception of moral particulars. (shrink)

This article aims to justify the positive role in the empirical investigation of nature that Kant attributes to the idea of God in the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, I propose to read the Transcendental Ideal section and the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic together to see whether they can reciprocally illuminate each other. I argue that it is only by looking at the transcendental deduction of the ideas of reason and the resulting analogical conception of God that a (...) fully legitimate positive use of the idea of God can be vindicated. (shrink)

This article analyses a sceptical challenge resulting from metaphysical approaches to the problem of the necessity of empirical laws of nature in Kant’s critical philosophy (what I shall call ‘essentialist’ readings). I argue that this challenge may jeopardize the purpose of empirical enquiry (and therefore the plausibility of essentialist readings), but that Kant has internal resources to address it in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. I show that reading this problem through the lens of the Dialectic allows (...) us to reconcile the metaphysical question of necessitation of laws with a robust sense of empirical cognition. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a novel reading of the critical legitimacy of the regulative use of reason in the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. After introducing some key terminology of the Dialectic, I analyse the shortcomings of two influential accounts of the regulative use of reason and identify their common problem in their commitment to the descriptivity of the ideas of reason. I then offer my rule‐based account of the regulative use of reason (...) by clarifying how Kant transforms reason's metaphysical inclinations into prescriptive rules of bottom‐up empirical research. Finally, I explain why such interpretation of reason is metaphysically innocent and thereby a promising approach to understand its role in Kant's scientific project. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgment, Kantattempts to unravel the problem of Übergang that threatens his CopernicanRevolution. Having opened up a ``chasm'' betweensensible and supersensible, betweenepistemological and ontological, Kant facesboth the specter of empirical chaos in whichthe noumenal refuses to conform to theunderstanding's attempts to legislate over themanifold of intuition, and the problem offinding a place for freedom to have effectswithin the seamless phenomenal realm ofefficient causality. Central to Kant's attemptto overcome these problems is his notion of theheautonomy of reflective judging, (...) in whichjudgment subjectively legislates its ownactivity. The net effect of this strategy isto preserve the integrity of the architectonicby permitting judgment use of ontologicalprinciples in regulating its own activity, butalways placing these ontological principlesunder an epistemological ``as if'' that cannot becarried over into the noumenal realm (e.g.,judgment can subjectively operate under theprinciple that the world appears ``as if'' it haspurpose, but this cannot be thought to apply tothe noumenal). Kant shields his architectonicby allowing it to encounter onlyepistemologically neutered noumena. This paperargues that Hick faces an analogousÜbergang problem, explores his``heautonomous'' attempt to blunt the problem,and concludes that the attempt fails, leavingHick with an unresolved problem of``onto-ethical discontinuity.''. (shrink)

The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's first Critique is notorious for two reasons. First, it appears to contradict itself in saying that the idea of the systematic unity of nature is and is not transcendental. Second, in the passages in which Kant appears to espouse the former alternative, he appears to be making a significant amendment to his account of the conditions of the possibility of experience in the Transcendental Analytic. I propose a solution to both of these (...) difficulties. With regard to the first, I argue that Kant does not contradict himself. With regard to the second, I argue that Kant is not making any change to his view of the conditions of the possibility of experience espoused in the Transcendental Analytic. The underlying cause of these apparent problems is also their solution: the transcendental illusion that nature is necessarily systematic. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the 'indeterminate objective validity' possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.

Throughout the critical period Kant enigmatically insists that reason is a ‘unity’, thereby suggesting that both our theoretical and practical endeavors are grounded in one and the same rational capacity. How Kant's unity thesis ought to be interpreted and whether it can be substantiated remain sources of controversy in the literature. According to the strong reading of this claim, reason is a ‘unity’ because all our reasoning, including our theoretical reasoning, functions practically. Although several prominent commentators endorse this view, it (...) is widely thought to lack exegetical support. This paper seeks to strengthen the case for this reading by showing how theoretical reason's positive function, as Kant presents it in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, may be construed as fundamentally practical. I argue that reason's supreme regulative principle ought to be understood as a categorical practical imperative. This interpretation, I suggest, resolves the apparent inconsistencies that blight Kant's account of the principle in the Appendix, while bringing greater overall coherence to his account of theoretical reason's regulative function. (shrink)

In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant asserts that laws of nature “carry with them an expression of necessity”. There is, however, widespread interpretive disagreement regarding the nature and source of the necessity of empirical laws of natural sciences in Kant's system. It is especially unclear how chemistry—a science without a clear, straightforward connection to the a priori principles of the understanding—could contain such genuine, empirical laws. Existing accounts of the necessity of causal laws unfortunately fail to illuminate the possibility (...) of non-physical laws. In this paper, I develop an alternative, ‘ideational’ account of natural laws, according to which ideas of reason necessitate the laws of some non-physical sciences. Chemical laws, for instance, are grounded on ideas of the elements, and the chemist aims to reduce her phenomena to these elements via experimentation. Although such ideas are beyond the possibility of experience, their postulation is necessary for the achievement of reason's theoretical ends: the unification and explanation of the cognitions of science. (shrink)

In this essay I analyse Kant’s view on the regulative role of reason, and in particular on what he describes as the ‘indispensably necessary’ role of ideas qua foci imaginarii in the Appendix. I review two influential readings of what has become known as the ‘transcendental illusion’ and I offer a novel reading that builds on some of the insights of these earlier readings. I argue that ideas of reason act as imaginary standpoints, which are indispensably necessary for scientific knowledge (...) by making inter-conversational agreement possible. Thus, I characterise scientific knowledge as a distinctive kind of perspectival knowledge. This novel reading can illuminate the role of reason in complementing the faculty of understanding and sheds light on the apparent dichotomy between the first and the second part of the Appendix. More to the point, this novel reading takes us right to the heart of what scientific knowledge is, according to Kant, and how it differs from bogus knowledge and opinion. (shrink)

This article criticizes the attempts by Bas van Fraassen and Michael Friedman to address the challenge to rationality posed by the Kuhnian analysis of scientific revolutions. In the paper, I argue that van Fraassen's solution, which invokes a Sartrean theory of emotions to account for radical change, does not amount to justifying rationally the advancement of science but, rather, despite his protestations to the contrary, is an explanation of how change is effected. Friedman's approach, which appeals to philosophical developments at (...) a meta-theoretical level, does not really address the problem of rationality as posed by Kuhn's work. Instead of showing how, despite revolutions, scientific development is, indeed, rational, he gives a transcendental account of rational scientific progress. (shrink)

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

The metaphysical “Law of Continuity of Alterations” says that whenever an object alters from one state to another, it passes through a continuum of intermediate states. Kant treated LCA as a transcendental law of understanding. The primary purpose of the paper is to reconstruct and evaluate Kant’s three arguments for LCA. All three are found to be inadequate. However, a secondary goal of the paper is to show that LCA would have more naturally been construed as a regulative principle of (...) reason. I conclude with some remarks about how this could work. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and defends Kant's argument for the transcendental status of reason's principles of the systematic unity of nature in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. On the present account, these principles are neither mere methodological recommendations for conducting scientific inquiry nor do they have the normative force of categorical imperatives, two extant interpretations of Kant's discussion of reason in the Appendix. Instead, they are regulative yet transcendental principles restricted to theoretical cognition. The principles of the systematic unity of (...) nature count as transcendental in virtue of their role as conditions of the inferential articulation of empirical concepts. (shrink)

According to a common interpretation, most explicitly defended by Onora O’Neill and Patricia Kitcher, Kant held that epistemic obligations normatively depend on moral obligations. That is, were a rational agent not bound by any moral obligation, then she would not be bound by any epistemic obligation either. By contrast, in this paper, I argue that, according to Kant, some epistemic obligations are normatively independent from moral obligations, and are indeed normatively absolute. This view, which I call epistemicism, has two parts. (...) First, it claims that in the absence of other kinds of obligations, rational agents would still be bound by these epistemic obligations, i.e., that the latter are normatively independent. Second, it claims that, no matter what other obligations are at stake, rational agents are bound by these epistemic obligations, i.e., the normativity of these epistemic obligations is absolute in that it cannot be undercut by any moral or other sort of obligation. The argument turns on an exploratory reading of Kant’s remarks in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” (1786) about the maxim of “thinking for oneself” as the “supreme touchstone of truth.” In contrast to O’Neill and Kitcher, I argue that if we interpret this maxim as stating the unifying principle of theoretical and practical reason, then we must interpret it as stating an epistemic, and not merely practical imperative. This result, I argue, vindicates epistemicism and illuminates interesting lessons about Kant’s conception of the category of “epistemic” norms. Further, it helps us make headway with Kant’s enigmatic remarks about the unity of practical and theoretical reason in the Groundwork, first and the second Critiques, and the Lectures on Logic. On my proposal, principles of the practical and theoretical uses of rea-son are unified through a formal epistemic principle. (shrink)

Is the refutation of scepticism a central objective for Kant? Some commentators have denied that the refutation of either theoretical or moral scepticism was central to Kant's concerns. Thus, in his recent book Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, Karl Ameriks rejects 'taking Kant to be basically a respondent to the skeptic'. According to Ameriks, who here has Kant's theoretical philosophy in mind,What Kant goes on to propose is that, instead of focusing on trying to establish with certainty – against (...) skepticism – that the objects of common sense exist, let alone that they have philosophical dominance, or, in contrast, on explaining that it is only the theoretical discoveries of science that determine what is objective, one can rather work primarily to determine a positive and balanced philosophical relation between the distinct frameworks of our manifest and scientific images. (shrink)

Kant famously claims that pure reason is subject to a transcendental illusion in which the subjective validity and the regulative use of a principle of reason are conflated with its objective validity and constitutive use. His doctrine of transcendental illusion is puzzling for he insists that this illusion is natural as well as necessary. The two dominant interpretation strategies cannot make sense of this puzzle because they turn out to be either too strong or too weak: they either struggle to (...) account for the legitimate, regulative use of the transcendental principle of reason or fall short of explaining the necessity of the transcendental illusion. In contrast, I shall argue that it is possible to account for the fact that the transcendental illusion is natural and necessary because it has its source in the discursive form of our human understanding, and that this illusion can nevertheless be known to be illusory because our discursive nature can be recognised as a merely particular form of understanding by comparing it with a possible, intuitive form of understanding in an act of critical self-reflection. (shrink)

Kant famously claims that pure reason is subject to a transcendental illusion in which the subjective validity and the regulative use of a principle of reason are conflated with its objective validity and constitutive use. His doctrine of transcendental illusion is puzzling for he insists that this illusion is natural as well as necessary. The two dominant interpretation strategies cannot make sense of this puzzle because they turn out to be either too strong or too weak: they either struggle to (...) account for the legitimate, regulative use of the transcendental principle of reason or fall short of explaining the necessity of the transcendental illusion. In contrast, I shall argue that it is possible to account for the fact that the transcendental illusion is natural and necessary because it has its source in the discursive form of our human understanding, and that this illusion can nevertheless be known to be illusory because our discursive nature can be recognised as a merely particular form of understanding by comparing it with a possible, intuitive form of understanding in an act of critical self-reflection. (shrink)

In this paper I extend the case for a necessitation account of particular laws in Kant's philosophy of science by examining the relation between reason's hypothetical use in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and the legitimate hypotheses identified in the Doctrine of Method. Building on normative accounts of reason's ideas, I argue that reason's hypothetical use does not describe the connections between objects and their grounds, which lie beyond the reach of the understanding, but merely prescribes the relations between (...) appearances and their conditions, for which the understanding must seek. A legitimate hypothesis, I suggest, is a proposition we hold to be true that fills in one or several of those relations. The problematic character of hypotheses requires that we evaluate our reasons for holding them to be true. While natural modality is grounded in the nature of things, which cannot be fully known, our reasons for assent can and must be grounded on features of objects that are epistemically available to us. (shrink)

El paradigma del Juicio constituye un modelo de racionalidad que pretende elevarse como alternativa positiva ante los retos coyunturales introducidos por el giro lingüístico de la filosofía en el pensamiento contemporáneo. Frente a la difícil tarea de defender principios universalistas en la cultura actual, este modelo aspira a pronunciarse positivamente sobre cuestiones tales como la de la validez normativa que pueda afectar las relaciones entre acción humana y deliberación. Para alcanzar su objetivo, el paradigma del Juicio patrocina una forma de (...) la normatividad sin principios (validez ejemplar), enraizada en el juicio reflexionante kantiano y en el sensus communis (sentido común) de la tradición retórico-humanista. El objetivo de este artículo es la presentación de dicho modelo de racionalidad dentro de la filosofía kantiana y, por medio de la exploración de sus antecedentes histórico-filosóficos (Gadamer), y gracias a un rodeo por la tradición retórico-humanista (Aristóteles y Vico), se busca soslayar el énfasis estético que la fundamentación de Kant acentuó. Finalmente, se pondera el alcance y pertinencia que posee dicho paradigma en la reapropiación de dos de sus intérpretes en la filosofía contemporánea: Alessandro Ferrara y Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

An influential strand in philosophy of science claims that scientific paradigms can be understood as relativized a priori frameworks. Here, Kant’s constitutive a priori principles are no longer held to establish conditions of possibility for knowledge which are unchanging and universally true, but are restricted only to a given scientific domain. Yet it is unclear how exactly a relativized a priori can be construed as both stable and dynamical, establishing foundations for current scientific claims while simultaneously making intelligible the transition (...) to a subsequent framework. In this article, I show that important resources for this problem have been overlooked in Kant’s theory of reflective judgement in the third Critique. I argue that Kant accorded the task of formulating new scientific laws to reflective judgement, which is charged with forming new ‘universals’ that guide the experience of nature. I show that this is the very task attributed to the relativized a priori: the constitution of a given conceptual framework, not of the conditions for object-reference as such. I conclude that Kant’s considered conception of science encompasses the operations of both reflective and determining judgement. Relativizations of the a priori should follow Kant’s lead. (shrink)

This article begins by arguing that the ‘madness’ of Antonin Artaud is either fetishised or resisted, depending on the disciplinary angle from which one works. It proposes an alternative approach to the study of Artaud, which might avoid such pitfalls by reading Artaud’s work as performative philosophy or a philosophy of performance. The approach is defined by the principle of ‘working with’, rather than working on, a literary or philosophical figure. The second part of the article works, or philosophises, with (...) Artaud, reading his work on the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ alongside Immanuel Kant’s work on judgment from the third Critique. It explores the Kantian distinction between determining and reflective judgment, extending reflective judgment into what I call anarchic reflection. To do so, the article elucidates the conceptual relation between actuality, entropy, an-archy, cruelty and sublimity, defining anarchic reflection as an unintentional and/or intentional crisis of the judgment or krisis of Form that opens the possibility of its transformation. (shrink)

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse 1998). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ (...) [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection. (shrink)

Famously, Kant is a transcendental idealist. Yet he also endorses empirical realism, and even boasts that only the transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. The difficulty of making sense of those commitments together leads many interpreters to begin by attributing to Kant some variant of conventional, subjective idealism. That in turn requires that Kant's empirical realism be at best a merely ersatz or quasi-realism. But that drains Kant's boast of its significance. For any idealist can be a realist if (...) the 'realism' in question is defined in terms of a prior commitment to idealism. Thus I argue, on the contrary, that we must begin the interpretation of Kant's Critical philosophy by taking his empirical realism to be a genuine, common-sense realism about empirical things. That approach yields a consistent, satisfying, and novel reading of the Critical enterprise, including transcendental idealism, as explaining how empirical realism is possible. Along the way I show, among other things, (1) how to make systematic sense of Kant's controversial theory of meaning, which is standardly either downplayed or regarded as grossly inconsistent with his other core commitments; (2) how to dispense with the centuries-old Neglected Alternative objection; and (3) how to account for the syntheticity of the moral law and its role in conferring experience-immanent meaning on the practical postulates (e.g., of the existence of God). (shrink)

This paper discusses Immanuel Kant’s views on the role of experiments in natural science, focusing on their relationship with hypotheses, laws of nature, and the heuristic principles of scientific enquiry. Kant’s views are contrasted with the philosophy of experiment that was first sketched by Francis Bacon and later developed by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Kant holds that experiments are always designed and carried out in the light of hypotheses. Hypotheses are derived from experience on the basis of a set (...) of heuristic principles. The function of experiments is testing hypotheses in order to either reject them as false, or else to transform them into empirical laws of nature. To this end, we must integrate the hypotheses that are confirmed by experiments with the a priori principles which are the foundations of natural science. Compared with Bacon, Boyle, and Hooke, Kant has elaborate views on the one hand, on how our theoretical and pre-theoretical assumptions bear on experimental practice, and on the other hand, on how the results of experimental activity can be integrated with theories to advance our knowledge of nature. However, Kant overstates the dependence of experiments on theories. (shrink)