This essay examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Logic and its interpretation of Kant's “science of transcendental analysis” as a theory of the cognitive faculties and their “inherent forms” or “several functional powers”. I explain why Coleridge characterises transcendental analysis as an “investigation into the constitution and constituent forms” of the faculties, and consider the reasons behind his schematic division of such inquiry into “transcendental [ … ] Æsthetic, Logic, and Noetic”. I argue that Coleridge's claims about the forms, operations, and contents (...) that derive from different cognitive powers, and the philosophical method that enables us to prove such derivation, are based on Kant's theory of “transcendental reflection”. I also explain how Coleridge's facultative conception of transcendental analysis relates to recent scholarship on Kant's accounts of (i) our cognitive capacities and (ii) the purposes of transcendental reflection. My essay does not aim to defend Coleridge's interpretation of Kant, but rather to provide a clearer picture of how this interpretation informs Coleridge's analysis of cognitive activity and mental content in Logic, including his “transcendental noetic”, which seeks to explain the possibility of the kind intellectual intuition that Kant explicitly denies. (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 article accounts for how Kant’s understanding of enlightenment gives normative, communicative structure to public reason as a practice. Kantian public reason is argued to be collegial. As public reasoners promoting our enlightenment, we should seek optimal scrutiny from a generally unrestricted, intellectually and epistemically diverse audience. To receive this scrutiny, we should communicate in a way that facilitates this audience’s ability to scrutinise our views – situating others as our colleagues – which in turn facilitates their promotion of their (...) own enlightenment. As a practice in which we help others promote their enlightenment by helping them help us promote ours, Kantian public reason is argued to be cooperative. But intriguingly, Kant offers a sufficient justification for this cooperative communication on first-personal grounds. The article details some of Kant’s more concrete thoughts on how we should communicate as public reasoners, and concludes by appraising his parsimonious justification of collegial communication as a resource for addressing contemporary concerns about public discourse. (shrink)

It is well known that at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity. It is also sometimes maintained that Kant’s appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgement. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant’s epistemology. A different conception of the (...) role of spontaneity in judgement has clear precedents, I claim, in the works of Cudworth and Rousseau. There the imagined role for the active power of the mind is not to identify criteria that might serve as norms for epistemically responsible judgement. Rather the spontaneous power of the mind is cited as the source of representational contents that secure the truth conditions of our everyday claims to empirical knowledge. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that Kant can be read as holding that "ought" judgments follow from certain "is" judgments by mere analysis. More specifically, I defend an interpretation according to which (1) Kant holds that “S ought to F” is analytically equivalent to “If, as it can and would were there no other influences on the will, S’s faculty of reason determined S’s willing, S would F” and (2) Kant’s notions of reason, the will, and freedom are all fundamentally (...) non-normative. Not only does this reading have significant textual support, but, I claim, it also sheds light on why Kant takes freedom and morality to mutually imply one another. Moreover, while Kant does take there to be a gap between moral judgments and empirical descriptive statements, that gap is consistent with the analysis in question. I conclude by arguing that this rejection of the is-ought gap is not as philosophically implausible as it might seem, with a focus on G.E. Moore and Hume’s arguments for certain ‘gaps’ between the normative and the non-normative. (shrink)

O foco deste artigo é identificar e expor o conceito de racionalidade que opera na filosofia kantiana, considerando, sobretudo, a “Doutrina transcendental do método” da Crítica da razão pura. De modo mais específico, a investigação toma como ponto de partida o texto da “Arquitetônica da razão pura” e destaca o conceito de sistema ali exposto, levando em conta sua paridade com o organismo, que lhe serve de metáfora. A partir daí, tem-se a ocasião para qualificar o método da razão como (...) profundamente dinâmico e caracterizar, desde semelhante qualificação, a própria postura filosófica como atividade de pensamento que se exerce crítica e sistematicamente sobre a multiplicidade de conhecimentos. (shrink)