Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber offers an interpretation of Kant’s “confession,” in the Prolegomena, that “it was the objection of David Hume that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber.” It argues that Hume roused Kant not, as has often been thought, by challenging the principle “every event has a cause” that governs experience, but by attacking the principle of sufficient reason, the basis of rationalist metaphysics and of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. (...) This proposal makes it possible to reconcile Kant’s declaration about Hume with his later assertion that it was the Antinomy of pure reason that first woke him from dogmatic slumber, because the Antinomy, like Hume’s challenge, is directed against the dogmatic use of the principle of sufficient reason. The proposal put forward here also makes it possible to understand why Kant speaks of “the objection of David Hume” after mentioning Hume’s attack on metaphysics; for the “objection” that Kant has in mind, it is argued here, is a challenge to metaphysics, rather than to the foundations of empirical knowledge. (shrink)

Including the first English edition of the Treatise of the Three Impostors since 1904, this book examines the treatise in its literary, political, and philosophical context.

Certainty and Practical Reason is concerned with Kant's practical response to epistemological skepticism and radical doubt. ;It begins from Kant's remark that the concept of freedom is the keystone of the arch of reason, theoretical as well as practical, and sustains reason against skepticism; and from Kant's account of the practical motives of transcendental realism, the source of skepticism, in the First and Second Critiques. The Critiques suggest both that Kant's response to skepticism is practical, and that skepticism is itself (...) both practically motivated and associated with practical error. ;In the first chapter, it is argued that the Transcendental Analytic of the First Critique is not a final refutation of skepticism and radical doubt, and that Kant does not see it as such. The theoretical arguments of the Transcendental Analytic need to be completed with an appeal to practical reason if we are to ground Kant's starting assumption, the fact of experience. ;The second chapter considers epistemological skepticism as involving a practical error answered by the practical cure of the categorical imperative. ;The third chapter begins by considering Cartesian doubt as a practically motivated attempt to pose the problem of practical rationality, and Kant's response to this problem. It then discusses Kant's view that the transcendental realist demand for knowledge of the noumenal, which gives rise to skeptical doubt, is a pursuit of the unconditioned whose hidden meaning is practical; and explains how Kant responds to the doubt by responding to and interpreting transcendental realism as a practical project. ;The fourth chapter discusses the Critique of Judgment as a response to "enthusiasm" or the transcendental realist claim to knowledge of the unconditioned, and thereby to skepticism as well. (shrink)

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber offers an interpretation of Kant’s “confession,” in the Prolegomena, that “it was the objection of David Hume that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber.” It argues that Hume roused Kant not, as has often been thought, by challenging the principle “every event has a cause” that governs experience, but by attacking the principle of sufficient reason, the basis of rationalist metaphysics and of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. (...) This proposal makes it possible to reconcile Kant’s declaration about Hume with his later assertion that it was the Antinomy of pure reason that first woke him from dogmatic slumber, because the Antinomy, like Hume’s challenge, is directed against the dogmatic use of the principle of sufficient reason. The proposal put forward here also makes it possible to understand why Kant speaks of “the objection of David Hume” after mentioning Hume’s attack on metaphysics; for the “objection” that Kant has in mind, it is argued here, is a challenge to metaphysics, rather than to the foundations of empirical knowledge. (shrink)

This essay is a review of Daniel Garber's "Descartes' Metaphysical Physics" (Chicago U P 1992) and Michael Friedman's "Kant and the Exact Sciences" (Harvard U P 1992). Garber's study of Descartes is scrupulous but his historicist assumptions result in a failure to grasp Descartes' originality or the unity and power of his thought. Friedman, by taking Kant's conception of science seriously, sheds great light on Kant's thought generally and implicitly raises important philosophical problems for the present day.

Hillel Steiner's objective in this remarkable book is to give an account of justice based on rights. He argues that rights must be conceived as property, and proposes that property be conceived in terms of freedom as the power of unimpeded action. The political philosophy involved is as he says a classical laissez-faire liberalism. However, on the basis of an argument against a natural right to bequeath property, Steiner proposes that such a liberalism requires radical redistribution of natural resources in (...) each generation, a redistribution which provides equal shares in such resources or their monetary equivalent for each individual when he attains majority. Steiner follows Henry George in holding that the earth is a "commons" and holds that our possession of it is subject to the condition that we leave "as much and as good," in Locke's phrase, for others. The genetic endowment of individuals, as well as the germ lines from which they emerge, are among the natural resources of the earth, and possession of a child endowed with good genes should obligate his parents to compensate others for their possession of him as of other natural resources by payment into a global common fund. Steiner proceeds to this striking conclusion by means of a steady march through successively more concrete domains of investigation: from a discussion of the metaphysics of liberty, through a discussion of the logic of rights, of moral reasoning, economic reasoning, and justice as the adjudication of competing claims. He deploys the technical apparatus of these fields with wit and rigor, as well as a deep knowledge of older authors. (shrink)