Immanuel Kant is strict about the limits of self-knowledge: our inner sense gives us only appearances, never the reality, of ourselves. Kant may seem to begin his inquiries with an uncritical conception of cognitive limits, but in Kant and the Subject of Critique, Avery Goldman argues that, even for Kant, a reflective act must take place before any judgment occurs. Building on Kant’s metaphysics, which uses the soul, the world, and God as regulative principles, Goldman demonstrates how Kant can open (...) doors to reflection, analysis, language, sensibility, and understanding. By establishing a regulative self, Goldman offers a way to bring unity to the subject through Kant’s seemingly circular reasoning, allowing for critique and, ultimately, knowledge. (shrink)

This article builds on Arendt’s development of a Kantian politics from out of the conception of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Arendt looks to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful to explain how political thought can be conceived. And yet Arendt describes such Kantian reflection as an empirical undertaking that justifies itself only in relation to the abstract principle of the moral law. The problem for such an account is that the autonomy of the moral law appears to be (...) at odds with the social cohesion of Kantian political life. The ensuing contradiction can be deemed the antinomy of political judgment. Kant’s conception of reflective judgment offers such an inquiry considerably more to work with than Arendt uncovers. In particular, the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature that is shown to direct all reflection can be seen to offer the solution to this antinomy. (shrink)

The fourteen essays in this volume, by leading scholars in the field, explore the relationship between teleology and politics in Kant’s corpus. Among the topics discussed are Kant’s normative political theory and legal philosophy; his cosmopolitanism and views on international relations; his theory of history; his theory of natural teleology; and the broader relationship between morality, history, nature, and politics. _Politics and Teleology in Kant_ will be of interest to a wide audience, including Kant scholars; scholars and students working in (...) moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of history, and political theory and political science; legal scholars; and international relations theorists. (shrink)

In Hegel's Faith and Knowledge he argues that Kant's critical system is unable to defend the assumptions that underlie its analysis of our cognitive faculties; Kant has begun his investigations by presupposing the distinction between our finite faculties, those “in which possibility and actuality are distinguished” , and those of a being possessing an “intuitive understanding” , for whom cognition is not limited to the sensibly given. In so defining our cognitive faculties as finite Kant is able to distinguish our (...) dependence not merely on the understanding as the locus of concepts, but so too on sensibility as the source of intuition. Cognition is thus limited to those thoughts that offer beyond their conceptual consistency the possibility of empirical givenness, and so define their actuality in terms of sensibility. And yet, it would seem, as Hegel argues, that. (shrink)

While in Being and Time Heidegger criticizes Kant for presupposing the very objects that he then goes on to examine, in his 1935–1936 lecture course What Is a Thing? he argues that the differentiation of subject and object with which Kant begins enables him to point to the temporal nature of thought. In following Kant’s own description of his project, Heidegger deems the presupposition of the objects of experience not detrimental to the inquiry, but determinative of its circular method. In (...) this paper I investigate whether such circularity offers an entrance to Heidegger’s own hermeneutic circle. (shrink)

In this paper I make use of Heidegger’s late essay, “Kant’s Thesis About Being,” in order to examine the structure of Kantian critique, the elusive transcendental method. Heidegger investigates the underlying reflective act that restricts “the use of the understanding to experience,” what Kant describes in an Appendix to the “Transcendental Analytic” of the Critique of Pure Reason as “transcendental reflection.” What is clear from Kant’s brief description is that prior to the analysis of the conditions of the possibility of (...) experience, critical inquiry has designated the boundary of possible experience. While neither Kant nor Heidegger explicitly develops the account of the transcendental method that follows from this initial orienting act, doing so will offer a response to the charge, leveled at Kant since thepublication of the first Critique, that he was blind to the metaphysical presuppositions of transcendental idealism. (shrink)