James Van Cleve examines the main topics from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, such as transcendental idealism, necessity and analyticity, space and time, substance and cause, noumena and things-in-themselves, problems of the self, and rational theology. He also discusses the relationship between Kant's thought and that of modern anti-realists, such as Putnam and Dummett. Because Van Cleve focuses upon specific problems rather than upon entire passages or sections of the Critique, he makes Kant's work more accessible to the serious student (...) and scholar. (shrink)

David Lewis’s analysis of “can” in “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” (Lewis, American Philosophical Quarterly, 13, 145–52, 1976) has been widely accepted both as a definitive analysis of “can” and as a successful resolution of the Grandfather Paradox for time travel. I argue that the central feature of his analysis puts it on all fours with a fallacy frequently imputed to fatalists such as Richard Taylor. I go on to consider two moves that might be made to avoid the fallacy, (...) arguing that one of them leads to the unavailability of an all-things-considered “can” and the other to a new primitive modality, not analyzable in Lewis’s way. (shrink)

Descartes's view that the eternal truths of mathematics and logic have been established by God and depend on his will does not merely commit him (as some commentators have suggested) to denying that such truths are necessarily necessary; it abolishes their necessity altogether. For similar reasons, some contemporary views also unwittingly abolish necessity.

The issues I explore in this paper are best introduced by the table with which it begins. The left-hand entry in each row gives expression to a kind objectivity; the right-hand entry affirms the existence of a special kind of object. When philosophers believe in any of the entities on the right, it is typically because they think them necessary to ground the facts on the left. By the same token, when philosophers deny any of the facts on the left, (...) it is often because they cannot bring themselves to believe in the associated kind of object on the right. My project is to explore the extent to which it is possible to have the objectivity without the objects—for example, absolute motion without substantival space, objective predication without universals, objective synonymy without propositions, and objective modality without possible worlds. Each of these combinations would have been congenial to A.N. Prior. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth.

This chapter contains section titled: The Relativity of the Present The Relativity of Existence Conclusion.

My agenda in this book is set mainly by Kant himself. I take up most of the main topics in the Critique of Pure Reason, more or less in the order in which Kant considered them. This summary gives only conclusions, not arguments, for which I refer the reader to the book itself.

On the first point, the issue dividing us is this: when Kant seeks to unfold the necessary conditions of experience, what sense of ‘experience’ does he have in mind? I think it is sometimes a thin sense in which nothing more is posited than the bare consciousness of representations. Ameriks thinks it is a thicker sense in which experience involves judgment, perhaps even true judgment, and perhaps even knowledge.

This is a marvelous book. Langton offers a fresh interpretation of Kant, the main tenets of which she states in a few bold propositions and then goes on to elaborate with great clarity and care. She supports her interpretation with a wealth of citations accompanied by insightful commentary. The “Humility” of her title is the thesis that we can have no knowledge of the intrinsic properties of things, which is Langton’s gloss on the Kantian slogan that we can have no (...) knowledge of things as they are in themselves. The central argument she finds in Kant for this thesis proceeds from premises to which I believe many contemporary philosophers would give their assent. It is therefore an argument to which we should give careful consideration. (shrink)

This book is a systematic study of the uses of tropes in metaphysics. By a trope Bacon says he understands either a thing’s having a property or the property as localized to that thing. Bacon believes that entities belonging to the following ontological categories, among others, may all be constructed out of tropes: individuals, universals, states of affairs, and possible worlds. Evidently, if you have tropes, the other categories are all de trop. Bacon also uses trope theory to provide analyses (...) of time, causation, belief, and duty. (shrink)

My agenda in this book is set mainly by Kant himself. I take up most of the main topics in the Critique of Pure Reason, more or less in the order in which Kant considered them. This summary gives only conclusions, not arguments, for which I refer the reader to the book itself.

On the first point, the issue dividing us is this: when Kant seeks to unfold the necessary conditions of experience, what sense of ‘experience’ does he have in mind? I think it is sometimes a thin sense in which nothing more is posited than the bare consciousness of representations. Ameriks thinks it is a thicker sense in which experience involves judgment, perhaps even true judgment, and perhaps even knowledge.