These comments are my contribution to the author-meets-critics session on Katharina Kraus' recently published Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, at the APA Pacific meeting. In my comments, I challenge Kraus' characterization of my fictionalism concerning the idea of the soul, and contend for the importance of transcendental illusion in that idea's function of guiding the empirical investigation of inner appearances.

Apresentação de Psicologia Racional e a Ideia Pseudo-racional de Alma, de Michelle Grier.

The notion of Self plays a significant role in the philosophical speculations of Buddha and Wittgenstein. For the Buddha, ‘Self’ has empirical validity without ultimate reality. However, the Real Self is transcendent. It is the Absolute which is immanent as well as transcendent. It cannot therefore be bound to thought-constructions. The Absolute is Nirvāṇa; it is peaceful, immortal and unproduced which is unspeakable and can only be realised through immediate spiritual experience. To deal with Nirvāṇa rigourously, Buddha upholds a negative (...) method of describing it as final. He prefers to subscribe to the philosophy of silence, for the bliss of Nirvāṇa is beyond empirical reality. Some striking affinities with such Buddhist notion of Self can be found in Wittgensteinian philosophy of Self. For Wittgenstein, the ‘Self’ comes into being through one’s own world. The Self or the metaphysical subject does not belong to the world; rather it is the limit of the world. The metaphysical Self is different from the empirical Self or ego with which psychology deals. The psychological self pertains to and explains the worldly state-of-affair. Besides, the philosophical Self or I is not the human being, the human body or the human soul with psychological properties, but the boundary (not a part) of the world. Self or I is not the name of a person. It therefore is inexplicable. Since it is unspeakable, we must be silent about it, for whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein finally submits that this is all that really matters in human life. A comparative study of the two great philosophers suggests that the Buddhist philosophy of Self apparently echoes in the Wittgensteinian philosophy of Self. (shrink)

In this paper I propose to consider a certain set of notions in Kant as subsumable under a single notion – that of the soul’s intensity – as well as the possibility of a transcendental grounding of this notion within Kant ’s critical framework. First, I discuss what it means for Kant to attribute intensive magnitude to the soul, starting with his response to Mendelssohn where Kant introduces the soul’s intensity as a metaphysical notion immanent to the principles of rational (...) psychology. I show, however, that in Kant ’s counter-argument there occurs a subtle though crucial shift in perspective – from the soul’s substance to its powers. Then I move on to consider three fundamental variants upon the soul’s intensity – intensities of representation, of life, and of cognition – each governed, I argue, by the implied notions of measure of intensity and its balance. Also, I examine Kant ’s accounts of the life of a species and the necessity of sickness; of intensity of “enlightenment” in a society and the benefit of ignorance; and of sermon as a practical exertion of cognition’s intensity. Next, the aforementioned shift of emphasis allows me to demonstrate that the notion of the soul’s intensity can indeed be transcendentally justified by appealing to Kant ’s principle of the Anticipations of Perception. Finally, I conclude with an appendix on the possible connection of the soul’s intensity to Kant ’s aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper examines whether Kant’s Critical philosophy offers resources for a conception of empirical psychology as a theoretical science in its own right, rather than as a part of applied moral philosophy or of pragmatic anthropology. In contrast to current interpretations, this paper argues that Kant’s conception of inner experience provides relevant resources for the theoretical foundation of scientific psychology, in particular with respect to its subject matter and its methodological presuppositions. Central to this interpretation is the regulative (...) idea of the soul, which supplies principles of systematicity at different levels. Firstly, the idea defines the way in which we must reflect on mental beings, i.e., those beings that fall in the domain of psychology. Secondly, it provides a principle for the unification of a systematic body of psychological laws. In consequence, by approaching the object of psychology from the perspective of the self-conscious subject, who––in virtue of being capable of inner experience––first constitutes a psychological reality, Kant’s theory offers an attractive alternative to reductionist conceptions of psychology. (shrink)

This work makes the revisionist claim that "the theory of mind in the Critique [of Pure Reason] is much more traditional and rationalistic than it at first appears, but that it is also more defensible than is generally recognized". Specifically, Ameriks aims to show that "Kant can be seen as wanting, above all else, to put... into a respectable form" the "core of the rationalist commitment" "to the idea that we have a special kind of identity that can withstand all (...) the kinds of change that ordinarily spell the end of ordinary objects". But, first, Ameriks's account of the "core of the rationalist commitment" is maddeningly vague and unstable--indeed, Ameriks's conception of rationalism is so ill-defined that at one point skepticism about the external world is treated as a part of rationalism rather than as the very much undesired consequence of certain Cartesian premises which Kant thought it to be!--and the discussion is damagingly ahistorical. Ameriks does emphasize the developmental dimension within Kant's own work, ranging over the whole of Kant's published corpus and mining the various lecture courses on metaphysics which have now been gathered together as volume 28 of the Berlin edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. But his picture of rationalism itself and its characteristic arguments is undifferentiated and undocumented, and this leads to the misconception that Kant thought that some theoretical defense of rationalist theses could still be maintained while what are merely some possible arguments in their behalf were criticized; but some review of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Meier would surely have shown that Kant was criticizing all of the chief arguments for the rationalist conception of the soul known to him, and attention to Kant's own claim for the completeness of his presentation of these natural and inevitable illusions of human reason could have suggested only that Kant himself thought that these were all the theoretical arguments for a rationalist philosophy of mind there could be. Second, it is questionable whether Ameriks's view really revises our standard reading of Kant's conclusions at all. The gist of Ameriks's argument is that in spite of Kant's specific criticism of the paralogistic arguments of pure psychology, Kant retained a favorable attitude toward the theoretical and not just practical postulation of such properties as immateriality and transcendental freedom at the noumenal level--but this turns out to mean little more than that Kant accepted his own transcendental idealism. This is hardly revolutionary, and the interest of the point is far from strengthened by Ameriks's own conclusion that transcendental idealism cannot be fully proved. (shrink)

Thorough comparison of Immanuel Kant’s and Christian Wolff’s divergent appraisals of the science of psychology reveals various ways in which Kant fundamentally altered the Wolffian philosophical apparatus that he inherited. Wolff conceived of a thoroughgoing interplay between empirical and rational psychology, of combining different sorts of cognition in psychology, and of a mathematical science of the soul, or psychometrics. Kant however rejected each of these particular theses and deemed psychology to be no natural science, “properly so-called.” (...) This chapter details these departures from Wolff, explains their basis, and concretizes an underlying contrast in Kant’s and Wolff’s respective philosophical approaches. Namely, whereas Wolff’s philosophical system is malleable, allowing for the combination of various kinds of cognition and methods, in Kant’s Critical philosophy, everything has its proper, preordained niche. At bottom, it is the unyielding rigor of Kant’s system that results in his pessimistic evaluation of the prospects for psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant's Dialectic by Ian ProopsStephen HowardIan Proops. The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant's Dialectic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 512. Hardback, $105.00.Ian Proops's book is a substantial contribution to the thriving field of Anglophone scholarship on the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Across five hundred pages, Proops examines the whole of the Dialectic. (...) The book is divided into three parts, following the disciplines of previous special metaphysics with which Kant critically engages in the Dialectic: rational psychology, cosmology, and theology. Discussions of transcendental illusion and the regulative use of ideas of reason are slotted into the rational psychology and theology parts, respectively.Methodologically, Proops aims to take a middle course between historical and reconstructive approaches (31–32). In historical and reconstructive modes alike, though, Proops is primarily concerned with accurately presenting and rigorously evaluating Kant's arguments in the Dialectic. These arguments come in two forms: either those of the imagined rational psychologist, cosmologist, or theologian, whom Kant ventriloquizes in order to reveal their errors; or those arguments that Kant makes in his own voice. The Fiery Test of Critique distinguishes itself from existing studies through the detail and care with which these arguments are scrutinized. Specialists will find numerous illuminating exegeses and links to a wide range of Kant's published and unpublished writings. Proops does not hesitate to identify where, in his view, Kant's arguments fail (or where those of Kant's ventriloquized metaphysicians fail in a way Kant does not intend), but he endeavors to interpret charitably and to make his own evaluative criteria explicit.The wide-ranging introduction to the book offers intriguing reflections on a metaphor Kant uses for his critique of pure reason: a "fiery test" (8; A 406/B 433). This test, Proops suggests, is best understood not as a religious ordeal by fire but as a "metallurgical assay": the testing of a coin or an ore to determine its precious metal content (9–10). This means that the test of critique "is not pass-fail" (12). Kantian critique identifies some precious metal to be retained alongside the dross (the base-metal bearer) to be discarded. The "gold" [End Page 525] and "silver" found by Kant's fiery test are, Proops contends, respectively the indirect proof of transcendental idealism that emerges from the Antinomy chapter, and the doctrinal beliefs in God and an afterlife that remain after the Paralogism and Ideal (13, 453–54).This application of Kant's metaphor indicates how far Proops diverges from the dismissive views of older Anglo-American studies of the Dialectic (the paradigm being Bennett's Kant's Dialectic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974]). Proops's opening questions and goals show that he aims to clarify the precise character of the dogmatic metaphysical claims criticized by Kant, and to identify what of this previous tradition Kant considers worth saving and why (2–7). This focus on the positive contribution of the Dialectic to Kant's philosophy—an approach Proops shares with other recent commentators—is very welcome.For all his illuminating discussion of Kant's Feuerprobe imagery, Proops neglects to note that Kant does not simply identify worthwhile aspects of previous special metaphysics. Rather, the philosophical findings that Proops takes to be the precious results of the critical test are significantly developed in Kant's hands. That is, no pre-Kantian rational cosmologist claims that their debates provide an indirect proof of transcendental idealism (of course). Neither do pre-Kantian rational psychologists or theologians make Kant's move of conceiving of God and the immortal soul as matters of doctrinal belief, where the latter is an epistemic attitude distinct from knowledge and cognition. In the cases that Proops highlights, then, the relevant image seems to be not only a metallurgical test but also an alchemical transformation of previous metaphysical doctrines into positive "critical" results.The parts of the book on the Paralogisms and the Ideal, on which Proops has previously published, will no doubt stimulate further detailed debate among specialists. I leave these debates aside to consider the part of the... (shrink)

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View essentially reflects the last lectures Kant gave for his annual course in anthropology, which he taught from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. The lectures were published in 1798, with the largest first printing of any of Kant's works. Intended for a broad audience, they reveal not only Kant's unique contribution to the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, but also his desire to offer students a practical view of the world and of humanity's (...) place in it. With its focus on what the human being 'as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself,' the Anthropology also offers readers an application of some central elements of Kant's philosophy. This volume offers a new annotated translation of the text by Robert B. Louden, together with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn that explores the context and themes of the lectures. (shrink)

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so (...) is to overlook the distinctive rational psychology developed by Christian Wolff, which emphasized the empirical foundation of any rational cognition of the soul, and which was widely influential among eighteenth-century German philosophers, including Kant. In this book, Dyck reveals how the received conception of the aim and results of Kant's Paralogisms must be revised in light of a proper understanding of the rational psychology that is the most proximate target of Kant's attack. In particular, he contends that Kant's criticism hinges upon exposing the illusory basis of the rational psychologist's claims inasmuch as he falls prey to the appearance of the soul as being given in inner experience. Moreover, Dyck demonstrates that significant light can be shed on Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence by considering the Paralogisms in this historical context.Readership: Scholars and advanced students in history of philosophy, especially those working on Kant. (shrink)

The article highlights the conceptual issues related to Kant’s analysis of the soul, a concept of utmost importance for the metaphysics and psychology of German academic philosophy (Schulphilosophie) of the Enlightenment was significantly dependent on the developed and systematically presented philosophical and scientific ideas and concepts of Christian Wolff. Kantian philosophy, its themes, and conceptual language were formed in the crucible of Wolfean discourse, and from the early 1770s in the struggle against it, which led to the emergence of (...) a new, critical philosophy – transcendental idealism, in which the problem of the soul, consciousness, and self-awareness became fundamental. It is this issue that was thoroughly covered in the «Critique of Pure Reason» and other works that were published later, after the first Critique. The article draws attention to Kant’s Lectures, which, on the one hand, demonstrate his critical attitude towards the so-called Wolfians, their metaphysics, and psychology, and, on the other hand, the lecture materials illustrate Kant's new conceptual position, and, what is important, develop, supplement and clarify it. The sources of Kant’s lectures are highlighted, taking into account the fact that we have at our disposal lecture notes, the authors of which are either unknown or, if known, their authorship is still somewhat doubtful, since they are notes that different people have rewritten. The article analyses lecture notes on psychology, the authors of which are more or less well-known, and experts recognize these notes as quite valid. The conceptual content of these lectures allows us to look at Kant’s understanding of the problem of the soul in a somewhat broader context compared to the «Critique of Pure Reason», where this problem is analyzed in connection with the paralogisms of reason and the transcendental deduction of categories. In his lectures on psychology, Kant draws attention to the problem of the interaction of the soul with the human body, the «location of the soul», linking it not so much to the organs of the human body (for example, the head) as to the location of a person as a bodily being in the world makes all acts of consciousness, self-awareness, and sense perception possible. Kant emphasizes the basic importance of such a spatial location of a person for the soul, as something that belongs to a person with a certain integrity, and not a separate organ, to act properly, to perform its cognitive functions. The article analyses the problem of existence, which is important for critical philosophy, its various modalities, and predication, with a special emphasis on the problem of the existence of metaphysical objects - the soul, God, and the world as a whole. (shrink)

Making sense of Kant’s claim that it is morally necessary for us to believe in the immortal soul is a historically fraught issue. Commentators typically reject it, or take one of two paths: they either restrict belief in the immortal soul to our subjective psychology, draining it of any substantive rational grounding; or make it out to be a rational necessity that morally interested beings must accept on pain of contradiction. Against these interpreters, I argue that on Kant’s view, (...) belief in our immortality is necessary because it further determines and enriches the cognitive content contained in the concept of the highest good. Through this sharpened conceptual content, we acquire the resources to withstand theoretical skepticism about our moral vocation. (shrink)

In his pre-critical lectures on rational psychology, Kant employs an argument from the I to the transcendental freedom of the soul. In the (A-edition of the) first Critique, he distances himself from rational psychology, and instead offers four paralogisms of this doctrine, insisting that ‘I think’ no longer licenses any inferences about a soul. Kant also comes alive to the possibility that we could be thinking mechanisms – rational beings, but not agents. These developments rob him of his (...) pre-critical rationalist argument for freedom. In the Groundwork, this is a serious problem; if we are not free, morality will be a phantasm for us. In Groundwork III, Kant attempts to overcome this by offering a new argument for our freedom, involving the standpoint of practical reason. In this paper, I detail these developments and present a practical and phenomenological reading of Kant’s approach in Groundwork III. I also venture a defence of this new argument. (shrink)

Kraus’s book is a rich and systematic examination of Kant’s account of the different dimensions of the metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology of the ‘self’ that pertains to human subjectivity. Here I explore some of the different meanings that Kraus associates with the term ‘self’ on Kant’s behalf, asking for further clarification as to her interpretation of the terms ‘subject’ (‘the I’), ‘soul’ and ‘person’, in particular. I also raise some critical questions concerning Kraus’s account of the nature and limitations of (...) the ‘real’ use of the concept of the soul in particular, in light of passages throughout the Critical period in which Kant seems to allow for a relatively unproblematic application of the term to whatever being it is that possesses the various psychical faculties – a being which he also seems to allow is an object of experience (and hence cognition). (shrink)

Kant saw in an old argument a threat to his criticism of traditional rational psychology. He called this argument the Achilles of all dialectical inferences. What the Achilles purports to prove is that the unity of consciousness requires the simplicity of the soul. The argument proceeds from, a distinction between two types ofactions that are ascribable to a subject. For example, when we say that a school of fish moves, this movement can be explained by referring to the movements (...) of the fish constituting that whole. Thus, “moving” is an action type that can be attributed to an aggregate. The second premise says that the action of the thinking I cannot be regarded as the concurrence of several things acting. Thus, any thinking self has to be a simple subject because the action of the thinking self cannot be an aggregate of several actions of different subjects constituting that self. In this paper, Kant’s criticism of the Achilles argument is investigated. (shrink)

Given Hume's seemingly ambivalent—and often cryptic—claims about the limits of human knowledge, it is no surprise that a skeptical and a naturalistic reading compete as the proper interpretation of the Treatise. Although Hume was traditionally viewed as a skeptic, more recently the "naturalized" view of the Treatise has been in the ascendancy. On this view, while Hume deploys various skeptical arguments, they are mainly in the service of revealing the essentially naturalistic structure of human cognition. In other words, Hume is (...) taken to be engaged in a type of philosophical psychology, and the results of this project are taken to accord with generally naturalized claims about the mind. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that Kant’s moral psychology draws from the dualist tradition of Plato and Aristotle, which takes there to be distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. My aim is to challenge the air of obviousness that psychological dualism enjoys in neo-Kantian moral psychology, specifically in regard to Tamar Schapiro’s account of the nature of inclination. I argue that Kant’s own account of inclination instead provides evidence of his commitment to psychological monism, the idea that (...) the mentality of an adult human being is rational through and through. I first consider Schapiro’s “intuitions” in favour of dualism: inclination must have a non-rational source, she contends, because they assail us unbidden and are not immediately responsive to volition, and because we are not responsible simply for having inclinations (only for acting on them). I explain how a monistic account of the nature of inclination can accommodate the first two points, and explain why the third neither is a point a Kantian can accept, nor is its denial the affront to common sense that Schapiro supposes. Then I turn to Schapiro’s aim to conceive of reflection as non-rational and thus independent of justificatory thought, and yet such as to induce rational reflection. I argue that it remains mysterious how inclination, on her account, could be resourced to play this role; and with that criticism in mind, I conclude by making a positive case for Kant’s conceiving of inclination in monistic terms, as an expression of rational mindedness. (shrink)

This article explains and criticizes several of Hume's arguments regarding British economic policy. I focus on Hume's methodology, which is essentially utilitarian but also depends heavily on his philosophical account of human psychology. I claim that the arguments examined prevail over competing 18th century approaches to economic policy. And I explain the relevance of this methodology for present day public policy debates.

In this essay, I draw on Haidt’s and Baron’s respective insights in the service of a bit of philosophical psychoanalysis. I will argue that deontological judgments tend to be driven by emotional responses, and that deontological philosophy, rather than being grounded in moral reasoning, is to a large extent3 an exercise in moral rationalization. This is in contrast to consequentialism, which, I will argue, arises from rather different psychological processes, ones that are more “cognitive,” and more likely to involve genuine (...) moral reasoning. These claims are strictly empirical, and I will defend them on the basis of the available evidence. Needless to say, my argument will be speculative and will not be conclusive. Beyond this, I will argue that if these empirical claims are true, they may have normative implications, casting doubt on deontology as a school of normative moral thought. (shrink)

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)

Psychology and Philosophy provides a history of the relations between philosophy and the science of psychology from late scholasticism to contemporary discussions. The book covers the development from 16th-century interpretations of Aristotle’s De Anima, through Kantianism and the 19th-century revival of Aristotelianism, up to 20th-century phenomenological and analytic studies of consciousness and the mind. In this volume historically divergent conceptions of psychology as a science receive special emphasis. The volume illuminates the particular nature of studies of the (...) psyche in the contexts of Aristotelian and Cartesian as well as 19th- and 20th-century science and philosophy. The relations between metaphysics, transcendental philosophy, and natural science are studied in the works of Kant, Brentano, Bergson, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and Davidson. Accounts of less known philosophers, such as Trendelenburg and Maine de Biran, throw new light on the history of the field. Discussions concerning the connections between moral philosophy and philosophical psychology broaden the volume’s perspective and show new directions for development. All contributions are based on novel research in their respective fields. The collection provides materials for researchers and graduate students in the fields of philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, and psychology. (shrink)

Kant was one of the inventors of anthropology, and his lectures on anthropology were the most popular and among the most frequently given of his lecture courses. This volume contains the first translation of selections from student transcriptions of the lectures between 1772 and 1789, prior to the published version, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), which Kant edited himself at the end of his teaching career. The two most extensive texts, Anthropology Friedländer (1772) and Anthropology Mrongovius (1786), (...) are presented here in their entirety, along with selections from all the other lecture transcriptions published in the Academy edition, together with sizeable portions of the Menschenkunde (1781-1782), first published in 1831. These lectures show that Kant had a coherent and well-developed empirical theory of human nature bearing on many other aspects of his philosophy, including cognition, moral psychology, politics and philosophy of history. (shrink)

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View essentially reflects the last lectures Kant gave for his annual course in anthropology, which he taught from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. The lectures were published in 1798, with the largest first printing of any of Kant's works. Intended for a broad audience, they reveal not only Kant's unique contribution to the newly emerging discipline of anthropology, but also his desire to offer students a practical view of the world and of humanity's (...) place in it. With its focus on what the human being 'as a free-acting being makes of himself or can and should make of himself,' the Anthropology also offers readers an application of some central elements of Kant's philosophy. This volume offers a new annotated translation of the text by Robert B. Louden, together with an introduction by Manfred Kuehn that explores the context and themes of the lectures. (shrink)

Addresses Kant's crucial belief that we must clearly distinguish and fully honor the separate demands of science and morality in our souls.

The aim of this paper is to explore the consequences of accepting the immortality of the soul with regard to moral behavior. Philosophers from different periods and fields offer a variety of arguments which prove the immortal nature of the soul based on ethical theories, such as happiness is the end of mankind, man’s incapability of fulfilling his final purpose, the posthumous award of divine justice and so on. Through a critical appraisal of different but representative philosophical approaches to immortality (...) presented by Plato, Kant and Petros Brailas-Armenis, this paper aims to show that there is a strong interaction between ethics and psychology; the idea of eternal life has a deep moral meaning as an incentive for being virtuous. Therefore, both knowledge about and belief in the immortality of the soul can serve as a springboard for an ethical life. (shrink)

Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so (...) is to overlook the distinctive rational psychology developed by Christian Wolff, which emphasized the empirical foundation of any rational cognition of the soul, and which was widely influential among eighteenth-century German philosophers, including Kant. In this book, Dyck reveals how the received conception of the aim and results of Kant's Paralogisms must be revised in light of a proper understanding of the rational psychology that is the most proximate target of Kant's attack. In particular, he contends that Kant's criticism hinges upon exposing the illusory basis of the rational psychologist's claims inasmuch as he falls prey to the appearance of the soul as being given in inner experience. Moreover, Dyck demonstrates that significant light can be shed on Kant's discussion of the soul's substantiality, simplicity, personality, and existence by considering the Paralogisms in this historical context. (shrink)

The paper deals with the topic of empty terms as considered in chapter six of Devitt’s book Designation. Devitt’s proposal is that a statement about fiction is (usually) implicitly preceded by a fiction operator roughly paraphrasable by “it is pretended that” or “in fiction”. The causal chain that forms the network for a fictitious name are not d(esignational)-chains, for they are not grounded in an object. Nevertheless, although the fictitious name does not designate, we could say that it stands in (...) some other referential relationship to the world: it ‘F(ictionally)-designates’. It seem that we could then state truth conditions of a F-sentence using F-designation: the F-operator direct us to look not for the designatum of name but for its F-designatum. The name (for example, “Napoleon” in War and Peace), though nonempty, is just like a fictitious name. In proposing that nonempty names in fiction refer to real items, I argue against the view that “Napoleon” in the War and Peace designates the famous general, Napoleon, and F-designates parts of War and Peace. The referent of F-designation is Napoleon, famous general, too. At the end of the paper I claim that Devitt, if he wants to remain a modal fictionalist, has to renounce the view of one-world metaphysics. (shrink)

["The Concept of Eternal Peace" - An Eternal Illusion?].

These remarks focus on Kraus’s claim that for Kant the category of substance cannot apply to the soul but that instead we can and should apply a merely regulative idea of the soul. While granting Kraus’s contention that we require an idea of the soul in order to investigate inner experience, I argue that the category of substance nonetheless applies to the soul, but that the notion of the soul as entirely non-corporeal is a regulative idea. To explore this contention, (...) I closely examine two crucial passages Kraus uses to argue against parity between inner and outer sense. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, contrary to a widely influential account of Kant’s development in the “silent decade,” that key changes in his empirical and rational psychology throughout the 1770’s are traceable to changes in the scope he assigns to inner sense. Kant’s explicit inclusion of our access to the I or soul within the scope of inner sense in the early 1770’s (after its apparent exclusion in the Dissertation) yields a more robust empirical psychology. Given the Wolffian (...) character of Kant’s pre-Critical conception rational psychology, this in turn provides a firmer foundation for the rational cognition of the soul, as exemplified in Kant’s treatment in the ML1 notes. Even so, I contend that Kant’s eventual rejection of the pretenses of rational psychology to offer cognition of the soul likewise has its basis in his later exclusion of any access to the I from the scope of inner sense, which also reveals a previously unnoticed continuity between his pre-Critical and Critical conceptions of rational psychology. (shrink)

The majority of Kant scholars has taken it for granted that for Kant the soul is in some sense present in space and that this assumption is by and large unproblematic. If we read Kant’s texts in the context of debates on this topic within 18th century rationalism and beyond, a more complex picture emerges, leading to the somewhat surprising conclusion that Kant in 1770 can best be characterised as a Cartesian about the mind. The paper first develops a framework (...) for describing the various positions on the place of the soul in space as varieties of ‘localism’, since German philosophers of the 18th century all agreed on the fact that the soul is in some sense present in space. Strong localists (Crusius, Knutzen) maintain that the soul occupies a place that cannot at the same time be occupied by a material substance. The Königsberg Wolffian Christian Gabriel Fischer is an ‘epistemic localist’ defending the view that our knowledge about the presence of the soul in space is limited. Bilfinger holds that the soul only represents itself as being present in space, he is a ‘representational localist’. The Cartesians, including Leonhard Euler and his teacher Samuel Werenfels, assume that the soul is effective in a region of space without truly being present there. They are ‘virtual localists’. Kant’s attitude towards this problem before the 1760s is a bit unclear. But his writings in this period are at least compatible with the strong localism defended by Knutzen. In the Herder transcripts (1762-1764) and other texts after 1760, Kant begins to distance himself from this view, but he does not articulate clearly his own position. This trend culminates in Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), where Kant oscillates somewhat uneasily between epistemic and virtual localism and criticises explicitly the Cartesian thesis that the soul’s presence in the body is limited to a determinate region. The dissertation from 1770 marks another radical change in Kant’s views on the place of the soul. Here, he subscribes to virtual localism and its concomitant thesis that the soul itself is, properly speaking, nowhere. Together with the thesis that the soul knows that it belongs to the mundus intelligibilis this makes Kant in 1770 a Cartesian about the mind. (shrink)

In the part of the first Critique known as “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason” Kant seeks to explain how even the most acute metaphysicians could have arrived, through speculation, at the ruefully dogmatic conclusion that the self (understood as the subject of thoughts or "thinking I") is a substance. His diagnosis has two components: first, the positing of the phenomenon of “Transcendental Illusion”—an illusion, modelled on but distinct from, optical illusion--that predisposes human beings to accept as sound--and as known to (...) sound--certain in fact flawed arguments for substantive theses about the nature of the self; second, the identification of the fallacy we commit when we succumb to this illusion. It is explained how these two elements combine to produce a central instance of (what Kant sees as) dogmatic speculative metaphysics, namely, the doctrine that the self is a substance in the sense of a necessarily non-inhering subject of inherence. It is argued that Kant has a novel, ingenious, and even somewhat plausible account of the route by which the rational psychologist arrives--or might arrive--at this view, an account that involves identifying a rather deep-rooted confusion about the very nature of conceivability. (shrink)

: According to Kant, the arguments of rational psychology are formal fallacies that he calls transcendental paralogisms. It remains heavily debated whether there actually is any formal error in the inferences Kant presents: according to Grier and Allison, they are deductively invalid syllogisms, whereas Bennett, Ameriks, and Van Cleve deny that they are formal fallacies. I advance an interpretation that reconciles these extremes: transcendental paralogisms are sound in general logic but constitute formal fallacies in transcendental logic. By formalising the (...) paralogistic inference, I will pinpoint the error as an illegitimate existential presupposition. Since - unlike transcendental logic - general logic abstracts from all objects, this error can only be detected in transcendental logic. (shrink)

Illusion is a significant concept in philosophy, art history, literary theory and aesthetics. It has a concrete scientific basis in the perspective of modern cognitive neuroscience. Historically, it has been critically discussed by many philosophers, including Plato, Bacon, Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, who considered it to be a distortion of reality. Yet illusion is connected with so many basic aesthetic issues -- such as ambiguity, imagination, and imagery -- that it remains an indispensable concept in modern aesthetics. In the different (...) art media communication of creators with appreciators involves illusory imagery. Its importance is emphasized by Ernst Gombrich in his Art and Illusion, one of the most influential art history texts in the English-speaking world. The concept of illusion becomes the crossing point of classical philosophy and contemporary aesthetics. In this article, the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic bases of illusion will be introduced. In different fields, illusion has different content, but depends on the same psychological mechanisms. The neural mechanisms that underpin aesthetic illusion in contemporary artistic production also function in the modern ideology described by Adorno, Eagleton, and Williams. Not all aesthetic illusions have positive functions, which sometimes leads to distorted cognition and emotional complexity. When it deviates too far from reality, aesthetic illusion contains particular cognitive emotional qualities that conflict with artistic imagery in classical arts. As a bearer of modern aesthetic emotion, it is also shaped by special economic and political situations and always has a kind of ideological character. Thus aesthetic illusion often promotes new configurations of aesthetics and art history. (shrink)

Kant’s claim that we must postulate the immortality of the soul is polarizing. While much attention has been paid to two standard arguments in its defense (one moral-psychological, the other rational), I contend that a favorite argument of Kant’s from the apogee of his critical period, namely, the teleological argument, deserves renewed attention. This paper reconstructs it and exhibits what makes it unique (though not necessarily superior) in relation to the other arguments. In particular, its form (as third-personal or descriptive, (...) beginning from observations) and related force of assent (as a subjectively universal reflective judgment) set it apart from the other arguments. My goal is to establish that any engagement with Kant’s immortality postulate must include equal consideration of the teleological argument in order to be complete. (shrink)

In On a Discovery, Kant depicts monads as simple beings that are thought in the idea as the ground of appearances. He argues that his account of monads is partially in line with both Leibniz's monadology and his own critical philosophy. However, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant appears to depart from the monadologies of his predecessors. In this article, I make sense of Kant's late subscription to a version of Leibniz's monadology by arguing that Kant considers monads to (...) be the objects represented through cosmological and psychological ideas posited by reason in its search for the unconditioned conditions of appearances. In particular, I point to what I take to be two instances of what Kant calls “objects in the idea” in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely (a) the substratum of matter qua ground of external appearances, and (b) the soul qua ground of internal appearances. Drawing on Kant's reply to Eberhard and the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, I highlight the merely regulative—and yet fundamental—role that monads conceived as objects of reason play in Kant's critical philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (2006) 577-597 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Kant and Herder on Baumgarten's AestheticaAngelica NuzzoWhile philosophers since antiquity have offered reflections and theories on subjects such as the beautiful, the sublime, art, and its appreciation, "aesthetics" as a discipline in its own right dates back only to the second half of the eighteenth-century. We owe to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) the introduction of 'aesthetics' (...) into philosophical discourse. At the moment of its inception, however, this discipline had little to do with art and was not primarily concerned with the beautiful. It was instead a theory of the cognitive value of human sensibility—a doctrine of "sensible cognition." A general historical and systematic question presents itself at this point: How shall human sensibility be conceived in order for aesthetics as a theory of sensibility to gain an independence of its own in philosophical discourse? And accordingly: How shall the human being be conceived in order for our aesthetic experience to claim a philosophical value of its own?In this essay, I elaborate the results of the hypothesis that I submit in response to these questions. 1 My claim is that the mind/body dualism dominating the rationalist tradition of modern philosophy is the principal obstacle preventing aesthetics from becoming an independent science of human sensibility. 2 In the rationalist tradition within which Baumgarten's work is placed, truth concerns the higher cognitive faculty. Besides logic, the investigation of this faculty occupies the discipline of psychology traditionally divided into rational and empirical psychology. While rational psychology abstracts from sensibility in dealing with a disembodied metaphysical soul and its properties, empirical psychology is still viewed as a branch of metaphysics bound to the reduction of all faculties to the theoretical one. Such a view prevents the important results of empirical research from connecting to fields such as history, anthropology, and moral philosophy in a way that can positively defy the charge of materialism and the attacks of skepticism. [End Page 577] In other words, since empirical psychology is still metaphysica specialis, its results do not qualify it to the status of an independent empirical science.Kant and Herder are the crucial protagonists of the transformation of aesthetics after Baumgarten. In their intellectual itinerary, both philosophers dedicate important reflections and critical considerations to the new idea of "aesthetics" first introduced by Baumgarten. They both take up his heritage and work in the direction of overcoming its rationalistic presuppositions. For both philosophers, the confrontation with Baumgarten's theory of "sensible cognition" prompts a new understanding of the role that "sensibility" plays in constituting philosophical discourse and, in connection with this issue, a new understanding of what can be properly called a "philosophical" aesthetics. The critical reflection on Baumgarten's doctrine leads both Kant and Herder to a new view of the relation between logic, epistemology, psychology, and anthropology. It is precisely the different set of relations that Kant and Herder respectively establish among these disciplines that determines the different role that they attribute to aesthetics in their philosophy.In what follows, I offer a confrontation between Kant's and Herder's views of aesthetics that is mediated by their respective critiques of Baumgarten. The aim of this confrontation is not historical but systematic. The issue at stake is the positioning of aesthetics between epistemology, on the one hand, and psychology and anthropology, on the other. I am interested in the way in which Kant and Herder propose different models for integrating "sensibility" into the philosophical discourse by establishing ontological and epistemological conditions which radically break with the rationalist paradigm of mind/body dualism. I want to suggest that Kant's and Herder's starting point and first objective is the same, although the realization of the program differs significantly. Their general aim is to attribute to human sensibility a new central place in philosophy, thereby steering the philosophical focus from the metaphysics of a "disembodied soul" to the inquiry into an "embodied mind." With Kant and Herder, rational psychology yields... (shrink)

Plato links pleasure with illusion, and this link explains his rejection of the view that all desires are rational desires for the good. The Protagoras and Gorgias show connections between pleasure and illusion; the Republic develops these into a psychological theory. One part of the soul is not only prone to illusions, but also incapable of the kind of reasoning that can dispel them. Pleasure appears good; therefore this part of the soul (the appetitive part) desires pleasures qua good but (...) ignores reasoning about what is really good. Hence the new moral psychology of the Republic: not all desires are rational, and thus virtue depends on bringing one's non-rational desires under the control of reason. (shrink)

The recurrent theme in Kant’s critique of the paralogisms of rational psychology is that we lack any intuition of the self or soul, and are therefore incapable of knowing anything about its metaphysical nature. This criticism, if sound, would show that something is wrong with the rational psychologist’s arguments, but not what it is. In what follows, I shall ignore Kant’s general critique and look for specific places where the rational psychologist goes astray—as well as for an alternative route (...) by which one of his conclusions might still be reached. (shrink)

In what follows, I will detail Kant's criticism of the Leibnizian conception of mind as it is presented in key chapters of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft . Approaching Kant with such a focus goes against the current predominant in contemporary Kant scholarship. Kant's engagement with Leibniz in the KrV is often taken as limited to the refutation of the latter's relational theory of space and time in the Aesthetic and the general criticism presented in the Amphiboly chapter, inasmuch as (...) Kant is taken to be primarily concerned with addressing empiricist opponents (a focus particularly evident in the English-language commentary). In addition, the argument against rational psychology in the Paralogisms is taken as challenging an essentially Cartesian position. The first two chapters of this project will introduce the Leibnizian conception of the mind, contrasting it with its Cartesian predecessor, and consider the career of the Leibnizian conception in the schools of 18th century Germany. As I will show, it was the Leibnizian conception of mind that held sway, despite scattered challenges, and that would have primarily been on Kant's mind when he turned to consider the extravagant claims of metaphysical psychology. In chapters 3-5, I turn to Kant's criticism of this conception as presented in the Transcendental Analytic of the KrV . There, I show how the subjective and objective deductions, in addition to the Amphiboly chapter, all address the Leibnizian claim of a parallelism between the investigations of the mental and the physical. In chapters 6-8, I consider the case against the Leibnizian conception of mind as presented in the Transcendental Dialectic, claiming that the doctrine of transcendental illusion plays an important (though largely ignored) role in explaining the grounds of the Leibnizian conception as it is transmitted in the rational psychology of Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, and Kant himself in the 1770's. Moreover, I argue that the limits Kant sets to empirical psychology are consistent with his criticism of the Leibnizian conception of mind, and, significantly, are motivated by deeper practical concerns. (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, Kant demolished the traditional idea of the soul in his Critique of Pure Reason. By denying the human mind any theoretical or intuitive knowledge of the soul as an immaterial substance and referring this idea to an illusory tendency of the mind, he efficiently tore down a longstanding metaphysical discipline called rational psychology. Katherina Kraus’s aim is to challenge this conventional reading. In her new book Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, she claims that Kant’s true (...) intention was to transform rather than demolish the idea of the immaterial soul. Her main argument, nourished by a close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, is that despite this transformation... (shrink)