In this innovative study Patricia Kitcher argues that we can only understand the deduction of the categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of his attempt to fathom the psychological prerequisites of thought. Thus a consideration of his conception of psychology is essential to an understanding of his philosophy. Kitcher specifically considers Kant's claims about the unity of the thinking self; the spatial forms of human perceptions; the relations among mental states necessary for them to (...) have content; the relations between perceptions and judgment; and the limits of philosophical insight into psychological processes. (shrink)

I argue that once one holds (as Kant does) that the mind is equipped with innate, pre-existing, i.e. a priori structures, one can ask (as materialists or empiricists would), Is there an identifiable source of such structures and what does it imply? Already Schopenhauer, Moses Mendelssohn and others have taken that route of argument, without fully drawing the implications. In this paper I attempt to do so, posing the query: Is Kant's very explicit separation of the transcendent from the (...) transcendental necessary in his critical system? I try to answer from various perspectives. (shrink)

Of all the well-known doctrines in Kant's first Critique, the transcendental psychology is perhaps the most notorious. Frege's and Husserl's famous fin de siècle critiques of "logical psychologism," together with Strawson's withering scorn in The Bounds of Sense, have combined to make Kant's explicitly psychological approach to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning seem old-fashioned at best and simply embarrassing at worst. Patricia Kitcher's Kant's Transcendental Psychology aims to change all (...) that; she offers a revisionist reading of the Critique of Pure Reason in which transcendental psychology is understood to be not only central to Kant's overall argument, but quite defensible on its own terms. (shrink)

One of the perennially intriguing questions regarding Kant’s approach to the human sciences is the relation between his ‘transcendental psychology’ and empirical cognitive psychology. In this paper I compare his analysis of the a priori conditions of human cognition in the Critique of pure reason with his empirical account of the human cognitive faculties in his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. In comparing his approach to self-consciousness, sensibility, imagination, and understanding in these two works, I (...) argue that Kant distinguishes between the transcendental and empirical aspects of the human cognitive faculties, and regards the transcendental functions as configuring the empirical faculties of human consciousness, or as giving them the structure that they require to become faculties of cognition. I then show that the cognitive faculties of human beings may vary in their empirical operation, even while they are configured by the same transcendental structure. Finally, I characterize Kant’s transcendental psychology in the first Critique as an account of the faculties that are required for a mind to be an agent or subject of cognition, corresponding to his account of the conditions that are required universally and necessarily for something to be an object of cognition.Keywords: Immanuel Kant; Anthropology; Psychology; Cognition; Transcendental; Empirical. (shrink)

The role and place of transcendental psychology in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has been a source of some contention. This work presents a detailed argument for restoring transcendental psychology to a central place in the interpretation of Kant's Analytic, in the process providing a detailed response to more "austere" analytic readings.

Perhaps the ultimate significance of Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy lies in its attempted reconciliation of the transcendental, logical orientation of continental rationalism with the humanistic, psychological approach of British empiricism. With the rationalists, Kant distinguished sharply between questions concerning the causes and origins of our knowledge and questions about its limits and objective validity. Thus, a rigorous critique of psychologism, i.e. of any attempt to explain, or explain away the validity of either our cognitive or moral principles (...) by means of an analysis of their basis in human nature or their genesis in human experience, is one of the most characteristic traits of the Kantian philosophy. Yet this transcendental, logical investigation of the nature and limits of knowledge, and of the fundamental principles of morality leads Kant back to the human subject, in whose cognitive faculties he finds the a priori principles of human knowledge and in whose autonomy he finds the basis of the categorical imperative. This gives rise to a paradoxical conception of man as on the one hand, together with the rest of creation, a part of nature, subject to its laws, and on the other hand, in his capacity as knower and actor, a rational being who not only transcends nature in the sense that he is not completely determined by its laws, but who is actually the author of these laws. (shrink)

This paper develops a new functionalist interpretation of Kant that aims to unify his cognitive psychology with transcendental idealism. It argues that Kant’s faculty of cognition describes neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal mind, but a theoretical construct of the transcendental subject, comparable to the abstract Turing machine. This interpretation can be called “transcendental functionalism,” which determines what functions the mind has to realize if it is to be capable of objective cognition. Transcendental functionalism resolves (...) problems associated with other functionalist interpretations of Kant by drawing a systematic distinction between transcendental cognitive functions and their empirical realizations. While transcendental functions stipulate abstract conceptual requirements, their empirical counterparts realize the functional constraints in appearances within the spatiotemporal and causal framework. This distinction also allows a better explanation of why Kant abandoned the subjective deduction of categories in the B-deduction. (shrink)

From the various discussions of Kant’s theoretical philosophy throughout Hegel’s works, it is not difficult to come away with the impression that Hegel thinks that the Kantian categories are derived from experience, and that the method of a “transcendental” investigation of the forms of subjectivity is nothing other than that of generalization upon observation. As early as the 1802-03 essay, Faith and Knowledge, for example, he characterizes the critical philosophy as the “completion and idealization” of Lockean “empirical psychology.” (...) In § 41 of the Encyclopedia he tells us that Kant’s systematization of the “special forms of the a priori element … of thought … is solely based upon psychological and historical grounds.” Moreover, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he refers to Kant as going “psychologically,” i.e., “historically,” to work in his accounts of intuition, understanding, and reason in a manner that is “entirely empirical, and not developed out of the concept.”. (shrink)

while kant's transcendental philosophy as expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena has been extraordinarily influential over the past two centuries, its transcendental methodology has continued to puzzle commentators. Recently, Colin Marshall, in an article entitled "Does Kant Demand Explanations for All Synthetic A Priori Claims?," has brought one of the central problems for any interpretation of Kant's methodology to the fore again.1 In his paper, Marshall discusses what he calls "the Regress Puzzle": (...) Several commentators have noted that there is a puzzle about how the positive part of Kant's project could work. The puzzle, which I will call the "Regress Puzzle," arises when we ask: If Kant... (shrink)

Perhaps the ultimate significance of Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy lies in its attempted reconciliation of the transcendental, logical orientation of continental rationalism with the humanistic, psychological approach of British empiricism. With the rationalists, Kant distinguished sharply between questions concerning the causes and origins of our knowledge and questions about its limits and objective validity. Thus, a rigorous critique of psychologism, i.e. of any attempt to explain, or explain away the validity of either our cognitive or moral principles (...) by means of an analysis of their basis in human nature or their genesis in human experience, is one of the most characteristic traits of the Kantian philosophy. Yet this transcendental, logical investigation of the nature and limits of knowledge, and of the fundamental principles of morality leads Kant back to the human subject, in whose cognitive faculties he finds the a priori principles of human knowledge and in whose autonomy he finds the basis of the categorical imperative. This gives rise to a paradoxical conception of man as on the one hand, together with the rest of creation, a part of nature, subject to its laws, and on the other hand, in his capacity as knower and actor, a rational being who not only transcends nature in the sense that he is not completely determined by its laws, but who is actually the author of these laws. (shrink)

The book provides a critical and historical inquiry into Kant's schematism chapter. It focuses on the meanings of the notion of schema before Kant, the precritical meaning of this notion, an analysis of the schematism chapter and its criticisms, and an overview of the legacy of Kant's schematism in philosophy and psychology.

This paper reflects on the exchange that took place in a session organized by the North American Kant Society at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Washington, DC (January, 2016). The session, “New Perspectives in Kant’s Psychology,” marked a rare occurrence: the almost simultaneous publication in 2014 of two important new books on this topic, Corey Dyck’s Kant and Rational Psychology (Oxford University Press) and Patrick Frierson’s Kant’s Empirical Psychology (Cambridge University Press). At (...) first glance, these books have little in common. While the bulk of Dyck’s project is devoted to interpreting Kant’s Paralogisms in light of 18th century German discussions of rational psychology, Frierson shows how Kant’s conception of human beings as objects of empirical investigation is essential to understanding his theory of action, cognition, and moral motivation. If one looks more closely, however, these projects share a fundamental assumption, namely, that in order to understand what motivates and shapes the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, one must grapple with the implications of his empirical psychology. (shrink)

Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why should we care about them? Unless we provide satisfactory answers to these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be subsumed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory. According to Ermanno Bencivenga, this outcome is both common and regrettable. Bencivenga points to Immanuel Kant for the solution. Kant's (...) philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need. Ethics Vindicated is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on Bencivenga's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant's Copernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the "incompleteness thesis" of Kant's General Metaphysics before completing a full analysis of the power of judgment which only occurred in the Critique of Judgment-Power. Kant scholars have argued that Kant's General Metaphysics was completed with the Critique of Pure Reason and the Third Critique added nothing significant to this quest. One of the issues in this paper is to understand Kant's various "transition problems" and their solution to unify knowledge under (...) a metaphysics, all of which has implications for the natural and cognitive sciences even today. (shrink)

Allison's interpretation and defense of Kant's idealism turn on his claim that a clear distinction between two senses of the appearance/reality distinction is crucial to and pervades Kant's thought. These are the empirical and transcendental senses, which distinguish respectively between the ordinary senses of subjective and objective, i.e., that which in my experience I believe belongs solely to my private awareness of things and that which I believe must pertain to everyone's awareness of things because it is (...) an aspect of their being, and the philosophical, or critically reflective, senses of those terms, i.e., that which we want to say about them as a function of the way in which we all experience them and that which sub specie aeternitatis we want to say belongs to things as they are in themselves. The fundamental thrust of Allison's argument is that for Kant the notion of objectivity in the ordinary sense does not imply or entail transcendental objectivity, which had been a supposition common to most of Kant's predecessors. Moreover, Allison's basic criticism of the dominant tradition of interpretation, beginning with Kant's rough contemporaries and extending into the present in the persons of Pritchard, Strawson and Walker, is that their reconstructions of Kantian doctrine and their criticisms of it turn on their inability to see or refusal to acknowledge the presence of this central distinction of Kant's thought. The deep irony pointed out by this study, then, is that just the set of distinctions on which Kant based his solutions to the metaphysical and epistemological problems which he inherited from the Cartesian tradition have been missed by most of his critics, who in turn criticized him for succumbing to all the illusions he thought he had exposed to the light. I believe Allison is correct in this claim, and his strategy of interpretation and defense is both right-minded and fruitful. The key to maintaining the distinction between the two senses of the appearance/reality distinction for Allison is the notion of an epistemic condition, which he defines as "one that is necessary for the representation of an object or an objective state of affairs", and which is to be distinguished from both psychological conditions of knowing and ontological conditions of being. The crux of Allison's argument, then, is to show that and how the notion of an epistemic condition underlies a proper understanding of idealism in the Kantian sense such that it avoids Cartesian metaphysical commitments. This is a formidable task, but one that Allison completes with much more than normal success. (shrink)

I argue that §§15–20 of the B-Deduction contain two independent arguments for the applicability of a priori concepts, the first an argument from above, the second an argument from below. The core of the first argument is §16's explanation of our consciousness of subject-identity across self-attributions, while the focus of the second is §18's account of universality and necessity in our experience. I conclude that the B-Deduction comprises powerful strategies for establishing its intended conclusion, and that some assistance from empirical (...) psychology might well have produced a completely successful argument. (shrink)

Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy is the first system of transcendental philosophy after Kant. Recent scholarship has understood it as a model of Grundsatzphilosophie, as a defense of the concept of freedom, or as a shift from philosophy to history of philosophy. The present book, translated from Italian language, emphasizes another golden thread in Reinhold’s works from 1784–94 and regards his philosophy as a system of transcendental psychology.

Engaging with Kant’s transcendental logic seems to be a question of mere scholarly historical interest today. It is most commonly regarded a mixture between logic and psychology or epistemology, and by that, not a serious form of logic. Transcendental logic seems to be of no systematical impact on the concept of logic. My paper aims to disclose a different account on the endeavour of Kant’s transcendental logic in particular and of the “Critique of Pure Reason” (CPR) (...) in general. Kant’s fundamental question is in a revolutionary way aiming to ground the character of necessity of knowledge, which means to justify the claim that thinking in accordance with the forms and principles of formal logic does not lead to sheer tautologies or an unsolved contradiction, but to knowledge that is objectively valid. In a first part, I shall demonstrate the necessity and the significance of this new fundamental question of the CPR with respect to its genesis out of pre-Kantian metaphysics. A brief outline of Kant’s answer to this question, with special emphasis on his revolutionary new comprehension of logical form, will be given as well. A second part shall open up a perspective that lies beyond Kant’s standpoint with reference to Nietzsche and eventually to Hegel. I will answer the question: What knowledge do we achieve about being or actuality by means of formal logic? I will argue that Kant shows that formal logic is the logic of all technical-practical conduct but also, at least indirectly, the limitation of the technical-practical knowledge and its legitimate sphere of application. (shrink)

The paper raises two questions, which seem central to understanding Kant's transcendental epistemology in the first Critique. First, Kant claims that the conditions for the possibility of experience are also conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience (A158/B197). Here the notion of an object is not conceived from the divine standpoint ('the view from nowhere') and is in some sense relativized to experience. But in what sense? Is the notion of an object relativized to one specific (...) kind of experience, human experience? Or is it relativized only to any possible experience? Second, in what sense is Kant's transcendental epistemology a priori? Is it a priori in the strong sense that its starting-point - the notion of experience in the question 'How is experience possible?' - is a priori? Or is it a priori only in the weak sense that, while the notion of experience is obtained empirically, a priori reasoning is required to establish how experience is possible? It has recently been argued (by Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology) that (a) the results that Kant wants to establish transcenden-tally about objects are relative to one specific kind of experience, human experience, and (b) Kant's transcendental epistemology is a priori only in the weak sense that the reasoning is a priori, while the starting-point is empirical. These claims are indeed crucial to Kitcher's overall aim of naturalizing Kant's transcendental epistemology. The aim of the paper is to resist both claims. I argue that Kant's notion of an object of experience is the notion of an object of any possible experience, not the notion of an object of one specific kind of experience, human experience. It follows, I argue, that Kant's transcendental epistemology is a priori in the strong sense that its starting-point is a priori. If we deny strong apriority, we fail to account for Kant's move from the nature of experience to the nature of empirical reality: empirical reality as such, not empirical reality as experienced by a particular variety of creatures capable of experience. The upshot is that, for better or worse, Kant's transcendental epistemology cannot be naturalized. (shrink)

Despite Conger’s classic view that one can find very little of the microcosmic doctrine in any of the Idealists, the paper argues that Kant develops several little known microcosmic doctrines over the course of his development from his first Critique to his second Critiqueto his Opus Postumum and that these are intimately connected with his various notions of “transcendental” philosophy. First, the roots of the microcosmic doctrine in Plato are explored. Second, Kant’s most basic microcosmic doctrine and its connection (...) with his “faculty psychology” notion of transcendental philosophy in the first Critique are explored. Third, it is explained why, contrary to Conger, the Idealist tradition is a natural home for microcosmic doctrines. Fourth, Kant’s moral microcosmic doctrine, which is implicit in the “starry heavens” remark in the conclusion to second Critique and related remarks in the Opus Postumum, is discussed in some detail. This includes a discussion of the microcosmic doctrines in the Stoics. Fifth, it is shown how Kant’s various microcosmic doctrines shed considerable light on his evolving conception of transcendental philosophy from his first Critique to his final statement in the Opus Postumum. (shrink)

1. The Problem of Transcendental Theology Kant's transcendental philosophy begins with an attempt to solve the theoretical problem of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. In solving this epistemological problem Kant demonstrates how transcendental knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the synthetic a priori conditions for the possibility of experience) is possible only when its application is confined to the realm of empirical knowledge (i.e., to experience). He argues that space, time, and the twelve categories form the (...) transcendental boundary line between what we can and cannot know. But this 'solution' itself calls attention to an even more significant problem: what is the status of that which lies outside the boundary of possible empirical knowledge? Kant reveals as early as CPR xxix xxxi1 that this metaphysical problem of how to verify the fundamental human ideas of 'God, freedom, and immortality', upon which he believes all religion and morality depend, constitutes the deepest and most urgent form of the 'transcendental problem'. It should therefore come as no surprise when he devotes the entire Transcendental Dialectic, the largest section of the first Critique, to the task of solving this ubiquitous perplexity of human reason. According to Kant our ideas of God, freedom, and immortality inevitably arise in the human mind as a result of our attempts to unify and systematize our empirical knowledge. In other words, reason naturally seeks for something beyond the limits of empirical knowledge which can supply unity and coherence to the diversity of facts which fall within that boundary. The problem is that the transcendental conditions which enable us to gain knowledge in the empirical world are unable to perform their function with respect to such ideas, because the ideas abstract from all sensible content, whereas the transcendental conditions (space, time and the categories) all require such content. As is well known, Kant devoted considerable effort in the Transcendental Dialectic to the task of pointing out the implications of this transcendental problem for rational psychology (with its proofs of the immortality of the soul), rational cosmology (with its proofs of transcendental freedom), and rational theology (with its proofs of the existence of God).. (shrink)

Kant points to two forms of self-consciousness: the inner sense, or empirical apperception, based on a sensory form of self-awareness, and transcendental apperception. Through the notion of inner sense, Kant also allows for an introspective account of self-awareness; nonetheless, Kant holds an utterly sophisticated notion of basic self-consciousness provided for by the notion of transcendental apperception. As we will see, the doctrine of apperception is not to be confused with an introspective psychological approach: in reality, it is a (...) formal model for the thinking activity itself which explains the most central concepts regarding subjecthood. (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)

: It has been said that Kant's critical philosophy made it impossible to pursue either the Cartesian rationalist or the Lockean empiricist program of providing a foundation for the sciences (e.g., Guyer 1992). This claim does not hold true for much of nineteenth century French philosophy, especially the eclectic spiritualist tradition that begins with Victor Cousin (1792-1867) and Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and continues through Paul Janet (1823-99). This tradition assimilated Kant's transcendental apperception of the unity (...) of experience to Descartes's cogito. They then took this to be the method of a philosophical psychology that reveals the active self as substance or cause and thus provides the epistemological grounding for these categories. However, to dismiss these philosophers as simply confused or mistaken would be to overlook the historical role that their interpretations of Kant played in the subsequent development of philosophy and the social sciences in France. Specifically, Émile Durkheim's (1858-1917) sociological theory of the categories was deeply influenced by the eclectic spiritualist tradition and yet at the same time developed in reaction to it, as he thought that its psychological account of the categories failed to bring out their shared or universal character and the extent to which our conceptions of the categories are cultural products. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is modeled on the Wolffian division of logic textbooks into sections on concepts, judgments, and inferences. While it is undeniable that the Transcendental Logic contains elements that are similar to the content of these sections, I believe these similarities are largely incidental to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In this essay, I offer an alternative and, I believe, more plausible account of Wolff’s influence on the (...) structure of the Transcendental Logic, one that puts the focus on his empirical psychology rather than his logic. In particular, I argue that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is deeply indebted to a conception of purity that Wolff introduces in his empirical psychology and that this conception sheds more light on the overall structure of the Transcendental Logic than the accepted view. In section one, I outline two conceptions of purity found in Kant and trace them to similar views in Wolff. In section two, I turn to Kant’s views about logic as they are expressed in the Critique and argue that it is best to interpret Kant’s taxonomy of logic on its own terms rather than reading it through its terminological similarities to aspects of the Wolffian tradition. In section three, I argue that the second of the two conceptions of purity identified in section one is central to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In doing so, I argue against the widespread view that this section of the Critique is modeled solely on what Kant calls pure general logic as opposed to both pure and applied general logic. I then conclude by briefly reviewing my account and considering some of its broader implications for our understanding of Kant. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the role of Kant’s refutation of materialism in his understanding of the Enlightenment, meant to be the necessary condition that allows human beings to express their proper dignity, i.e. to cultivate the urge for and the vocation of free thought. Sketching the main moments of the German struggle against the threat of materialism, the paper places Kant’s refutation within this tradition, and reconstructs the steps of his critique from the very beginning of his reflection – still (...) dealing with the main topics of Wolff’s metaphysic – up to the definitive refutation he develops on the basis of the transcendental idealism of the first Critique. The shift from the «obscure reasons» pointed out in the Dreams, that allow a refutation of materialism on moral grounds, to the statement of the meaninglessness of the question in a transcendental perspective reveals that the attempt to find a solution to the problem of materialism – most of all in its psychological meaning –represents a neverending challenge within Kant’s reflection. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the role of Kant’s refutation of materialism in his understanding of the Enlightenment, meant to be the necessary condition that allows human beings to express their proper dignity, i.e. to cultivate the urge for and the vocation of free thought. Sketching the main moments of the German struggle against the threat of materialism, the paper places Kant’s refutation within this tradition, and reconstructs the steps of his critique from the very beginning of his reflection – still (...) dealing with the main topics of Wolff’s metaphysic – up to the definitive refutation he develops on the basis of the transcendental idealism of the first Critique. The shift from the «obscure reasons» pointed out in the Dreams, that allow a refutation of materialism on moral grounds, to the statement of the meaninglessness of the question in a transcendental perspective reveals that the attempt to find a solution to the problem of materialism – most of all in its psychological meaning –represents a neverending challenge within Kant’s reflection. (shrink)

An anti-skeptical transcendental argument can be loosely defined as an argument that purports to show that some experience or knowledge of an external world is a necessary condition of our possession of some knowledge, concept, or cognitive ability that we know we have. In this dissertation I examine transcendental arguments by focusing on one such argument given by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, along with some attempts to interpret that argument by contemporary commentators. ;I proceed (...) by dividing anti-skeptical transcendental arguments into three types: epistemological, verificationist, and psychological. I examine arguments of the first two types and show why they cannot succeed against the skeptic. I then argue that Kant's Refutation of Idealism is of a different type: it is psychological in that it concerns the necessary conditions of our forming beliefs of certain kinds. Many contemporary Kant scholars have claimed that his anti-skeptical strategy relies on phenomenalism or verificationism; I argue, however, that Kant in the Refutation employs a clever and hitherto unappreciated strategy which involves an empiricist principle concerning the origin of simple ideas, and which does not require either phenomenalism or verificationism. I conclude with an analysis and assessment of Kant's argument. (shrink)

One third of the transcendental dialectic in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to demolishing the pseudo-science of rational psychology. In this part of his work Kant attacks the idea that there is an ultimate subject of experience — the ‘I’ or Self — which can only be investigated and understood intellectually. The belief that such a study is possible is natural to human reason; but it is based on demonstrable error. Kant tries to exorcize our (...) minds from falling prey to this mistake. (shrink)

A common reaction to Hegel’s suggestion that we collapse Kant’s distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as Kant (...) conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel’s critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel’s idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant’s dichotomy between form and content or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect—does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre-Critical metaphysics. This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more seriously. (shrink)

Contrary to both his own intentions and the views of both older and more recent commentators, I argue that Kant’s aesthetics remains within the confines of eighteenth-century aesthetics as a branch of empirical psychology, as it was then practiced. Kant established a plausible connection between aesthetic experience and judgment on the one hand and cognition in general on the other, through his explanatory concept of the free play of our cognitive powers. However, there is nothing distinctly ‘a priori’ or (...) ‘transcendental’ in his claim that this state of mind is what causes our pleasure in beauty or other aesthetic properties. Nor did Kant establish a genuinely a priori or transcendental principle that all human beings have the same disposition to experience a free play of their cognitive powers, let alone in response to the same objects. This failure, however, in no way limits the continuing significance of Kant’s aesthetic theory.Keywords: Alexander Gerard; Henry Home, Lord Kames; Immanuel Kant; Beauty; Taste; Free play of the cognitive powers. (shrink)

The chapter places Kant's discussions of empirical and rational psychology in the context of previous discussions in Germany. It also considers the status of what might be called his "transcendental psychology" as an instance of a special kind of knowledge: transcendental philosophy. It is divided into sections that consider four topics: the refutation of traditional rational psychology in the Paralogisms; the contrast between traditional empirical psychology and the transcendental philosophy of the Deduction; (...) Kant's appeal to an implicit psychology in his taxonomy and theory of cognitive faculties throughout the Critique of Pure Reason; and his new definitions of and support for empirical and rational psychology in the Doctrine of Method. (shrink)

É bem sabido que a estética de Kant está estruturada intersubjetivamente, porque ele honra a reivindicação do gosto pela universalidade. No entanto, o fundamento transcendental desta universalidade compartilhada é uma base suprasensível tida por certa, mas que não pode ser trazida diretamente para dentro da experiência comunicativa. O apelo kantiano à estrutura sintética a priori do juízo estético também remove-o da esfera da interação pessoal observável. Esta estratégia argumentativa expõe-no a desafios céticos e gera referências inacessíveis às representações internas (...) (sejam elas intuições, categorias do entendimento ou idéias racionais). Não é suficiente, como faz Kant, propor uma descrição da experiência estética que seja subjetivamente plausível e, a partir disso, reivindicar sua validade intersubjetiva. É indispensável encarnar a intersubjetividade no comportamento e na linguagem. Na intersubjetividade prática, lida-se com as atitudes estéticas em um modo concreto e acessível, sem depender de pressupostos mentalistas como fundamento. Termos conceituais como 'agradável', 'belo', 'sublime', 'feio', 'universalidade' adquirem novo significado em um contexto interativo e reivindicações estéticas são testadas em um modelo dialógico de jogo semântico. (shrink)

In this chapter, I expound Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he first and most elaborately presented in his early essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), by focusing on the criticism that Hegel levelled against Kant’s (supposedly) arbitrary subjectivism about the categories. This relates to the restriction thesis of Kant’s transcendental idealism: categorially governed empirical knowledge only applies to appearances, not to things in themselves, and so does not reach objective reality, according to Hegel. Hegel claims that this restriction of knowledge (...) to appearances is unwarranted merely on the basis of Kant’s own principle of transcendental apperception, and just stems from Kant’s empiricist bias. He argues that Kant’s principle of apperception as the foundational principle of knowledge is in fact incompatible with his empiricism. Hegel rightly appraises the centrality of transcendental apperception for the constitution of objectivity. But he is wrong about its incompatibility with Kant’s empirical realism. By virtue of a misapprehension of the formal distinction between the accompanying ‘I think’, i.e. the analytical principle of apperception, and what Hegel calls “the true ‘I’” of the original-synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel unjustifiably prises apart the productive imagination, which is supposedly this “true ‘I’”, and the understanding, which is supposedly just a derivative, subjective form of the productive imagination; the latter, according to Hegel, is Reason or Being itself, and is the truly objective. This deflationary reading of the understanding, which hypostatises the imagination as the supreme principle, rests on a distortion of key elements of Kant’s theory of apperception. In this chapter, I show that Hegel’s charge of inconsistency against Kant, namely, Hegel’s claim that the principle of apperception as the highest principle of cognition does not comport with Kant’s restriction thesis, is the direct consequence of a psychological misreading of Kant’s subjectivism. (shrink)