An effort to expand and defend aspects of my reading of the Deduction of Taste. The Red Scorpion is just for fun. -/- .

This essay reconsiders David Hume’s thinking on the fate of the British Empire and the future of established religion. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the development of Hume’s views on Britain’s successive attempts to impose or regain its authority over its North American colonies and compares these views with the stance taken during the American Crisis by Adam Smith and Josiah Tucker. Fresh light is shed on this area of Hume’s later political thought by a new letter, appended to (...) the essay, which at the same time provides an illuminating glimpse of his abiding preoccupation with the future of established religion. It is argued that this evidence of Hume’s privately held views belies the notion that his thinking on political and religious matters was fundamentally opposed to that of his friends among the philosophes. It is consequently misleading to regard Hume as an opponent of the more radical wing of the Enlightenment. (shrink)

In this volume, representatives of the faculties addressed by Kant give their assessment of Kant's relevance for their disciplines.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) is one of the best-known figures of the French Enlightenment and a central figure in eighteenth-century philosophy. His influential theories of the social contract, inequality, liberty and education make him one of the most famous political philosophers of all time. In this superb introduction, Nicholas Dent covers the whole of Rousseau's thought. He gives particular attention to Rousseau's theories of democracy and freedom found in his most celebrated work, The Social Contract , and explains what Rousseau meant (...) by the 'general will'. (shrink)

This work responds by tracing the details of the relationship between transcendental and practical freedom through Kant's writings.

Harry Frankfurt has argued that Descartes’s madness doubt in the First Meditation is importantly different from his dreaming doubt. The madness doubt does not provide a reason for doubting the senses since were the meditator to suppose he was mad his ability to successfully complete the philosophical investigation he sets for himself in the first few pages of the Meditations would be undermined. I argue that Frankfurt’s interpretation of Descartes’s madness doubt is mistaken and that it should be understood as (...) playing the same role as his more famous dreaming doubt. I focus my discussion around four questions: (Q1) What does the meditator have in mind when speaking of madness?, (Q2) Why does the meditator so quickly dismiss the madness doubt but take seriously the dreaming doubt?, (Q3) Does the madness doubt have the same scope as the dreaming doubt?, and (Q4) Why does the meditator bring up the madness doubt at all? (shrink)

1713 erschien in London "Drei Dialoge zwischen Hylas und Philonous" von George Berkeley.

David Hume (1711-1776) es sin duda el filósofo más importante de la ilustración británica. Se ocupó de una enorme variedad de problemas y sobre todos ellos ejerció su mirada crítica. En los ensayos que aquí presentamos puede apreciarse muy bien el alcance y la actualidad de sus planteamientos: una epistemología dispuesta a atenerse tanto a lo que nos muestra la experiencia como a las disposiciones de nuestra naturaleza. Una moral atenta a la felicidad humana (basada en la búsqueda de lo (...) inmediatamente agradable y de lo útil), y a la variedad de formas en que la misma puede concretarse. Una política elaborada pensando en la justicia, en el diálogo y en la necesidad de establecer acuerdos y contratos. Una crítica implacable de la superstición y el entusiasmo, y de las consecuencias negativas para la sociedad del fanatismo y la intolerancia. No es entonces extraño que nuestro autor pueda convertirse así en un interlocutor privilegiado para muchas corrientes filosóficas del momento. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the implications of Hutcheson’s and Hume’s sentimentalist theories for the question of whether and how we can offer reasons to be moral. Hutcheson and Hume agree that reason does not give us ultimate ends. Because of this, on Hutcheson’s line, the possession of affections and of a moral sense makes practical reasons possible. On Hume’s view, that reason does not give us ultimate ends means that reason does not motivate on its own, and this makes (...) practical reasons, strictly speaking, impossible. For Hutcheson, those who are good people (benevolent people) have reasons to continue in that way. While he has nothing to say to those who are thoroughly self-interested, he thinks there are no such persons. Hume’s theory implies that one can have a motive to behave morally when one’s character does not so incline, since he believes that morality is at least sometimes in the interest of the agent. One interesting source of their differences is that Hume subscribes to an internal connection between justification and motivation, while Hutcheson argues that motivating reasons and justifying reasons are logically distinct. -/- . (shrink)

Most of Kant's readers have assumed that he demanded explanations for all synthetic a priori claims. I argue that this is not the case, and that Kant accepted some synthetic a priori claims as basic. I further argue that he took himself to be justified in making such claims on the basis of a certain sort of robust reflection. In essence, Kant's method is more like that of the phenomenologists than that of 20th century analytic philosophers.

The 'one-world' interpretation of Kant's idealism holds that appearances and things in themselves are, in some sense, the same things. Yet this reading faces a number of problems, all arising from the different features Kant seems to assign to appearances and things in themselves. I propose a new way of understanding the appearance/thing in itself distinction via an Aristotelian notion that I call, following Kit Fine, a 'qua-object.' Understanding appearances and things in themselves as qua-objects provides a clear sense in (...) which they can be the same things while differing in many of their features. (shrink)

Kant's transcendental idealism hinges on a distinction between appearances and things in themselves. The debate about how to understand this distinction has largely ignored the way that Kant applies this distinction to the self. I argue that this is a mistake, and that Kant's acceptance of a single, unified self in both his theoretical and practical philosophy causes serious problems for the 'two-world' interpretation of his idealism.

Definition of the problem The creation and selection of children as tissue donors is ethically controversial. Critics often appeal to Kant’s Formula of Humanity, i.e. the requirement that people be treated not merely as means but as ends in themselves. As many defenders of the procedure point out, these appeals usually do not explain the sense of the requirement and hence remain obscure. Arguments This article proposes an interpretation of Kant’s principle, and it proposes that two different instrumental stances be (...) distinguished. I argue that the creation of “saviour children” is a form of instrumentalization that I dub “preemptive instrumentalization” and that it is categorically different from earlier forms of instrumental attitudes concerning human reproduction. Conclusion Critics are wrong to claim that Kant’s principle is either compatible with the selection of saviour siblings or too vague to serve as an ethical principle. (shrink)

This dissertation aims at forging an archetectonic link between Kant's first and third Critiques within a cognitive-semantic framework. My aim is to show how the major conceptual innovations of Kant’s third Critique can be plausibly understood in terms of the theoretical aims of the first, (Critique of Pure Reason). However, unlike other cognition-oriented approaches to Kant's third Critique, which take the point of contact between the first and third Critique's to be the first Critique's Transcendental Analytic, I link these two (...) works via the first Critique's Transcendental Dialectic, specifically its discussions of the "ideas of pure reason." According to Kant, the “ideas of pure reason” (IPRs) — viz., the notions of self, world-whole, and God — are innate content-bearing entities representing three types of transempirical object, none of which are possible objects of cognition. However, although Kant denies that these rather unique content-bearers can be used for purposes of “speculative cognition,” he does think that they have an internal functional value for human cognitive systems. Although under my analysis of their functional value the IPRs subserve a highest-order aim which derives from theoretical reason — namely, to ground and optimize cognitive systematicity — their directive content in fact renders their implementation(thus their form of intentionality) more characteristic of practical reason. Kant’s positive account of reason’s “interest” in and use of the IPRs exhibits a kind of cognitive pragmatism. Of utmost concern to the cognitive-semantic enterprise, as I conceive it, is the development of (what might be called) a metaphysics of intentionality. A `metaphysics of intentionality', as I use the term, refers to a coherent set of postulative propositional cognitions (or, at any rate, content-bearing entities) implemented, first, for the sake of rationally explaining the phenomenological unity and object-directed character of our perceptual states and, second, to explain why the objects represented in such states are, or must be, law-governed and thus necessarily amenable to scientific investigation. On my view, the discussions in Kant’s third Critique nontrivially contribute to the development of a metaphysics of intentionality and thus to the larger cognitive-semantic enterprise of Kant's first Critique, and it is this link that lends Kant's third Critique a cognitive significance. (shrink)

This paper attacks an account of Kant's controversial distinction between "free" and "dependent" beauty. I present three problems—The Lorland problem, The Crawford Problem, and the problem of intrinsic relation—that are shown to be a consequence of various interpretations of Kant's distinction. Next, I reconstruct Robert Wicks' well-known account of dependent beauty as "the appreciation of teleological style" and point out a key equivocation in the statement of Wicks' account: the judgment of dependent beauty can be thought to consist in comparing (...) any two objects' teleological styles either in respect of how or in respect of how well each realizes a common purpose. I argue that this equivocation forces Wicks into a dilemma: either he must assert the impossibility of ugliness or he must assert that the judgment of dependent beauty is reducible to the judgment of perfection. Either way, he denies important theoretic desiderata. (shrink)

Le système spinoziste comprend une infinité d'expressions de la Nature et offre aux modes finis que nous sommes la possibilité d'appréhender la puissance d'agir sous un angle physique, mental, ou encore psychophysique, selon qu'elle est ...

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (KrV) presents a priori knowledge of synthetic truths as posing a philosophical problem of great import whose only possible solution vindicates the system of transcendental idealism. The work does not accord any such significance to a priori knowledge of analytic truths. The intelligibility of the contrast rests on the well-foundedness of Kant’s analytic–synthetic distinction and on his claim to objectively or correctly classify key judgments with respect to it. Though the correctness of Kant’s classification is (...) vital to his philosophical project, it has been vigorously challenged since he introduced his famous distinction of judgments. The aim of this essay is to explore several .. (shrink)

In this opinion piece, the authors offer their personal and idiosyncratic views of the future of the philosophy of science, focusing on its relationship with the history of science and metaphysics, respectively. With regard to the former, they suggest that the Kantian tradition might be drawn upon both to render the history and philosophy of science more relevant to philosophy as a whole and to overcome the challenges posed by naturalism. When it comes to the latter, they suggest both that (...) metaphysics has much to learn from the philosophy of science and that it offers an array of tools that philosophers of science can themselves appropriate. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant claims that he is offering a science of reason grounded on principles. Given Kant’s frequent but diverse use of the term “principle” throughout the work, it is unclear what exactly this term is supposed to signify, whether there are more or less fundamental principles and on what basis, and whether there is supposed to be some way in which the diverse instances of them are related to form a unified science of theoretical reason. (...) The aim of this paper is to offer a theory of Kant’s principles that will provide answers to these questions. First, the article clarifies what Kant understands by the term “principle” by briefly looking to his metaphysics lectures and then to the use of the term by two thinkers contemporary and influential to Kant—namely, Hume and Newton. The resulting hypothesis is that Kant conceives of principles in an Aristotelian fashion. While it is common to think of Kant’s theory of theoretical reason as uncovering the formal principles of cognition, the article next argues that such principles should be understood in the broader context of Kant’s teleological conception of theoretical reason, which contains also efficient transcendental principles, and whose unifying transcendental principle is a final cognitive aim. Finally, the article suggests that this teleological conception of reason has implications for a proper understanding of the highly disputed metaphysical results of the Critique. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to understand the main characteristics of the three transitions that Kant makes in his Groundwork in view of his professed purpose of grounding pure moral philosophy. In particular, I show that the method of transition is devised as a way in which Kant can secure the a priori basis of morality in his campaign against naturalism in ethics.

In the philosophy of mathematics, as in its a meta-domain, we find that the words as: consequentialism, implicativity, operationalism, creativism, fertility, … grasp at most of mathematical essence and that the questions of truthfulness, of common sense, or of possible models for (otherwise abstract) mathematical creations,i.e. of ontological status of mathematical entities etc. - of second order. Truthfulness of (necessary) succession of consequences from causes in the science of nature is violated yet with Hume, so that some traditional footings of (...) logico-mathematical conclusions should equally be falled under suspicion in the last century. We have in mind, say, strict-material implication which led the emergence of relevance logics, or the law of excluded middle that denied intuitionists i.e. paraconsistent logical systems where the contradiction is allowed, as well as the quantum logic which doesn't know, say, the definition of implication etc. Kant's beliefs miscarried hereafter that number (arithmetic) and form (geometry) would bring a (finite) truth on space and time, when they revealed relative and curvated, just as it is contradictory essentially understanding of basic phenomena in the nature: of light as an unity of wave – particle, or that both "exist" and "don't exist" numbers as powers of sets between 0א and c (the independence of continuum hypothesis) etc. Mathematical truths are ''truths of possible worlds'', in which we have only to believe that they will meet once recognizable models in reality. At last, we argue in favour of thesis that a possible representing "in relief" of mathematical entities and relations in the "noetic matter" (Aristotle) would be of a striking heuristic character for this science. (shrink)

In the Introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic, of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents a conception of error. In the (Jäsche) Logic, he also deals with the problem of error, albeit in a different way. This paper aims at exposing this difference and arguing that, in the (Jäsche) Logic, error is explained moreconsistently and suitably than it is in the Transcendental Dialectic. It begins by considering judgment as the place of truth, falsehood and error, and inquiring into the cognitive (...) faculties that take part in its framing. These faculties, whose roles cannot be interchanged, are the sensibility, passive and receptive, and the understanding, active and spontaneous. Erroneous judgment springs from the unnoticed influence of sensibility on understanding, which makes theunderstanding hold merely subjective grounds of judgment to be objective ones. This unnoticed influence is conceived, in the Transcendental Dialectic, in such a way that sensibility is, in a certain sense, held to be the determining ground of error, as if it were an active faculty, whereas that influence is conceived in the (Jäsche) Logic in such a way that the understanding itself is regarded as the source and author of error. This authorship agrees with the conception of the understanding as submitted to prescriptive laws, which is contained in the very definition of Pure General Logic, as a science of the a priori laws of how the understanding ought to think. (shrink)

Kant’s analytic-synthetic distinction is often construed in terms of the question of whether or not the predicate is contained in or can be derived from the concept of the subject. Few have observed that Kant has another formulation of the distinction, a formulation that is based on the determinate-indeterminate distinction. In fact, it is this formulation that will shape the development of one of the main tasks of post-Kantian German idealism. It is my aim to explain how Kant, Maimon, and (...) Fichte each define and address the problem of the synthetic a priori in terms of the determinate-indeterminate distinction. (shrink)

It is a common thought that mathematics can be not only true but also beautiful, and many of the greatest mathematicians have attached central importance to the aesthetic merit of their theorems, proofs and theories. But how, exactly, should we conceive of the character of beauty in mathematics? In this paper I suggest that Kant's philosophy provides the resources for a compelling answer to this question. Focusing on §62 of the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgment’, I argue against the common view (...) that Kant's aesthetics leaves no room for beauty in mathematics. More specifically, I show that on the Kantian account beauty in mathematics is a non-conceptual response felt in light of our own creative activities involved in the process of mathematical reasoning. The Kantian proposal I thus develop provides a promising alternative to Platonist accounts of beauty widespread among mathematicians. While on the Platonist conception the experience of mathematical beauty consists in an intellectual insight into the fundamental structures of the universe, according to the Kantian proposal the experience of beauty in mathematics is grounded in our felt awareness of the imaginative processes that lead to mathematical knowledge. The Kantian account I develop thus offers to elucidate the connection between aesthetic reflection, creative imagination and mathematical cognition. (shrink)

La publication de l' "Emile" et du "Contrat social" a dressé les autorités de l'Europe entière contre Rousseau. A Genève, les deux ouvrages sont condamnés et brûlés le 18 juin 1762.