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Kant and the problem of existential judgment: critical comments on Wayne Martin’s Theories of Judgment

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Abstract

The paper assesses Martin’s recent logico-phenomenological account of judgment that is cast in the form of an eclectic history of judging, from Hume and Kant through the 19th century to Frege and Heidegger as well as current neuroscience. After a preliminary discussion of the complex unity and temporal modalities of judgment that draws on a reading of Titian’s “Allegory of Prudence” (National Gallery, London), the remainder of the paper focuses on Martin’s views on Kant’s logic in general and his theory of singular existential judgment in particular. The paper argues against Martin’s key claims of the primacy of formal logic over transcendental logic and of the synthetic nature of judgment in Kant. It also takes issue with each of the four interpretations of singular existential judgment in Kant offered by Martin: existence as logical predicate, as copula, as thesis and as logical subject.

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Notes

  1. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, transl. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 411 (glossary).

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Correspondence to Günter Zöller.

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This paper was first presented at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco in April 2007 in a session on Wayne Martin's book, Theories of Judgment. Psychology, Logic, Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In what follows, all parenthetical page references that are not preceded by siglia are to this work. Parenthetical page references preceded by "A" and "B" refer to the original pagination of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, with the first edition indicated by "A" and the second edition indicated by "B." Quotations from the Critique of Pure Reason are from the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Parenthetical page references preceded by "AA" followed by an Arabic number and a colon refer to volume and page of Kant's gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Prussian Academy of Sciences and its successors (Berlin, later Berlin/New York: Reimer, later de Gruyter, 1900ff.)

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Zöller, G. Kant and the problem of existential judgment: critical comments on Wayne Martin’s Theories of Judgment . Philos Stud 137, 121–134 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9175-z

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