Online research in philosophy

The paper considers Paul Natorp's Kantian reading of Plato's theory of ideas, as developed in his monumental work, Platos Ideenlehre, eine Einführung in den Idealismus (1903, 1921). Central to Natrop's reading are, I argue, the following two claims: (1) Plato's ideas are laws, not things; and (2) Plato's theory of ideas in the first instance a theory about the possibility and nature of thought - in particular cognitive and indeed scientific or explanatory thought - and only as a consequence is it a theory about the nature of reality. Natrop thus argues that Plato's theory of ideas is at its heart a transcendental theory, and that Plato's metaphysics is built on this basis. The paper considers these claims - and their textual basis in Plato - in some detail, and attempts an initial evaluation of their plausibility as a reading of Plato. I am on the whole sympathetic to Natorp's reading, though a proper assessment goes beyond the present paper. The wider interest of this idealist or anti-realist reading of Plato ought to be obvious, especially in view of the commonly accepted assumption these days that both Plato and Aristotle, and indeed the Greeks in general, took realism entirely for granted (see e.g. M. Burnyeat). Natorp argues that this is true of Aristotle, but quite untrue of Plato. But he is quite clear that the idealism he ascribes to Plato is not Berkeleyan or metaphysical idealism, but a certain kind of transcendental or epistemological idealism. Natorp, however, is no uncritical follower of Kant, and the version of trascendental idealism that he ascribes to Plato is, I argue, very different from Kant's.

According to metaphysical realism, the existence or at least the nature of things, “reality,” is independent of our cognition of them, whether in perception, conception, or description. Metaphysical nonrealism denies this. It comes in many varieties, as different as Berkeley’s subjective idealism and Kant’s transcendental idealism in the eighteenth century, Hegel’s objective idealism in the nineteenth century, and in contemporary philosophy what Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam call antirealism and Nelson Goodman calls irrealism. Berkeley held that the existence of the things we perceive is dependent on our perception of them, Kant that their nature is dependent on our understanding, on our concepts, and Wittgenstein and Heidegger that it is dependent on our language. Metaphysical realism is the bedrock of everyday and scientific thinking, but nonrealism has dominated modern philosophy, in one form or another, at least since Berkeley and Kant. The reasons for accepting it, however, have seldom been stated in detail and usually have consisted in rhetorical generalities such as “Nothing can be conceived that cannot be perceived” or “Thought without language is impossible,” which are not plausible. But a specific and not implausible reason is provided by logical nonrealism.

In this article I investigate Kant’s argumentation in the Critique of Pure Reason in favor of transcendental idealism. The argumentation for transcendental idealism seeks to establish the main conjecture of Kant’s Copernican hypothesis, to the effect that objects are conformed to our knowledge and not our knowledge to objects. But if the argumentation for transcendental idealism should presuppose anything of the Copernican hypothesis itself, then such argumentation remains as hypothetical as the Copernican hypothesis. What I seek to establish in this article is that in the Critique Kant presupposes the same presuppositions as does the Copernican turn, in which case transcendental idealism, as defended in the Critique, is nothing more than an elaborate hypothesis.

This rigorous examination of Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON provides a comprehensive analysis of the major themes of Kant's most famous work. Author James Van Cleve presents clear and detailed discussions of Kant's transcendental idealism, necessity and analyticity, space and time, substance and cause, noumena and things in themselves, problems of the self, and rational theology. He also discusses the relationship between Kant's thought and modern anti-realism, in particular the work of Putnam and Dummett. Organized around Kant's text but devoted maily to philosophical understanding of Kant's problems, the book makes Kant's oft-thought impenetrable work accessible to serious students as well as scholars.

Kant's writings on logic illustrate the comparison argument about truth, which goes as follows. A truth-bearer p is true if and only if it corresponds, or it agrees, with a portion of reality: the object(s), state(s) of affairs, or event(s) p is about. In order to know whether p agrees with that portion of reality, one must check if that portion of reality is as p states. Using the terms of the comparison argument, one must compare p with that portion of reality. This is impossible, because the only knowledge of reality we can have is in the form propositions, beliefs, or judgments, whose agreement with reality is as much in need of justification as the agreement of p with reality. Therefore, it is impossible to know which truth-bearers are true. This paper reconstructs Kant's version of the comparison argument. It is argued that, according to Kant, the argument is sound only under the assumption of transcendental realism. Transcendental idealism avoids the sceptical consequences of the comparison argument.

This article presents an overview of the current debate on Kant's doctrine of idealism, focussing on the metaphysical interpretations of Ameriks, Allais, Friebe, Langton, Van Cleve and Westphal, and also on Guyer's recent reassessment of Allison's latest views.

This paper takes a fresh look at a classical theme in philosophical scholarship, the meaning of transcendental idealism, by contrasting Kant's and Husserl's versions of it. I present Kant's transcendental idealism as a theory distinguishing between the world as in-itself and as given to the experiencing human being. This reconstruction provides the backdrop for Husserl's transcendental phenomenology as a brand of transcendental idealism expanding on Kant: through the phenomenological reduction Husserl universalizes Kant's transcendental philosophy to an eidetic science of subjectivity. He thereby furnishes a new sense of transcendental philosophy, rephrases the quid iuris-question, and provides a new conception of the thing-in-itself. What needs to be clarified is not exclusively the possibility of a priori cognition but, to start at a much lower level, the validity of objects that give themselves in experience. The thing-in-itself is not an unknowable object, but the idea of the object in all possible appearances experienced at once. In spite of these changes Husserl remains committed to the basic sense of Kant's Copernican Turn. I end with some comments on how both Kant and Husserl view the relation between theoretical and moral philosophy.

This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality.

Central to any examination of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism—as it appears in the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason—are questions about what sort of “idealism” it is trying to refute and what the precise steps of the supposed refutation might be. The first question is one regarding the nature of the claims made by Kant’s opponent, whilst the second traces the structure of the argument. Once upon a time the concern was that the Refutation turned out to be a voracious refutation of all idealism, including Kant’s own transcendental idealism. That issue has been resolved, however, by the ever more rigorous appreciation of the differences between Kant’s transcendental or formal idealism and the forms of Cartesian and Berkeleian idealism for which the refutation is intended. The Refutation of Idealism, then, is no self-refutation but the soundness of the actual execution of Kant’s argument in the Refutation of Idealism needs to be considered. What I want to demonstrate here is that the argument does not withstand critical scrutiny, precisely as a “refutation of idealism.” I will argue two issues. First, I want show is that as a “refutation of idealism”—considered within and without the broader commitments of transcendental idealism—Kant’s argument fails. This is because it misses a step which leaves the skeptic reasonable space to deny correlation between our representations and outer objects. The step is that of showing that external objects determine the content of our representations. This, I think, is not simply a failing in Kant’s exposition of the Refutation of Idealism but is the culmination of an enormous tension in Kant’s position between his twin commitments to transcendental idealism and empirical realism. This leads to a second important issue: the Refutation of Idealism, I will argue, relies on a notion Page 1 of 21 of “outer objects” that cannot be maintained within the framework of transcendental idealism. I am thereby at odds with Kant’s insistence, within the context of the Refutation at least, that the “transcendental idealist....

The debate on how to interpret Kant's transcendental idealism has been prominent for several decades now. In his book Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism (2004) Kenneth R. Westphal introduces and defends his version of the metaphysical dual-aspect reading. But his real aim lies deeper: to provide a sound transcendental proof for (unqualified) realism, based on Kant's work, without resorting to transcendental idealism. In this sense his aim is similar to that of Peter F. Strawson – although Westphal's approach is far more sophisticated. First he attempts to show that noumenal causation – on the reality of which his argument partly rests – is coherent in and necessary for Kant's transcendental idealism. Westphal then aims to undermine transcendental idealism by two major claims: Kant can neither account for transcendental affinity nor satisfactorily counter Hume's causal scepticism. Finally Westphal defends his alternative for transcendental idealism by showing that it solves these problems and thus offers a genuine transcendental proof for realism. In this paper I will show that all the three steps outlined above suffer from decisive shortcomings, and that consequently, regardless of its merits, Westphal's transcendental argument for realism remains undemonstrated.