Kant and naturalism reconsidered
Inquiry 51 (5):532 – 558 (2008)
| Abstract | Reconstructions of Kant are prominent in the contemporary debate over naturalism. Given that this naturalism rejects a priori principles, Kant's anti-naturalism can best be discerned in the “critical turn” as a response to David Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but to defend rational metaphysics. But when Kant went transcendental did he not, in fact, go transcendent? The controversy in the 1990s over John McDowell's Mind and World explored just this suspicion: the questions of the normative force of reason and of the ontological “space of reasons” vis- -vis the world. “Bald naturalism” appears to “extrude” rationality both ontologically and epistemologically from the natural world. Kant sought to discriminate a transcendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion. But was Kant's notion of the autonomy and spontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as McDowell's critics would have it? Situating Hume and naturalism in the eighteenth-century German context can help us understand the “critical turn” more accurately. While Hume recognized procedural proprieties for reflection, he did not believe in their a priori necessity. Initially, Kant shared that view. What assimilating Leibniz and Locke in the late 1760s garnered for Kant—the simultaneous spontaneity and self-transparency of reason—seemed to provide a means for overcoming Hume's skepticism and establishing a new foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, all of the efforts of modern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kant's transcendentalism. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,664 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesKenneth R. Westphal (2004). Kant's Transcendental Proof of Realism. Cambridge University Press.
Alan Thomas (1997). Kant, McDowell and the Theory of Consciousness. European Journal of Philosophy 5 (3):283-305.
Hans Fink (2006). Three Sorts of Naturalism. European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2):202–221.
Harold W. Brogan (2004). Kant's Retrieval of Leibniz. Epoché 8 (2):271-284.
Michael Friedman (1998). Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy: Michael Friedman. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 72 (1):111–130.
Wayne Waxman (1994). Hume's Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
Kenneth R. Westphal (2001). Freedom and the Distinction Between Phenomena and Noumena: Is Allison's View Methodological, Metaphysical, or Equivocal? Journal of Philosophical Research 26:593-622.
John H. Zammito (2008). Kant's "Naturalistic" History of Mankind? Some Reservations. Journal of the Philosophy of History 2 (1):29-62.
Thomas Sturm (2004). Manfred Kuehn: Kant - A Biography. [REVIEW] Philosophical Quarterly 54:476-479.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-02-04Total downloads29 ( #42,339 of 549,010 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,272 of 549,010 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
