This book is about Kant's account of human understanding, of our capacity to form concepts of, and to be conscious of, things in the world. It argues that his insights into what is needed for human understanding conflict with his overall view of the nature of that capacity.

This book is about Kant's account of human understanding, of our capacity to form concepts of, and to be conscious of, things in the world. It argues that his insights into what is needed for human understanding conflict with his overall view of the nature of that capacity.

I argue that the current view (as held by, eg., Warnock, Anscombe and Stenius) of Wittgenstein's theory of language in the Tractates is mistaken. This view maintains that Wittgenstein's theory is one of 'isomorphism'; that, roughly, a sentence has meaning in virtue of its being a facsimile of a fact or possible fact. But a detailed study of significant passages in the Tractattis shows that Wittgenstein held no such view. His use of important terms, such as Salz, Bild, Sachverhalt, Tatsache (...) , etc., has been crucially misunderstood. There is no isomorphism. The theory is not about sentences at all, but about talking sense. (shrink)

Kant’s response to Cartesian scepticism is often characterized in the following way. Whereas Descartes drives a wedge between subjective experience and objective reality, Kant argues that there could be no such thing as experience at all if reality were not itself structured in just the way our thought about it is structured. This picture of Kant’s response to Descartes portrays him as succeeding, where Descartes fails, in arguing directly from the nature of experience to the nature of reality; as subscribing, (...) therefore, to Descartes’ view that one is immediately aware only of one’s own mental states, but as seeing a way out of the subjective predicament. I maintain that this picture is deeply flawed. Kant’s transcendental argument is in fact a thoroughgoing critique of Descartes’ subjectivism, and destroys the Cartesian barrier to recognizing that our awareness of reality is unmediated and direct. (shrink)

Plotinus I. Enneades I-III cum vita Porphyrii.

Some philosophers—indeed, a large number—have presented us with a picture of human knowledge which makes it problematic as to whether we can ever be acquainted with an objective world. Given the nature of perception and thought as characterized by, e.g., Descartes and Hume, there is a problem about how anything I can be aware of can have any sort of objective status; there is a problem of how my awareness of anything can amount to anything other than its merely seeming (...) to me that things are thus and so. And of course many of these same philosophers, and other philosophers, have tried in all sorts of different ways to counter this skeptical thrust. Some, like Descartes, have argued that although human perceiving and human thinking are themselves purely subjective affairs, nevertheless the content of some of our thoughts and ideas is such that it (the content) could not exist if there did not also exist certain things of a quite objective nature. Another way of putting Descartes' thesis is to say that although all our concepts of things are, as concepts, purely subjective entities, nevertheless the content of some of our concepts requires that there exist certain objective entities. (shrink)

One might want to say that the difference between an apple and the colour red is a greater difference than that between an apple and a pear, between red and blue. In the same vein, one might want to say that the philosopher's question “What, really, is a piece of wax?” has greater generality than the more ordinary question “What distinguishes a piece of wax from a piece of soap?” I think Wittgenstein would say that to talk in this way (...) is to make the difference at issue seem too slight, so that we fail to see what the difference really amounts to.I should like to suggest that the following thesis is pervasive and fundamental in Wittgenstein's later teaching. (shrink)