KANT AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND EDITED BY ANIL GOMES Trinity College, University of Oxford AND ANDREW STEPHENSON Humboldt University, Berlin For A. W. Moore iii CONTENTS Acknowledgments ... Contributors ... Note On Sources And Translations ... Introduction ... 1. Kant, The Philosophy Of Mind, And Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy ... Anil Gomes 2. Synthesis And Binding ... Lucy Allais 3. Understanding Non-Conceptual Representation Of Objects: Empirical Models Of Sensibility's Operation ... Katherine Dunlop 4. Are Kantian Intuitions Object-Dependent? ... Stefanie Grüne 5. Intuition And Presence ... Colin McLear 6. Imagination And Inner Intuition ... Andrew Stephenson 7. Inner Sense And Time ... Ralf M. Bader 8. Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, A Problem For (Almost) Every Interpretation Of The Refutation Of Idealism ... Andrew Chignell 9. A Kantian Critique Of Transparency ... Patricia Kitcher 10. Judging For Reasons: On Kant And The Modalities Of Judgment. ... Jessica Leech 11. Kant On Judging And The Will ... Jill Vance Buroker 12. Self and Selves ... Ralph C. S. Walker 13. Subjects Of Kant's First Paralogism ... Tobias Rosefeldt 14. The Lessons Of Kant's Paralogisms ... Paul Snowdon Bibliography ... iv Acknowledgments The production of this volume has been remarkably smooth-sailing, a fact for which we owe many thanks. First, our thanks to the contributors to the volume, both for their excellent and thought-provoking essays and for the speed with which they responded to our numerous requests. A number of the papers were presented at a workshop in Oxford in January 2015, which was supported by funds from the John Fell Fund, the Mind Association, the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Trinity College, Oxford. The workshop was an incredibly stimulating occasion, and we are grateful to all involved, including Angela Breitenbach, Max Edwards, Robert Hanna, Katharina Kraus, Alexandra Newton, Robert Watt, and Kenneth R. Westphal. We later taught a graduate seminar organised around the contents of this book and our thanks to Kevin Busch, Neil Dewar, Carolina Flores Henrique, Pieter Fritschy, Matthew Husband, Amy Levine, and Alex Lupsaiu for their comments and discussion. Luke Davies helped with the copy-editing for the volume, saving us much time and effort. Alix Cohen and David Landy provided very useful advice. Finally, our thanks to Peter Momtchiloff for his encouragement and to Peter and the staff at Oxford University Press for their work in producing this volume and bringing it to press. Andrew Stephenson gratefully acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust. This volume is dedicated to our colleague and teacher, Adrian Moore, as a small token of gratitude for his friendship and support. The sheer range and depth of his work would be inspiration enough, but when combined with the sensitivity and kindness he shows to all he encounters, he stands as a model for how to be a philosopher. Anyone who knows Adrian's work will know the high regard he holds for Kant. We hope that he will find much to enjoy in the current volume. v Contributors Lucy Allais is Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Henry Allison Chair of the History of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. She has a book on Kant's transcendental idealism, Manifest Reality (Oxford University Press, 2015) and a number of articles on Kant's theoretical philosophy, as well as papers on forgiveness and some other topics in ethics. Ralf Bader is a Fellow of Merton College and Associate Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on Kant, ethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy. Jill Vance Buroker is a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at California State University, San Bernardino. Her main research interests are Kant, Descartes, and the theory of judgment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Her publications include Space and Incongruence: The Origin of Kant's Idealism (D. Reidel, 1981) and Kant: an Introduction to The Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Andrew Chignell is Associate Professor at the Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University. His research focuses primarily on Kant and early modern philosophy and has appeared in journals such as Nous, Mind, and Journal of the History of Philosophy. Katherine Dunlop is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. She is particularly interested in Kant's view of spatiality as a condition on perception, which lies at the intersection of her main areas of research: Kant's theoretical philosophy and history and philosophy of mathematics (especially in the early modern period). Anil Gomes is a Fellow and Tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, and CUF Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on Kant's theoretical philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and, in particular, issues which arise at their intersection. Stefanie Grüne is lecturer at the University of Potsdam. She works on Kant's theoretical philosophy and the philosophy of perception and is author of Blinde Anschauung (Klostermann, 2009). vi Patricia Kitcher is Roberta and William Campbell Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford University Press, 1990), Freud's Dream (M.I.T. Press, 1992), and Kant's Thinker (Oxford University Press, 2011). Jessica Leech is currently a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sheffield. Her research centres on questions about possibility and necessity. She is particularly interested in Kant's views on these topics and how we can use his ideas to inform our understanding of possibility and necessity today. More generally, she has research interests in metaphysics, logic, and the history of philosophy. Colin McLear is currently Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He specialises in early modern philosophy, particularly Kant, and the philosophy of mind. Representative publications include 'Kant on Animal Consciousness' (Philosophers' Imprint), 'Two Kinds of Unity in the Critique of Pure Reason' (Journal of the History of Philosophy), and 'Kant on Perceptual Content' (Mind). Tobias Rosefeldt is professor of philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin. He mainly works on Kant's philosophy and its reception and on contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is author of a book on Kant's theory of the self, Das logische Ich: Kant über den Gehalt des Begriffes von sich selbst (Philo, 2000). Paul Snowdon was a Fellow of Exeter College Oxford between 1971 and 2001 and then Grote Professor of Mind and Logic at UCL until retirement in 2014. He is the author of Persons, Animals, Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2014) and has written about perception, philosophy of mind, and the history of philosophy. Andrew Stephenson is a Leverhulme Visiting Researcher at Humboldt University in Berlin, before which he did his graduate studies and post-doctoral research at Oxford. He works on Kant's theoretical philosophy and its relation to concerns in contemporary philosophy of mind and epistemology. Recent publications include 'Relationalism about Perception vs. Relationalism about Perceptuals' (Kantian Review), 'Kant, the Paradox of Knowability, and the Meaning of 'Experience'' (Philosophers' Imprint), and 'Kant on the Object-Dependence of Intuition and Hallucination' (Philosophical Quarterly). Ralph C. S. Walker was a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1972 to 2011, though spending short periods in a number of universities outside the UK. He is author of Kant (Routledge, 1978) and The Coherence Theory of Truth (Routledge, 1988) and editor of Kant on Pure Reason (Oxford University Press, 1982). Now retired, he continues to teach and to write about philosophical issues, particularly those related to Kant. vii Introduction The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant's writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. In 'Kant, the Philosophy of Mind, and Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy', Anil Gomes provides a background to the topics discussed in the volume. In the first part of the essay, he sets out some of the topics in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant's writings, including Kant's account of our mental faculties, their role in representation, their logical and transcendental structure, and their expression in thought and action. In the second part, Gomes traces the way in which Kant's writings have influenced twentieth-century philosophy of mind in the analytic tradition. At the centre of Kant's account of the human mind is a division of the cognitive mind into a passive capacity for receptivity, sensibility, and an active capacity for spontaneity, the understanding. The essays by Lucy Allais and Katherine Dunlop concern the role that mental processing plays in Kant's account of sensibility. In particular, they focus on the question of what kind of mental processing is required in order for us to be perceptually presented with objects in intuition. In 'Synthesis and Binding', Allais challenges the identification of the role that synthesis plays in Kant's account of mental processing with the role that perceptual binding plays in the contemporary science of perception. Allais argues that whereas binding organises sensory input in order for us to be presented with perceptual particulars, conceptually-governed imaginative synthesis operates on intuitions in order that we may apply concepts to that which is given in intuition. Since synthesis is not involved in the generation of intuitions, it cannot be that which organises sensory input in order to present us with perceptual particulars. Although Allais does not think that conceptually-governed synthesis is involved in the generation of intuitions, she does acknowledge that there are a priori forms of processing which are required for us to have intuitions of objects and her view leaves open, and perhaps even suggests, that perceptual binding plays this role. Against this, in 'Understanding Non-Conceptual Representation: Empirical Models of Sensibility's Operation', Dunlop argues that perceptual binding cannot be what organises sensory data into the intuition of objects for Kant. Instead, drawing on another area of contemporary cognitive science, Dunlop argues that certain principles of object perception are better examples of the a priori mental processing that Kant thinks are involved in the generation of intuition. Since these principles do not involve concepts in Kant's sense, Dunlop agrees with Allais that the representation of individual objects in intuition does not require the involvement of the categories. viii The three essays by Stefanie Grüne, Colin McLear, and Andrew Stephenson concern the way sensibility relates us to objects, in particular, the question of whether and in what sense intuition is object-dependent. There are many different notions of object-dependence but one way of taking intuitions to be object-dependent holds that if a subject intuits an object, then that object must exist and be present to the subject. This claim plays an important role in Allais's account of the nature of intuition and it is endorsed by a number of interpreters. In 'Are Kantian Intuitions Object-Dependent?', Grüne criticises arguments in support of the claim that intuitions are object-dependent. One focus is a claim in the Prolegomena which has been taken to indicate the object-dependence of intuition. Grüne argues that the argument of the Prolegomena only makes sense if Kant takes intuitions to be objectindependent. Is the object-dependent view of intuition shown to be false by Kant's account of the imagination and its role in producing intuitions? In 'Intuition and Presence', McLear defends the object-dependence claim from two objections. First, that Kant describes the faculty of imagination as providing intuitions without the presence of their objects. Second, that Kant takes perception and hallucinations to be fundamentally the same kind of representation. McLear's response is to argue that Kant takes hallucinatory and other imaginative states to involve merely inner intuitions which we might sometimes mistake for outer intuitions. This reading of imaginational intuition looks compatible with taking outer intuition to be object-dependent and compares interestingly to contemporary disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience. In 'Imagination and Inner Intuition', Stephenson likewise focuses on the question of the compatibility of object-dependent views of intuition and Kant's claims about the nature of the imagination. He criticises the proposal that the imagination produces merely inner intuitions whose inner objects exist and are present in the way demanded by objectdependence views. Stephenson argues that this claim is inconsistent with Kant's statements about the imagination, that it leads to problems in explaining Kant's account of memory, and that it is ultimately incompatible with the view of intuition it is supposed to support. One conclusion to be drawn from the essays by Grüne, McLear, and Stephenson is that the issue of the object-dependence of intuition is tied up with that of inner sense. This is the subject of the essays by Ralf Bader and Andrew Chignell. Kant tells us that outer sense and inner sense have different forms: space is the form of our outer sense and time is the form of our inner sense. Yet whereas space is restricted merely to outer appearances, time is the formal condition of all appearances: outer appearances themselves are also in time. In 'Inner Sense and Time', Bader provides an account of how outer appearances end up in time, arguing that outer appearances are objects of representations of which we become aware in a temporal manner by means of an act of reflexive awareness. This act of reflexive awareness ix is an act of sensibility and is to be distinguished from objective time determination, which is performed by the understanding. In 'Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism', Chignell argues first, that the representations which are given to us in inner sense must inhere in a self, and second, that the self in which inner representations inhere is cognized through inner sense. How should we think of this self? Chignell argues that Kant takes it, and must take it, to be an empirical substance in which our changing representations inhere. This conclusion poses a challenge to the standard interpretations of Kant's argument in the Refutation of Idealism. The essays by Patricia Kitcher, Jessica Leech, and Jill Vance Buroker move the focus from sensibility to the understanding. Kitcher and Leech consider the relation between selfconsciousness and judgment. In 'A Kantian Critique of Transparency', Kitcher takes as her starting point Gareth Evans's claim in The Varieties of Reference that, in self-ascribing a belief, one's eyes are directed outwards, towards the world. This 'transparency thesis' has been very influential in contemporary discussions of self-knowledge and many proponents, not least Evans himself, take it to be inspired by Kant. Kitcher argues that this is not so: Kant is opposed to the transparency thesis. For Kitcher, Kant's account of the necessary conditions for cognition entails that only a self-conscious subject can hold a belief. And she takes this to show that the basis for any self-ascription of a belief must already involve selfconsciousness on the part of the ascribing subject, in a way which belies the transparency thesis's insistence on one's eyes being directed outward. In 'Judging for Reasons: On Kant and the Modalities of Judgment', Leech takes on the relation between our capacity to judge and our more specific capacity for modal judgment. Kant connects the modality of a judgment to its location in a course of reasoning, but this seems to have the puzzling consequence that since every judgment has some modality, every judgment must occur as part of a course of reasoning. How can this be true? After considering and rejecting alternative solutions, Leech argues that it follows from the claim, also defended by Kitcher, that judgment requires one to be conscious of the grounds for one's judgment. And she traces this requirement back to Kant's views about what is required for all our representations to belong to a single unity of consciousness. Buroker's essay, 'Kant on Judging and the Will', considers the role of the will in theoretical judgment. Kant distinguishes theoretical from practical reason, but, unlike Aristotle, holds that theoretical reason is subordinate to practical reason. Does this mean that theoretical judging is a voluntary activity? That depends on the type of judgment in question. Buroker argues that Kant allows a legitimate direct use of the will in those cases of assent that lack objectively sufficient epistemic grounds and thus can be motivated by a broadly practical purpose – belief. All other of Kant's forms of assent – conviction or knowledge, persuasion, and opinion – cannot be directly influenced by the will. However, since all our theoretical x judgments take place in service of some end or other, this opens up a use we can make of the understanding in determining our epistemic practices. It is here, Buroker argues, that we find the primacy of practical over theoretical reason. The final three essays return us to the question of what we can know about the self. Ralph Walker's paper, 'Self and Selves', addresses the question of whether the atemporal status of the self can be maintained in light of the synthetic activity undertaken by the self, arguing that there is no opposition here once we correctly understand Kant's conception of time. He then argues that since the existence and activity of the self is a precondition on experience, Kant ought to allow that we can know that the self exists and is active in much the same way that we know other synthetic a priori truths. Finally, he uses this discussion of the self to consider what reason Kant could have for thinking that there are other selfconscious subjects. Walker argues that only Kant's moral philosophy justifies our recognizing other selves and it could warrant our ascribing a similar status to animals. The essays by Tobias Rosefeldt and Paul Snowdon move beyond the co-operation of sensibility and the understanding to Kant's attack on rational psychology in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. In 'Subjects of Kant's First Paralogism', Rosefeldt sets himself against interpretations of the First Paralogism on which its fallacy involves a confusion between two meanings of the term 'subject'. Instead, he argues that the transcendental illusion involved in taking ourselves to cognize ourselves as thinking substances is one which involves misinterpreting a logico-semantical feature of the representation 'I', namely its nonpredicability. He argues that this also explains Kant's claim that there is a connection between the ideas of pure reason and the progress towards the unconditioned in chains of prosyllogisms. Finally, Snowdon, in 'The Lessons of Kant's Paralogisms', asks what there is to be learned from the Paralogisms. He argues that Kant's arguments are unconvincing once we abandon Kant's commitment to transcendental idealism and his claim that we have no intuition of ourselves. Snowdon then considers P.F. Strawson's influential account of the Paralogisms in The Bounds of Sense, arguing that Strawson's more favourable reading is similarly to be rejected, resting as it does on certain unobvious conceptual assumptions. Instead, the main lesson to be learned from Kant's attack on rational psychology is that certain forms of dualist reasoning have a serious weakness, one which Kant identifies and exploits in his discussion. Together, the essays in this volume display some of the range, depth, and power of Kant's writings on topics in the philosophy of mind. We hope they will serve to stimulate further discussion of this aspect of Kant's thought, about which and from which there is still much to learn. ADG, Oxford ACS, Berlin