Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology

Kant’s account of practical justification for belief has attracted much attention in the literature, especially in recent years. In this context, scholars have generally emphasized the originality of Kant’s thought about belief (Glaube), and Kant indeed offers a definition of belief that is very different from views that were prevalent in eighteenth-century Germany. In this article, however, I argue that it is very likely that Christian August Crusius exerted influence on Kant’s definition of belief and his account of practical justification. (...) In turn, acknowledging this influence has relevant consequences for how we understand the phenomenology of Kantian belief. (shrink)

Despite Conger’s classic view that one can find very little of the microcosmic doctrine in any of the Idealists, the paper argues that Kant develops several little known microcosmic doctrines over the course of his development from his first Critique to his second Critiqueto his Opus Postumum and that these are intimately connected with his various notions of “transcendental” philosophy. First, the roots of the microcosmic doctrine in Plato are explored. Second, Kant’s most basic microcosmic doctrine and its connection with (...) his “faculty psychology” notion of transcendental philosophy in the first Critique are explored. Third, it is explained why, contrary to Conger, the Idealist tradition is a natural home for microcosmic doctrines. Fourth, Kant’s moral microcosmic doctrine, which is implicit in the “starry heavens” remark in the conclusion to second Critique and related remarks in the Opus Postumum, is discussed in some detail. This includes a discussion of the microcosmic doctrines in the Stoics. Fifth, it is shown how Kant’s various microcosmic doctrines shed considerable light on his evolving conception of transcendental philosophy from his first Critique to his final statement in the Opus Postumum. (shrink)

Kant argues in the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment that the first stage in resolving the problem of teleology is conceiving it correctly. He explains that the conflict between mechanism and teleology, properly conceived, is an antinomy of the power of judgment in its reflective use regarding regulative maxims, and not an antinomy of the power of judgment in its determining use regarding constitutive principles. The matter in hand does not concern objective propositions regarding the possibility of objects (...) or actual features of certain objects, namely, organisms. It is rather a methodological issue as to the appropriate way to explain the generation, development, and function of organisms. Taken in this manner as subjective maxims guiding the explanation and inquiry of organisms, the principles of mechanism and teleology need not necessarily be seen as contradictorily opposed but instead can be combined in the study of organisms. This, however, is not enough to complete the analysis of the antinomy of the teleological power of judgment. In order to show that there is an antinomy in this case, Kant has to establish that both seemingly conflicting maxims are necessary and natural to the human mind. He does it by grounding them in the ‘special character’ or peculiarity (Eigentümlichkeit) of the human understanding. However, it is not entirely clear just what exactly this peculiarity of the human understanding is. Paul Guyer argues that Kant suggests two different accounts of the peculiarity of the human intellect. According to one account, this peculiarity consists in the fact that our understanding forms general concepts and according to another, in its propensity to proceed from the parts to the whole. I will argue in this paper that Kant puts forward a single account, in which the combination of these two features demonstrate the peculiarity of the human understanding manifested in the encounter with organisms. This account explains the necessity of the regulative maxims of mechanism and teleology, and thus completes Kant’s analysis of the antinomy of the teleological power of judgment. (shrink)

Nel suo "Il canone minore", Rocco Ronchi descrive il tentativo compiuto da quelle figure, sovente eretiche del pensiero rispetto a quello che l’autore individua come canone maggiore, che nel corso della storia della filosofia hanno pensato davvero l'immanenza dell’assoluto o, che è lo stesso, l’univocità dell’essere sul piano degli enti di natura. Nell’esigenza fondamentalmente speculativa e per ciò stesso anti-moderna della filosofia, ciò che si dà a vedere quale dato immediato dell’intuizione è un'equivalenza solo apparentemente innocua, ma in realtà profondamente (...) perturbante e traumatica: immanenza assoluta = natura. (shrink)

Discussione a partire dal libro di Giorgio Agamben "Karman. Breve trattato sull'azione, la colpa e il gesto", Bollati Boringhieri, 2017.

Although personal being plays an important role in G.W.F. Hegel's (1770–1831) philosophy he never provided a comprehensive definition of personality. Within the framework of his works it is thus possible to formulate different definitions of person and personality, and several conflicting definitions were presented among Hegelians during the 1830s and 1840s. In this paper I examine the role of personality in Hegel's system and discuss the relationship between personality and metaphysics. The question shall be analyzed in the context of various (...) works by Hegel and contrasted with two important precursors of Hegel, I. Kant (1724–1804) and J.G. Fichte (1762–1814). I shall also put the philosophy of Finnish Hegelian J.V. Snellman (1806–81) under scrutiny. The paper will indicate the importance of logic for Hegelian metaphysics and for Hegelian conception of personality. (shrink)

While it is well known that Kant’s transcendental idealism forbids the transcendent use of reason and its ideas, what had been underexplored until the last decade or so is his account of the positive use of reason’s ideas as it is expounded in the “Appendix” of the Critique of Pure Reason. The main difficulty faced by his account is that while there is no doubt that for Kant we need to rely on the ideas of reason in order to gain (...) knowledge of the empirical world, the justificatory grounds for our use remain unclear. Commentators have suggested various ways of addressing this worry. Some emphasize that reason’s demand for systematicity is purely methodological; others that the assumption that nature itself is systematically unified is transcendentally necessary. Some simply deem Kant’s account “extremely self-contradictory.” What is clear is that if neither the presupposition of nature’s systematic unity nor the command to seek this unity have any justification, reason’s regulative function, which plays a crucial role in Kant’s account of cognition, also lacks justification. This would be a disastrous result, for it would threaten the very possibility of cognition and its progress. This chapter proposes to tackle this problem from a new angle by exploring the role of reason’s feelings in Kant’s account. While the relationship between practical reason and feeling has been explored at length in the literature, the relationship between theoretical reason and feeling has not, and my aim is to suggest that doing so can shed new light on reason’s cognitive activity. For focusing on the fact that theoretical reason’s need manifests itself as a feeling will enable me to reassess how this need is met through reason’s regulative use of its ideas. (shrink)

Lucy Allais’s Manifest Reality offers an attractive new interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Kantian appearances are known through essentially manifest properties, but those properties are construed as belonging ultimately to things in themselves with intrinsic natures. This position can offer a nice account of the sense in which appearances and things in themselves are identical and a metaphysically plausible way to construe appearances as strictly partially mind-dependent. The position is less convincing when it comes to explaining the sense in which (...) appearances and things in themselves remain non-identical. I argue that such a non-identity thesis was in fact crucial to Kant’s use of idealism to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, to his account of the apriority of the representation of space, and to his anti-Leibnizian point that our mathematical and scientific cognition provides not confused representation of underlying things in themselves, but perfectly exact and strictly true cognition of something else. In closing, I suggest that the hylomorphic nature of Kant’s idealism points toward an alternative conception of the partial mind-dependence of appearances. (shrink)

The Kantian project of investigating the necessary structure of experience presupposes answers to three questions: what is the purpose of such an investigation, what is the source of necessary features of experience, and by what means is it possible to establish the necessary structure of experience? This paper is a critical examination of Strawson's answers to these questions in The Bounds of Sense and his later work. The realism that is implicit in The Bounds of Sense is much more explicit (...) in Strawson's later work but relies on problematic assumptions about the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

The Kantian project of investigating the necessary structure of experience presupposes answers to three questions: what is the purpose of such an investigation, what is the source of necessary features of experience, and by what means is it possible to establish the necessary structure of experience? This paper is a critical examination of Strawson's answers to these questions in The Bounds of Sense and his later work. The realism that is implicit in The Bounds of Sense is much more explicit (...) in Strawson's later work but relies on problematic assumptions about the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the criticism of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant put forward by Quentin Meillassoux under the charge of ‘correlationism.’ It uses Meillassoux’s interpretation of Kant as a starting point to develop an alternative interpretation in which space plays a central role within Kant’s thought, thus contributing to the wider philosophy of space. The argument progresses through an analysis of the three stages of dogmatism, skepticism and Criticism, which are central to Kant’s thought and which Meillassoux attempts to circumvent. (...) It demonstrates how Kant develops his Critical philosophy through a rejection of dogmatism as a commitment to the principle of sufficient reason, which is reconfigured using the insights of Hume’s skepticism. Thus the system outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason is at heart a temporal philosophy, in which the principle of sufficient reason is reconceptualized in terms of the issue of timedetermination. Meillassoux’s alternative system of ‘speculative materialism,’ it is argued, proceeds along the same path: Criticizing the principle of sufficient reason and reconfiguring it through the insights of Hume’s skeptical problematization of induction, in order to assert a temporal philosophy based upon the ‘hyper-chaos’ of the ‘principle of unreason.’ However, with this unexpected parallel between Kant and Meillassoux in regard to the issue of time, the problematic role of space also becomes apparent. Meillassoux’s temporal philosophy is disrupted by his use of the spatial metaphor to fully express the features of time that he sets out, and thus space becomes a point of tension within his temporal system of ‘speculative materialism.’ Working back through the parallel between Meillassoux and Kant reveals that the role of space and its connection to time is also a problematic point of tension within Kant’s Critical philosophy and one that is central to his reworking of the Critique of Pure Reason for the 1787 B-Edition. Thus, through a detailed interpretation of the Critical philosophy, and especially its role in the Refutation of Idealism added to the B-Edition, the centrality of space within Kant’s system is reasserted and evaluated. This recognition of the importance of space and its relation to time within Kant’s system also provides the means to reassess Meillassoux’s criticism of Kant as a ‘correlationist’ and recast the debate between idealism and realism in the history of post-Kantian philosophy terms of the roles and relations of time and space. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new nonconceptual reading of the B-Deduction. As Hanna correctly remarks :399–415, 2011: 405), the word “cognition” has in both editions of the first Critique a wide sense, meaning nonconceptual cognition, and a narrow meaning, in Kant’s own words “an objective perception”. To be sure, Kant assumes the first meaning to account for why the Deduction is unavoidable. And if we take this meaning as a premise of the B-Deduction, then there is a gap in (...) the argument since the categories are certainly not conditions for non-conceptual cognition. Still, I believe it is not this wide meaning but rather the narrow one that figures in any premise of the B-Deduction. Thus, in the reading that I am proposing, categories are not conditions for representing something, or even conditions for representing something objectively. Instead, they are conditions for the recognition that what we represent through the senses exists mind-independently. In the first step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the propositional thinking that the nonconceptually represented object of the sensible intuition exists objectively. In contrast, in the second step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the apprehension of what our human senses represent nonconceptually as existing objectively. (shrink)

The essays collected in this volume by Paul Guyer, one of the world's foremost Kant scholars, explore Kant's attempt to develop a morality grounded on the intrinsic and unconditional value of the human freedom to set our own ends. When regulated by the principle that the freedom of all is equally valuable, the freedom to set our own ends -- what Kant calls "humanity" - becomes what he calls autonomy. These essays explore Kant's strategies for establishing the premise that freedom (...) is the inner worth of the world or the essential end of humankind, as he says, and for deriving the specific duties that fundamental principle of morality generates in the empirical circumstances of human existence. The Virtues of Freedom further investigates Kant's attempts to prove that we are always free to live up to this moral ideal, that is, that we have free will no matter what, as well as his more successful explorations of the ways in which our natural tendencies to be moral -- dispositions to the feeling of respect and more specific feelings such as love and self-esteem -- can and must be cultivated and educated. Guyer finally examines the various models of human community that Kant develops from his premise that our associations must be based on the value of freedom for all. The contrasts but also similarities of Kant's moral philosophy to that of David Hume but many of his other predecessors and contemporaries, such as Stoics and Epicureans, Pufendorf and Wolff, Hutcheson, Kames, and Smith, are also explored. (shrink)

If we are to understand the complex relationship between Bergson and Kant, we must not approach the former’s philosophy as if it could only be either pre-critical or post-Kantian. Instead, the present essay seeks to shed light on this relationship by treating Kant as another “missing precursor of Bergson.” In Bergson’s eyes, Kant, like Descartes, contains two possible paths for philosophy, which reflect the two fundamental tendencies that are mixed together in the élan vital and continued in humankind: intuition and (...) intelligence. Bergson breaks with Kant from the interior of his philosophy, which he divides into two Kantianisms: the one, which he rejects as ancient, and the other, which he appropriates. What the analysis of this Bergsonian appropriation of Kant reveals, however, is not the existence of a latent Bergsonism in Kant, but rather the recovery of a Kantianism that is completed in Bergson—a Kantianism that embarked down a path that Kant himself, who held himself back from following it in order to dispense with all “intellectual” intuition, had only sketched. Thus, if Bergson is to be believed, an intuitive metaphysics, which installs itself in pure duration, is neither below nor beyond Kantian critique, but can pass through it, can traverse it in its entirety, since it proposes to surpass it, to prolong it following the path that Kant himself had cleared in order to fulfill its suppressed virtualities. (shrink)

This article considers the significance of Kant’s schematized categories in the Critique of Pure Reason for contemporary metaphysics. I present Kant’s understanding of the schematism and how it functions within his critique of the limits of pure reason. Then I argue that, although the true role of the schemata is a relatively late development in Kant’s thought, it is nevertheless a core notion, and the central task of the first Critique can be sufficiently articulated in the language of the schematism. (...) A surprising result of Kant’s doctrine of the schematism is that a limited form of metaphysics is possible even within the parameters set out in the first Critique. To show this, I offer contrasting examples of legitimate and illegitimate forays into metaphysics in light of the condition of the schematized categories. (shrink)

Bolzano's position on logic and his theory of sentences-in-themselves and their analysis, as well as his position on existence statements and subjective representations show a striking and profound similarity to Frege's theory of thoughts, his analysis of propositions, representations and judgment, as well as his position on the nature of logic in general. Bolzano's theories on these points, therefore, may well have been seminal to the development of Frege's position.

Immanuel Kant is better known as a philosopher but in the pre-critical period he studied in a very deep way many aspects of the natural sciences and that’s why the new volume of the English edition of Kant’s works is devoted to the publications of Kant’s writings on natural science. This massive volume is edited by Erik Watkins and Kant’s writing are translated by Lewis White Back, Jeffrey B. Edwards, Olaf Reinhardt, Martin Schönfeld and Erik Watkins.

Spontaneity – understood as an action of the mind or will that is not determined by a prior external stimulus – is a theme that resonates throughout Immanuel Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Though spontaneity and the concomitant notion of freedom lie at the foundation of many of Kant's most pivotal theses and arguments regarding cognition, judgment, and moral action, spontaneity and freedom themselves often remain cloaked in mystery, or accessible only via transcendental argument. This volume brings together a distinguished (...) group of scholars who explore the nature of freedom and spontaneity, the arguments Kant offers surrounding these concepts, and their place in Kant's larger philosophical system. The collection will be of interest to scholars interested in any aspect of Kant's philosophy, especially those who hope to gain a deeper insight into these fundamental Kantian ideas. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 683-713.

The activity of thinking has been traditionally set against the risk of error and its concomitants: inconsistency, incoherence, the false. Philosophy pursues and protects the truth; such is its mission statement. But this is, for Deleuze, an inadequate conception that gives us the image of a thought so weak, so thin and impoverished, that everything happens as if from the outside. What, asks Deleuze, of stupidity? How are we to account for it transcendentally? In his attempt at an answer, Deleuze (...) draws directly from Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, though without clearly articulating either the form of Schelling’s concepts or presenting how exactly they are supposed to account transcendentally for stupidity. Further still, Deleuze seems implicitly to recapitulate—to the serious detriment of his conceptual schematic, as Derrida famously claimed in The Beast & the Sovereign—Schelling’s belief in a freedom that is solely human, and therefore the refusal of a capacity for stupidity to the animal as well. The present article intervenes here, reconstructing the Schellingian concepts necessary to an understanding of Deleuze’s theory, and sketching in conclusion the possibility of a revised account that need not stratify itself so straightforwardly along the human/animal divide. (shrink)

I The Kantian notion of ‘affection’ is indeed problematic and obscure. In so far as the subject is finite and does not create the object of knowledge, the latter must always be somehow given. The passive faculty of sensibility makes it possible for the object to appear. But this receptive character of the subject correlates to some affection. Something affects us, and our sensibility receives this affection under the pure forms of space and time. The question that immediately arises is (...) what performs the action of affecting. And any answer, in the theoretical framework of the transcendental idealism, is always troubling. If we say that the thing in itself affects us, we are speaking about something that is not cognoscible. If we say that the object performs the action of affecting, we are considering that the sensation that is involved in every experience is, at the same time, a result of an affection produced by the object of experience. (shrink)