Kant: Rational Cosmology

I examine the extent to which God is inscrutable to human reason in Kant's critical philosophy. I argue that Kant's view here is much more radical than the rationalist commonplace that we cannot grasp how divine perfection is compatible with the existence of (apparent) imperfections. In Kant's considered view, we are absolutely incapable of accurately representing God's nature in any minimally determinate way: when we try to go beyond the empty idea of a mere 'something', we inevitably distort the nature (...) of God in an anthropomorphic fashion. The reason for this radical inscrutability of God is that our discursive intellect with its finite conceptual resources cannot capture the nature of a supremely perfect being. Our only way to form a legitimate, positive notion of God is by means of an analogy with the features that we objectively cognize in finite beings. (shrink)

In the 1780s Kant’s critique of rational cosmology clearly identified the limits of theoretical cosmology in agreement with the doctrine of transcendental idealism of space and time. However, what seems to be less explored, and remains still a desideratum for the literature, is a thorough investigation of the implications of transcendental philosophy for Kant’s view of cosmology in the 1790s. This contribution fills this gap by investigating Kant’s view of teleology and measurement in the Critique of Judgment, exploring their implications (...) for Kant’s late view of cosmology. Considering the historical and scientific context in which Kant developed his reflections motivates my proposal to read Kant’s late view of the universe in terms of “functional cosmology.” -/- . (shrink)

Kant makes a striking reference to Spinoza in the 1788 Critique of Practical Reason. This chapter begins by investigating whether Kant directly concerned himself with Spinoza, focusing on Omri Boehm's recent affirmative argument. Kant thinks the objective principle yields radical metaphysical conclusions only in conjunction with further claims about specific conditioning relations. Kant's privileging of Spinozism among realist views seems generally detached from Spinoza's actual thought. The chapter deals with points of convergence or near‐convergence between Kant and Spinoza. It identifies (...) two philosophically interesting points on which Spinoza's and Kant's views come surprisingly close: their arguments for the limitations of our sensory knowledge and their arguments for the timelessness of the mind. Spinoza's official argument for the timelessness of the mind appeals to his doctrines of the body's eternal essence, the parallel between bodies and ideas, and the identity of the human mind with God's idea of the human body. (shrink)

Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite (...) is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute. (shrink)

Elaborating on the substantial parallels between Molina’s and Kant’s attempts to reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge and natural causal determinism respectively, my aim is to establish a proper historical connection as well. Leibniz is shown to be the crucial mediator in two respects: (i) Kant knew Molina’s account of divine knowledge in general in its Leibnizian version through Baumgarten’s Metaphysica. In this work, scientia media plays no role in the explication as to how God knows absolute future contingents. (ii) (...) In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant resorted to doctrines similar to Molina’s in his criticism of Leibniz’s alternative explication which drew on complete concepts of monads. (shrink)

To many readers, it has seemed that Kant's discussion of the relation between practical and transcendental freedom in the Transcendental Dialectic is inconsistent with his discussion of the same relation in the Canon of Pure Reason. In this paper I argue for a novel way of preserving the consistency of Kant's view: in both the Dialectic and the Canon, 'transcendental freedom' requires the absence of determination by all natural causes, whereas 'practical freedom' requires the absence of determination by, specifically, sensuous (...) incentives. However, I argue that the defense of freedom presented in the Canon is abandoned by Kant in the Groundwork when he first develops his conception of the absolute purity of moral motivation. (shrink)

In this paper, I will show to what extent we can use our modern understanding of the Square of Opposition in order to make sense of Kant 's double standard solution to the cosmological antinomies. Notoriously, for Kant, both theses and antitheses of the mathematical antinomies are false, while both theses and antitheses of the dynamical antinomies are true. Kantian philosophers and interpreters have criticized Kant 's solution as artificial and prejudicial. In the paper, I do not dispute such claims, (...) but I show that our modern understanding of the Square of Opposition enables us to more naturally deliver the result Kant was aiming at. Accordingly, the paper does not pretend to be exegetically accurate. It is an attempt to revise the antinomies with the help of standard classical logic. And although such a revision entails some re-interpretation, in the end, it will actually help to unveil some of Kant 's thoughts. (shrink)

Available for the first time in English, this critical translation draws from the original seven Latin editions and Georg Friedrich Meier's 18th-century German translation. Together with a historical and philosophical introduction, extensive glossaries and notes, the text is supported by translations of Kant's elucidations and notes, Eberhard's insertions in the 1783 German edition and texts from the writings of Meier and Wolff. For scholars of Kant, the German Enlightenment and the history of metaphysics, Alexander Baumgarten's Metaphysics is an essential, authoritative (...) resource to a significant philosophical text. (shrink)

A clear and concise account of the metaphysical concept of world, its possibilities and limitations, from Kant to Derrida.

This paper describes a “double move“ made by Maimonides, Kant, and Hermann Cohen when they simultaneously dismiss and resolve the cosmological problem of the origin of the universe in time in order to represent creation as a moral issue. Maimonides claims to lack a compelling metaphysical argument regarding creation. However, a reading of Maimonides inspired by the views of Hermann Cohen finds him to be a Platonist who accepts creation from absolute privation so as to establish a moral world in (...) which revelation establishes a correlation between humans and God. For Kant, metaphysics also cannot address the origin of the universe, but he positively describes the regress towards the origin as indeterminately large to derive the unconditioned ideal of reason that supports the regulative use of reason. Cohen, therefore, follows the precedents set by Maimonides and Kant when he claims that the Jewish concept of creation is an ethical and logical problem rather than a cosmological one, even though his account of creation presupposes his era's dominant scientific model of the eternity of the universe. (shrink)

Scholars commonly assume that Kant never seriously engaged with Spinoza or Spinozism. However, in his later writings Kant argues several times that Spinozism is the most consistent form of transcendental realism. In the first part of the paper, I argue that the first Antinomy, debating the age and size of the world, already reflects Kant's confrontation with Spinozist metaphysics. Specifically, the position articulated in the Antithesis ? according to which the world is infinite and uncreated ? is Spinozist, not Leibnizian, (...) as commonly assumed. In the second part of the paper, I raise the chief Spinozist challenge to the Antinomy, arising from Spinoza's reliance on a cosmological `totum analyticum' ? an infinite whole which is prior to its parts. In conclusion, I begin to elaborate a defence of the Kantian position, confronting Spinoza's infinite whole with Kant's account of the absolutely infinite in his discussion of the sublime. (shrink)

Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this (...) debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant’s relationship to Hume sketched above. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with Graham Bird’s treatment, in The Revolutionary Kant, of Kant’s mathematical antinomies. On Bird’s interpretation, our error in these antinomies is to think that we can settle certain issues about the limits of physical reality by pure reason whereas in fact we cannot settle them at all. On the rival interpretation advocated in this essay, it is not true that we cannot settle these issues. Our error is to presuppose that the concept of the unconditioned has (...) application to physical reality. Once this presupposition has been abandoned, we can retrieve sound arguments from the antinomies, not indeed to demonstrate that the views originally being defended are correct, but to demonstrate that the views originally being attacked are incorrect. The essay concludes with some comments concerning how this disagreement relates to a broader disagreement about the best way to understand Kant. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the genesis of Kant’s conception of a realm of ends, arguing that Kant first started to think of morality in terms of striving to be a member of a realm of ends, understood as an ideal community, in the early 1760s, and that he was influenced in this by his encounter with the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. In 1766 Kant published Dreams of a Spirit Seer, a commentary on Swedenborg’s magnum opus, Heavenly Secrets. Most commentators (...) take Kant’s attitude towards Swedenborg to have been entirely negative, and argue that, at the most, Kant’s encounter with him had a purely negative impact on Kant’s development, inducing him to reject certain of his early metaphysical positions. I argue, in contrast, that Swedenborg had a positive influence on Kant’s development, particularly on his ethics, for Kant’s conception of a realm of ends is modeled on Swedenborg’s conception of heaven as a community of spirits governed by moral laws. (shrink)

In his Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant presents four antinomies. In his attempt to solve the first of these antinomies he examines and analyzes "thesis" and "antithesis" more thoroughly and employs the terms `part', `whole' and `boundary' in his argumentation for their validity. According to Kant, the whole problem surrounding the antinomy was caused by applying the concept of the world to nature and then using both terms interchangeably. While interesting, this solution is still not that much more than (...) a well thought out idea if it does not also include an adequate formal explication. Since the aforementioned terms all have counterparts in modern mereotopology, a discipline that has seen significant progress in recent times, we will apply these concepts to Kant's analysis in an attempt to evaluate Kant's solution in light of modern analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Kant and Leibniz are interested in explaining how a number of individuals can come together and form a single unified composite substance. Leibniz does not have a convincing account of how this is possible. In his pre-critical writings and in his later metaphysics lectures, Kant is committed to the claim that the idea of a world is the idea of a real whole, and hence is the idea of a composite substance. This metaphysical idea is taken over into his ethical (...) writings and becomes the idea of a realm of ends. I explain why a realm of ends, should be thought of as both a unum per se and as a real whole. A realm of ends is a whole of individuals unified by laws they have given themselves, that is, it is a community of autonomous individuals. Only such a community can be thought of as a composite individual. Such a whole will be real rather than ideal because the source of the unity of the whole is intrinsic to the whole, for what gives unity to the realm are laws and the sources of the laws are the individual members of the whole. It will be a unum per se because both the laws and the individuals constituting the realm are incomplete without one another. If this reading is correct, this requires a fundamental reevaluation of Kant’s notion of autonomy. To be autonomous is not, primarily, to be understood in terms of ruling oneself, but instead must be thought of primarily in terms of being a generative source of laws for an ideal community. (shrink)

In the second half of the 18th century the voices criticizing the concept of simple substances as proposed by Leibniz and Wolff became increasingly louder. In response, Kant altered his theory of substances as first proposed in the 1750s. So for example, while his notion of substance in the Monadologia physica is simple and not merely in space, but fills space entirely, the Kantian position in the 1760s and early 1770s is quite different. This essay examines the solution Kant offers (...) in his Inaugural Dissertation for the problems raised by critics of simple substances. It shows how Kant removes substance from space and consequently from the empirical world and makes it into a concept of the understanding which leads to the knowledge of simple substances by employment of the pure understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, I want to look at the way in which Deleuze's reading of Kant's transcendental dialectic influences some of the key thèmes of Différence and Répétition. As we shall see, in the transcendental dialectic, Kant takes the step of claiming that reason, in its natural functioning, is prone to misadventures. Whereas for Descartes, for instance, error takes place between two faculties, such as when reason (wrongly) infers that a stick in water is bent on the basis of sensé (...) impressions, Kant postulâtes that reason générâtes illusions internally purely in the course of its natural function. It is thèse illusions which lead reason into antinomy, as on the basis of thèse illusions, it is led to posit an illegitimate concept of the world as a totality. Further, for Kant, the antinomies represent an indirect proof of transcendental idealism, as it is only with the additional assumption of the noumenon, as that which falls outside of appearance, that we are able to résolve the antinomies. Deleuze's work on the image of thought clearly owes a great deal to Kant's theory of transcendental illusion, but the connections between Kant's transcendental dialectic and the structure of Différence and Répétition go deeper than this. Whereas Kant's problem is that reason générâtes contradictions when it assumes that the unconditioned can be given to reason, Deleuze's problem is the impossibility of developing a concept of différence within représentation. Between thèse two problems, there are significant structural parallels - in particular, the attempt to think outside the dichotomy of the finite and the infinité, and the attempt to prevent the application of spatio-temporal predicates to the noumenon. The antinomy of représentation for Deleuze is the inability of représentation to think différence apart from as purely representational or as undifferenciated abyss. As we shall see, Deleuze gives an explanation of this antinomy in terms of the differential calculus, and the notion of the differential in particular. While thèse parallels exist between Kant and Deleuze's thought, there are also some important différences. Although the differential is not determined in relation to représentation, this does not mean that it lacks ail détermination. This opens up a possibility not available in Kant's philosophy, that is, a thinking beyond the limit of représentation. As we shall see, Kant closes off this possibility by giving reason a heuristic function which in effect reinstates représentation. Kant makes this move precisely because the lack of spatiotemporal déterminations of the noumenal means for Kant that the noumenal lacks déterminations altogether. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, in a chapter of the Transcendental Dialectic entitled "The Antinomy of Pure Reason," Kant addresses the question whether a thoroughgoing mechanistic determinism is reconcilable with the ascription of free agency to human beings. In the third antinomy, reason is shown to be divided against itself insofar as both of two competing, and seemingly irreconcilable claims, can be justified on independent grounds; on the one hand, the claim that everything in nature proceeds according to the (...) law of causality - that every event is determined by antecedent events and causal laws; on the other hand, the claim that agents act freely, i.e., that there are some occurrences, namely human actions, which cannot be accounted for by antecedent states or events and causal laws. (shrink)

For Kant, both morality and the possibility of objective knowledge presuppose freedom. His theory of freedom is based on the distinction between phenomena and noumena, concepts which represent two different ways of viewing things. The question, however, is whether it is justified to take the noumenal perspective in addition to the phenomenal one. Isn’t freedom an illusion, if we regard ourselves as free, while in fact we are not? The crux of the problem lies in recognizing that there is no (...) objective fact as far as freedom is concerned, for objective fact is a category that belongs to the phenomenal world. Nevertheless, it is argued that freedom must be presupposed in order to account for the objectivity of the phenomenal world as a whole. (shrink)

Kant says patently conflicting things about infinity and our grasp of it. Infinite space is a good case in point. In his solution to the First Antinomy, he denies that we can grasp the spatial universe as infinite, and therefore that this universe can be infinite; while in the Aesthetic he says just the opposite: ‘Space is represented as a given infinite magnitude’ (A25/B39). And he rests these upon consistently opposite grounds. In the Antinomy we are told that we can (...) have no intuitive grasp of an infinite space, and in the Aesthetic he says that our grasp of infinite space is precisely intuitive. (shrink)

" L'énigme, c'est précisément qu'il semble évident que le monde existe pour nous. " C'est à cette énigme que se confronte Kant dès ses premiers écrits. Le projet critique de Kant prend son origine dans la critique de la cosmologie classique. A chaque étape de son développement, des écrits pré-critiques à l'Opus postumum, le rapport au monde est spécifié, que ce soit du point de vue de la sensibilité, de la connaissance ou de la morale. Avec Kant s'ouvre un nouvel (...) horizon pour l'homme, comme " habitant du monde ". Le monde moral et surtout le concept de liberté dont l'origine est cosmologique prennent une nouvelle dimension et se substituent à un hypothétique " monde intelligible ". C'est l'occasion pour Michaël Foessel de revisiter la " maison Kant " dans ses coins et recoins, de mettre à l'épreuve la rationalité de l'édifice, dans une confrontation féconde entre Kant, Husserl et Heidegger. Une lecture forte et vivifiante. (shrink)

The central questions in this study are: What does Kant consider the essence of the dispute between Rationalists and Realist Empiricists which he titles the “Second Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas?” Why does he believe it supports such wider aims of the Critical Philosophy as: showing the impossibility of a Transcendental Realist explanation of the spatiotemporal world, which amounts to an indirect proof of Transcendental Idealism ; being the only means for detecting the transcendental illusion which leads to Transcendental Realism (...) and convincing us to give it up ); demonstrating the defeat of theoretical reason in its highest aim – the systematization of knowledge under one concept – thus turning us toward practical reason as the only venue where reason's demand for the unconditioned can be satisfied? (shrink)

It is well known that the modern atomists assumed the ancient thesis that things are composed of simple entities. It is also known that Leibniz went beyond atomism, since he affirmed that the true substances on which things are founded, the so-called monads, cannot be divisible or extended, for they are souls. For Christian Wolff, the elements of bodies are not extended; these elements have no figure and no magnitude whatsoever, they fill no space and are indivisible. In the Monadologia (...) physica, published in 1756, Kant also argues that the ultimate principles of bodies are the monads or simple substances. The goal of this work is to reconcile the confronted positions of “metaphysics” and “geometry”. (shrink)

This paper discusses an apparent contrast between Kant’s accounts of the mathematical antinomies in the first Critique and in the Prolegomena. The Critique claims that the antitheses are infinite judgements. The Prolegomena seem to claim that they are negative judgements. For the Critique, theses and antitheses are false because they presuppose that the world has a determinate magnitude, and this is not the case. For the Prolegomena, theses and antitheses are false because they presuppose an inconsistent notion of world. The (...) paper argues that the contrast between the two works is only apparent, and provides an interpretation which removes it. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to confirm that it was Hamann's translation of Hume's "Treatise" (I.4.7) which triggered Kant's critical turn in 1768/69. If this is indeed so, then Kant's inaugural dissertation must be reassessed, in particular the doctrine, to be found there, that we have cognitive access to the intelligible world. This doctrine is part of a strategy for tackling the problem highlighted by Hume; that there may be conflicting principles at work in the human mind, i.e., an (...) antinomy. The dissertation's strategy failed and so raised the question of how categories can refer to objects. (shrink)

This book offers an important reappraisal of Schelling's philosophy and his relationship to German Idealism. Focusing on Schelling's self-critique in early identity philosophy the author rejects those criticisms of Schelling made by both Hegel and Heidegger. This work significantly redraws the boundaries of metaphysical thinking, arguing for a dialogue between rational philosophy, mythology and cosmology.

I pursue a suggestion by Kreimendahl according to which it was Hamann's translation of Section I.4.7 of Hume's "Treatise" which triggered Kant's critical turn in 1768/69. In the section Hume put forward the idea that the principles at work in the human mind might be radically at odds with each other, i.e., that there might be an "antinomy" in the original meaning of the word. My claims are (i) that in his dissertation Kant attempted to solve the problem of antinomy (...) and (ii) that the question as to how categories can refer to objects was raised by the strategy adopted there. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that the _Physical Monadology of 1756 has to be seen as an attempt to evade the same paradox as the one given in the second antinomy of the _Critique of Pure Reason. Since this attempt presupposes the claim that space rests upon relations between substances, it contradicts the thesis that it is a mere form of intuition, presented by Kant in his dissertation of 1770. Therefore, at least since 1770 the paradox of the divisibility (...) of matter rose up again so that Kant had to deal with it once again in his first _Critique. Remarkably, his key to solve the second antinomy is the same which ruled out his earlier solution of 1756 and gave rise to the paradox again, i.e., the ideality of space and time. But, contrary to the dissertation, in the _Critique it is substituted by the doctrine that our knowledge of objects depends on and is restricted to intuitively given objects and this is crucial to the solution of the second antinomy. Finally, it will be shown how Kant deals with the problem of the divisibility of matter in the _Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. (shrink)

Unlocking the Second Antinomy: Kant and Wolff MICHAEL RADNER But how in this business can metaphysics be reconciled with geometry, when it seems easier to mate griffins with horses than to unite transcendental philosophy with geometry?' Kant, x756 THE SECOND ANTINOMY, treating the proof and refutation of bodies as composed of simple substances, is one of the more puzzling sections of the Critique of Pure Reason. The thesis argument especially baffles commentators. Edward Caird in t 889 said: "Kant's statement of (...) this argument is very obscure."Among commen- tators of our era, T. E. Wilkerson complains: "This argument is very muddy." Jonathan Bennett remarks: "The text, however, is not clear enough for us to be sure exactly what Kant is relying on in his argument for the Thesis. "~ Nor have commentators spared the antithesis argument. No one, to my knowledge, has interpreted the text so that the thesis and antithesis arguments come out valid and constitute a genuine antinomy. Yet Kant stated on more than one occasion that all the antinomy arguments are valid. The proofs "are not deceptions, but are well-founded, under the supposition that appearances or a sensible world which comprehends them all are things in themselves" .3 In the Prolego- "Physical Monadology," in Kant's Latin Writings: Translations, Commentaries, and Notes, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck, Mary J. Gregor, Roll Meerbote and John A. Reuscher , ll6; Ak.. (shrink)

An interpretation of Kant's first antinomy is defended whereby both its thesis and its antithesis depend on a common basic principle that Kant endorses, namely that there cannot be an ‘infinite contingency’, by which is meant a contingent fact about how an infinite region of space or time is occupied. The greatest problem with this interpretation is that Kant explicitly declines to apply counterparts of the temporal arguments in the antinomy to the world’s future, even though, if the interpretation is (...) correct, such arguments are clearly there to be applied. This problem, it is argued, is surmountable. (shrink)

A common reaction to Hegel’s suggestion that we collapse Kant’s distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as Kant (...) conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel’s critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel’s idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant’s dichotomy between form and content or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect—does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre-Critical metaphysics. This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more seriously. (shrink)