Kant's Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks with Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Ethics as one of the most important works of moral philosophy ever written. In Moral Law, Kant argues that a human action is only morally good if it is done from a sense of duty, and that a duty is a formal principle based not on self-interest or from a consideration of what results might follow. From this he derived his famous and controversial (...) maxim, the categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature." H. J. Paton's translation remains the standard in English for this work. It retains all of Kant's liveliness of mind, suppressed intellectual excitement, moral earnestness, and pleasure in words. The commentary and detailed analysis that Paton provides is an invaluable and necessary guide for the student and general reader. (shrink)

This seminal contribution to Kant studies, originally published in 1982, was the first to present a thorough survey and evaluation of Kant's theory of mind. Ameriks focuses on Kant's discussion of the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason, and examines how the themes raised there are treated in the rest of Kant's writings. Ameriks demonstrates that Kant developed a theory of mind that is much more rationalistic and defensible than most interpreters have allowed.

Sally Sedgwick presents a fresh account of Hegel's critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy. She argues that Hegel offers a compelling critique of and alternative to the conception of cognition that Kant defended in his 'Critical' period, and explores Hegel's claim to derive from Kantian doctrines clues to a superior form of idealism.

In the first part of this chapter, I summarise some of the issues in the philosophy of mind which are addressed in Kant’s Critical writings. In the second part, I chart some of the ways in which that discussion influenced twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind and identify some of the themes which characterise Kantian approaches in the philosophy of mind.

In the 20th century, the role of the unconscious in Kant s philosophy has been in great part neglected by Kant scholars. Nevertheless, the unconscious, the other of consciousness, is a key problem of the critical philosophy. The purpose of the volume is to fill a substantial gap in Kant research and to offer a complete survey of the topic in different areas of research, such as history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral (...) class='Hi'>philosophy, and anthropology. ". (shrink)

New Ukrainian translation of the Preface to the famous Immanuel Kant`s Cri­tique of Pure Reason. Translator Yurii Fedorchenko emphasizes the correctness of the translation of certain propositions of the original text, as well as the adequacy of the reader’s understanding and, accordingly, the need for a correct translation of certain terms of Kant’s philosophy, such as “Vermögen”, “Gebrauch”, “Anwendung”, “Ausführlichkeit”, “ Ziel”, “Zweck”, etc. This translation is accompanied by an analyti­cal article by the translator, which is posted above in (...) the same issue of the magazine “Philosophy of Education”. (shrink)

An extended philosophical analysis of the concept of judgement, important in many areas of contemporary philosophy, including epistemology, the philosophy of value and aesthetics.Kant's philosophy understands judgement in different ways in the cognition of nature, the appreciation of natural beauty, and in the determination of moral action. This book aims to explore these three 'philosophies' of judgement, producing in the process a new and creative reading of Kant's work. The result is a unique book-length study (...) of judgement in general. At the core of this reading is an interpretation of how Kant understands reflection, presentation and activity. Novel aspects include accounts of the transcendental object, the implications of considering cognition as an activity, the structure of sensible givenness, Kant on the sublime, and the moral argument.The book draws upon ideas from within the Continental philosophy tradition, particularly from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. To Nietzsche there is devoted a whole chapter on the subject of sensation and physics, which aims to expand upon and illuminate parallel discussions in the reading of Kant. Readers will find much of interest in this wide-ranging text, including treatments of key features in Kant's epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of religion as well as his practical philosophy.Features* The first book to consider Kant's account of judgement in general.* A unique interpretation of Kant, employing philosophers in the Continental tradition - e.g Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze.* Contains a sustained study of Nietzsche on the subject of sensation and physics. (shrink)

This book argues that Kant's transcendental idealism has been misinterpreted: it denies not simply the super-sensory reality of space, time, and appearances, but their reality outside imagination as well. After adducing extensive and explicit textual evidence in its favor, Waxman shows this interpretation to be essential to the Transcendental Deduction, the affirmation of things in themselves, and the attempt to surmount Hume's scepticism. He further argues that Kant's much-neglected claim that, besides himself, "no psychologist has so much as (...) even thought that the imagination might be a necessary constituent of perception," should be construed so that even our consciousness of sensation itself (visual, tactile, etc.) is impossible without imagination. A compelling and original contribution to Kantian scholarship, Kant's Model of the Mind will also bear close examination by students and scholars of Hume, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

According to current philosophical lore, Kant rejected the notion that philosophy can progress by psychological means and endeavored to restrict it accordingly. This book reverses the frame from Kant the anti-psychological critic of psychological philosophy to Kant the preeminent psychological critic of non-psychological philosophy.

Few books have had as great an impact on intellectual history as Kant's The Moral Law . In its short compass one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy attempts to identify the fundamental principle 'morality' that governs human action. Supported by a clear introduction and detailed summary of the argument, this is not only an essential text for students but also the perfect introduction for any reader who wishes to encounter at first hand the (...) class='Hi'>mind of one of the finest and most influential thinkers of all time. (shrink)

This is the second edition of an influential book that first appeared in 1982. No significant changes have been made in the text, but a substantial Preface and a briefer Postscript have been added. They contain close considerations of important work on Kant’s theory of mind that appeared after the first edition as well as a review, in the Preface, of the bearing that sets of Kant’s lecture notes, discovered too late to be absorbed into the original book, have (...) on its main thesis. The thesis is that Kant’s theory of mind is closer to traditional metaphysics than most interpreters have allowed, and in particular that he is, in a way to be very carefully circumscribed but not trivialized, an immaterialist. The lecture notes add additional weight to the claim that Kant was fully in command of and partly adapted a full complex of doctrines of rational psychology and that his criticism of these over the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason cannot represent a total but only a partial and complicated reversal. The reader of the quotations from the lecture notes will be startled; it is as if one were reading the paralogisms positively signed. However, reflection shows that this cannot be and that Ameriks’s less abrupt transition, too “fine-grained” for ready summary, is more defensible. (shrink)

This work makes the revisionist claim that "the theory of mind in the Critique [of Pure Reason] is much more traditional and rationalistic than it at first appears, but that it is also more defensible than is generally recognized". Specifically, Ameriks aims to show that "Kant can be seen as wanting, above all else, to put... into a respectable form" the "core of the rationalist commitment" "to the idea that we have a special kind of identity that can withstand (...) all the kinds of change that ordinarily spell the end of ordinary objects". But, first, Ameriks's account of the "core of the rationalist commitment" is maddeningly vague and unstable--indeed, Ameriks's conception of rationalism is so ill-defined that at one point skepticism about the external world is treated as a part of rationalism rather than as the very much undesired consequence of certain Cartesian premises which Kant thought it to be!--and the discussion is damagingly ahistorical. Ameriks does emphasize the developmental dimension within Kant's own work, ranging over the whole of Kant's published corpus and mining the various lecture courses on metaphysics which have now been gathered together as volume 28 of the Berlin edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften. But his picture of rationalism itself and its characteristic arguments is undifferentiated and undocumented, and this leads to the misconception that Kant thought that some theoretical defense of rationalist theses could still be maintained while what are merely some possible arguments in their behalf were criticized; but some review of Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten and Meier would surely have shown that Kant was criticizing all of the chief arguments for the rationalist conception of the soul known to him, and attention to Kant's own claim for the completeness of his presentation of these natural and inevitable illusions of human reason could have suggested only that Kant himself thought that these were all the theoretical arguments for a rationalist philosophy of mind there could be. Second, it is questionable whether Ameriks's view really revises our standard reading of Kant's conclusions at all. The gist of Ameriks's argument is that in spite of Kant's specific criticism of the paralogistic arguments of pure psychology, Kant retained a favorable attitude toward the theoretical and not just practical postulation of such properties as immateriality and transcendental freedom at the noumenal level--but this turns out to mean little more than that Kant accepted his own transcendental idealism. This is hardly revolutionary, and the interest of the point is far from strengthened by Ameriks's own conclusion that transcendental idealism cannot be fully proved. (shrink)

Few books have had as great an impact on intellectual history as Kant's The Moral Law. In its short compass one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy attempts to identify the fundamental principle 'morality' that governs human action. Supported by a clear introduction and detailed summary of the argument, this is not only an essential text for students but also the perfect introduction for any reader who wishes to encounter at first hand the mind (...) of one of the finest and most influential thinkers of all time. (shrink)

Few books have had as great an impact on intellectual history as Kant's _The Moral Law_. In its short compass one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy attempts to identify the fundamental principle 'morality' that governs human action. Supported by a clear introduction and detailed summary of the argument, this is not only an essential text for students but also the perfect introduction for any reader who wishes to encounter at first hand the mind (...) of one of the finest and most influential thinkers of all time. (shrink)

Kant: Philosophy of Mind Immanuel Kant was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment Period in Western European history. This encyclopedia article focuses on Kant’s views in the philosophy of mind, which undergird much of his epistemology and metaphysics. In particular, it focuses on metaphysical and epistemological doctrines forming the … Continue reading Kant: Philosophy of Mind →.

Few books have had as great an impact on intellectual history as Kant's _The Moral Law_. In its short compass one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy attempts to identify the fundamental principle 'morality' that governs human action. Supported by a clear introduction and detailed summary of the argument, this is not only an essential text for students but also the perfect introduction for any reader who wishes to encounter at first hand the mind (...) of one of the finest and most influential thinkers of all time. (shrink)

Among philosophers of religion working prior to the nineteenth century, Immanuel Kant is preeminently useful to understand. For it is his statement of the problems and his lines of solution which are most widely known, and taken as the point of departure for subsequent criticisms and new interpretations of religion, It is natural for Fichte and Schleiermacher to build out from him and often against him, just as it is his treatment of ethics and religion that most excites the new (...) generation of university students, notably Schelling, Hegel, and then Schopenhauer. Directly or indirectly, Kant’s impact continues to be felt by such diverse minds as Kierkegaard and the Marxists, Feuerbach and the positivists, Nietzsche and the so-called British Hegelians. Since Kant furnishes the closest approximation to a joint historical reference field for these nineteenth-century philosophers of religion, to study him is already to gain some comprehension of what they are doing and why they think as they do in this area. (shrink)

In the First Antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew two conclusions from the argument he gives. First, Kant took his argument to show that the referent of the concept of ‘world’ does not exist as a thing in itself. For at B532 he says.

In the First Antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant drew two conclusions from the argument he gives. First, Kant took his argument to show that the referent of the concept of ‘world’ does not exist as a thing in itself. For at B532 he says.

Few philosophers have thought as long and as deeply as Kant about the nature of philosophy. His reflections on this topic did not come to an end with the Critique of Pure Reason. In what follows I am going to argue that in his Opus postumum, Kant came to realize that the conception of philosophy presented in the first Critique cannot be upheld. I will suggest that Kant’s numerous attempts in the first fascicle of the Opus postumum to (...) redefine transcendental philosophy reflect this insight. These attempts are thus not to be interpreted as signs of senility, as has usually been done, but as indicative of a new and heightened level of reflection. In this sense one can, I suggest, speak of a “postcritical” phase in Kant’s thinking, comparable to the so-called critical and precritical phases. This does not, however, mean that after 1790 Kant returned to a form of dogmatism, but that in his last work a conception of philosophy emerges that differs as much from that developed in the first Critique as the latter does from the one to be found in his precritical writings. I shall look at all three conceptions in turn. I begin with the precritical one. (shrink)

From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic and with the character of the experiencing self. In this study, Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, showing that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key to understanding both Kant's critique of "rational psychology" and his theory (...) of self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent ourselves to ourselves have import not only for epistemology, but for our view of persons and of our own immortality, as well as for moral philosophy. His theory of self-consciousness is also shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of the problem of other minds, functionalism, and the problem of indexical self-reference. (shrink)

Officially, for Kant, judgments are analytic iff the predicate is "contained in" the subject. I defend the containment definition against the common charge of obscurity, and argue that arithmetic cannot be analytic, in the resulting sense. My account deploys two traditional logical notions: logical division and concept hierarchies. Division separates a genus concept into exclusive, exhaustive species. Repeated divisions generate a hierarchy, in which lower species are derived from their genus, by adding differentia(e). Hierarchies afford a straightforward sense of containment: (...) genera are contained in the species formed from them. Kant's thesis then amounts to the claim that no concept hierarchy conforming to division rules can express truths like '7+5=12.' Kant is correct. Operation concepts ( ) bear two relations to number concepts: and are inputs, is output. To capture both relations, hierarchies must posit overlaps between concepts that violate the exclusion rule. Thus, such truths are synthetic. (shrink)

In the past few decades a remarkable change occurred in Kant scholarship: the "other" Kant has been discovered, i.e. the one of the doctrine of virtue and the anthropology. Through the rediscovery of Kant's investigations into the empirical and sensuous aspects of knowledge, our understanding of Kant's philosophy has been enriched by an important element that has allowed researchers to correct supposed deficiencies in Kant's work. In addition, further questions concerning the nature of Kant's (...) class='Hi'>philosophy itself have been formulated: the more the "other" Kant comes to the fore, the stronger the question concerning the connection between pure philosophy and empirical investigation becomes. The aim of this study is to show that the psychological and anthropological interpretations of Kant's pure philosophy are not convincing and at the same time to illustrate some connections between his critical and anthropological investigations by means of an analysis of the theory of the faculties. Against both a "transcendental psychological" and an "anthropological" reading, the book presents Kant's theory of the facultiesas a constitutive part of his critical philosophy andshows that there is a close connection between Kant's pure philosophy and his moral aesthetic. (shrink)

The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? What kinds of empirical models can be given of these operations? In what sense, and in (...) what ways, are intuitions object-dependent? How should we understand the nature of the imagination? What is inner sense, and what does it mean to say that time is the form of inner sense? Can we cognize ourselves through inner sense? How do we self-ascribe our beliefs and what role does self-consciousness play in our judgments? Is the will involved in judging? What kind of knowledge can we have of the self ? And what kind of knowledge of the self does Kant proscribe? These essays showcase the depth of Kant’s writings in the philosophy of mind, and the centrality of those writings to his wider philosophical project. Moreover, they show the continued relevance of Kant’s writings to contemporary debates about the nature of mind and self. Contents: 0. Introduction Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson 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. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S BUNDLES, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND KANT Even if we are inclined to view Hume's attempt to explain ascriptions of personal identity as an abysmal failure, we might still be sympathetic toward his proposal to replace the going substance theory of the nature of mind with his bundle account. Thus we might fault Hume for erecting an unachievably high standard for personal identity, or round on him for excluding bodily (...) criteria 2... from his solution, but nonetheless applaud his spiriting away of the Cartesian soul substance leaving his "true idea of the human mind" (261) as a collection of perceptions in its stead. However, Hume's concern to give an account of the idea of the unity of a human mind in terms of related perceptions has run into notoriously rough sledding, not the least of which is the fact that Hume himself in his Appendix to "Of Personal Identity" seems to abandon his bundle theory in despair. In this paper I shall first be concerned to examine the criticism of his bundle theory which Hume brings forth in the Appendix and explain why I think the core difficulty remains insoluble for Hume. I shall then go on to suggest that the unworkability of Húmete bundle theory is directly tied to his failure to appreciate certain features of the peculiarly first person nature of his question about the make-up of minds. In thus emphasizing the place of the first person voice in my interpretation I am stealing a leaf, if not a chapter, from Kant. But this is as it should be since one of the aims of this essay is to provide an interpretation of Hume's difficulties with his account of the nature of mind which explains part of the reason why 'self-consciousness' (or 'apperception') looms so very large in the Critique of Pure Reason attack upon Hume's type of bundle theory. 60. 1. Hume's Second Thoughts In a burst of self criticism at the Appendix to the section on personal identity, Hume brings forth this objection to his own efforts:...Having thus loosen' d all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective, and that nothing but the seeming evidence of the precedent reasonings cou'd have indue' d me to receive it (635). After additional reflections Hume encapsulates his objection thus:...All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness (6SS-6). What is the defect Hume calls to our attention? Notice first that the footnote on page 635 explicitly refers us back to that part of his account Hume considers defective; and when we look back to the text of the Treatise in question, page 260, we find it is precisely there that Hume uses the analogy of a republic to sketch his bundle theory of the unity of mind in terms of the two associative principles, resemblance and causation. So it must somehow be that this account in terms of the associative principles is mistaken. But what then is the mistake? According to Hume it is that he cannot 'explain' the principles which unite the discrete percepts. Now it seems to me there are only two possible things Hume could mean in saying this. He could mean either (1) that the principles which connect the percepts of one mind are instances of the associative principles, but he cannot explain them; or (2) there must be other, non-associative, principles which connect the percepts of a single mind and these he cannot explain. 61. I think we can safely conclude (1) cannot represent Hume's misgivings when he says he is unable to explain the uniting principles of the mental bundles. There is first the fact that he does not call into question his general programme of accounting for the nature of the unity of complex things by the principles of causation, resemblance and contiguity — for example, ships, plants, animals, houses and rivers (e.g. 257f) — but only his... (shrink)

Kant’s pre-1770 philosophy responded to the mind-body problem by applying a theory of “physical influx”. His encounter with Swedenborg’s mysticism, however, left him disillusioned with any dualist solution to Descartes’ problem. One of the major goals of the Critical philosophy was to provide a completely new solution to the mind-body problem. Kant’s new solution is “perspectival” in the sense that all Critical theories are perspectival: it acknowledges a deep truth in both of the controversy’s extremes (i.e., (...) what we might nowadays call eliminative materialism and an absolutely ideal folk psychology), by viewing both as ways of considering the issue, rather than as the only correct approach. Once we take into account its perspectival character, a new way of understanding Kant’s philosophy of mind emerges. The mind is no longer separate from the body, but is a manifestation of it, viewed from another (specifically human, rational) perspective. Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge (spatio-temporal intuition, categorial conception, and principled schematization) do not portray the mind as somehow creating the physical world; rather, they imply the opposite, that knowledge of objects is necessarily structured by a set of unconscious assumptions about the physical world. Our pre-conscious (or pre-mental, in Descartes’ sense of “mental”) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely physical. A reincarnated Kant’s solution to today’s mind-body problem would be: eliminative materialism is good science; but only the “explanatory idealist” can consistently be an eliminative materialist. Philosophically, multiple perspectives are necessary in order to understand anything we say or do. (shrink)

I suggest a possible rehabilitation of Reid's philosophy of mind by a constructive use of Kant's criticisms of the common sense tradition. Kant offers two criticisms, explicitly claiming that common sense philosophy is ill directed methodologically, and implicitly rejecting Reid's view that there is direct epistemological access by introspection to the ontology of mind. Putting the two views together reveals a tension between epistemology and ontology, but the problem which Kant finds in Reid also infects (...) his own system, as his weaker ontological claims are undermined to such an extent by the necessary reintroduction of self-consciousness that the justification he seeks for reason fails to be reached epistemologically. Plausible solutions to these parallel tensions imply that both Reid and Kant have a pre-systematic concept of mind, and may lead to the conclusion that Reid's method is more economical in the elaboration of an ontology for the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is first to explain a general notion of transcendental deductions, of which the Kantian are special cases; next to show, and to illustrate by examples from Kant’s work, that no transcendental deduction can be successful; and thirdly to put one of Kant’s achievements in its proper light by substituting for his spurious distinction between metaphysical exposition and transcendental deduction, a revised notion of metaphysical exposition and of the philosophical tasks arising out of it.

From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic, and with the character of theexperiencing self. Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, in part by applying to the Paralogisms insights drawn from Kant's Transcendental Deduction. His reading shows that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key (...) to understanding both Kant's critique of "rationalpsychology" and his theory of self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent ourselves to ourselves have import not only for epistemology, but for our view of persons and of our own immortality, and for moral philosophy as well. Kant's theory of self-consciousness is alsoshown to have implications for contemporary discussions of the problem of other minds, functionalism, and the problem of indexical self-reference. (shrink)

In an illusion, if what has been said in the earlier part of this section is right, the essential thing is the presence to the mind of some false proposition, which may be affirmed or denied according as we are or are not deceived. But what precisely is this false proposition in each case? And, a second question, on what grounds do we entertain it?

Kant's theory of the intuitive intellect has a broad and substantial role in the development and exposition of his critical philosophy. An emphasis on this theory's reception and appropriation on the part of the German idealists has tended to divert attention from Kant's own treatment of the topic. In this essay, I seek an adequate overview of the theory Kant advances in support of his critical enterprise. I examine the nature of the intuitive intellect's object; its epistemic (...) relation to its object; its mode of comprehension; the relationship between these cognitive elements; and I ask which minds Kant regards as intuitive intellects. (shrink)

This major study of Kant provides a detailed examination of the development and function of the doctrine of transcendental illusion in his theoretical philosophy. The author shows that a theory of 'illusion' plays a central role in Kant's arguments about metaphysical speculation and scientific theory. Indeed, she argues that we cannot understand Kant unless we take seriously his claim that the mind inevitably acts in accordance with ideas and principles that are 'illusory'. Taking this claim seriously, we (...) can make much better sense of Kant's arguments and reach a deeper understanding of the role he allots human reason in science. (shrink)