This paper argues that Kant's idea for a new kind of logic is bound up with a very specific strategy for obtaining truth criteria, where he takes Christian Wolff to have failed. While the First Critique 's argument against any universal criterion for empirical truth has almost always been treated as extraneous to the main concerns of the Transcendental Analytic, I argue that Kant inserted it at an important juncture in the text to illustrate a signal difference between traditional logics (...) and transcendental logic. Namely, while a criterion of truth as correspondence cannot be provided by traditional logics, since they cannot, in Kant's view, identify an object determinately and distinguish it from others, transcendental logic overcomes that particular barrier. The key to the improvement is to be found in how Kant modifies Wolffian order and “transcendental truth”, while still retaining them as central elements of his project. Once we have reconstructed Kant's strategy, we also gain a new perspective on Kant's puzzling assessments of his relation to Berkeley. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in (...) his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object. (shrink)

This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we (...) are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice. (shrink)

Kant and Bolzano agree that intuitions are non-accidentally singular, but each offers more than one explanation of why this is the case. One model, exemplified by Bolzano's explication of intuitions as “this”-representations, posits a type of representation which is such that it can only have one object. A very different explanation, prominent in Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, has recourse to the fact that certain classes of objects can have only one instance, and argues on this basis that some representations with those (...) contents are singular. This paper surveys various versions of these two explanations and uses each philosopher's answers to shed light on the other's. (shrink)

This stimulating book covers a wide range of topics concerning Kant and the history of logic, with the overall goal of specifying how Kant's various conceptions of logic developed out of that history. A first chapter on methodology argues that Kant is properly understood as negotiating a middle way between eclecticism and systematic philosophy. This is combined with the author's views on the proper method for our reconstruction of Kant's philosophy of logic, where her idea is that Kant's own critical (...) eclecticism will provide the key to the latter. One issue that is never addressed is why this is not a sort of category error: even if Kant's own views on methodology had featured a... (shrink)

This paper offers a novel solution to the long-standing puzzle of why the Canon of Pure Reason maintains, in contradiction to Kant’s position elsewhere in the first Critique, both that practical freedom can be proved through experience, and that the question of our transcendental freedom is properly bracketed as irrelevant in practical matters. The Canon is an a priori investigation of our most fundamental practical capacity. It is argued that Kant intends its starting point to be explanatorily independent of transcendental (...) logic and the ontic more generally, an independence that would be compromised if transcendental freedom were included in that starting point, even in a mode of supposition. In a different sense, however, practical reason precisely is dependent on the ontic: it can be realized only in beings. This species of dependence is used to explain the puzzling claim that practical freedom can be experienced. (shrink)

This project is in the first place an attempt to clarify what transcendental logic is and how Kant uses it in order to achieve his goals. I use two keys in unlocking transcendental logic: Kant's philosophy of mathematics and his account of modality. I argue that Kant's categorical separation of philosophical and mathematical cognition in his reflections on method is too sweeping and undifferentiated to account for his practice in transcendental logic. On the basis of an examination of what it (...) would take in order to sustain Kant's claim for the peculiarity of modal judgments---their subjective syntheticity---I argue that the positive claims that transcendental logic makes regarding objects are legitimated by the construction of an object as such, whose concept is provided by the sum total of the categories. I suggest that the schemata play a role analogous to that of the a priori constructed figure in a mathematical proof and provide a reconstruction of the Transcendental Doctrine of the Capacity of Judgment which makes sense of Kant's decision to label the modal principles 'postulates' in the precise sense of the Euclidean mathematicians. Part Two argues that Kant's practical philosophy is grounded on something which deserves to be called a transcendental logic every bit as much as the logic that we find in the Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of being based upon our capacity for theoretical judgment, in which we refer a concept to an ontic object via intuition, practical transcendental logic is based upon our capacity for practical judgment , in which we refer a concept to a deontic object via feeling. I show how the central arguments of Kant's practical philosophy rely implicitly upon the construction of a good will as such, which plays a semantic role analogous to that of the object as such in theoretical philosophy. One part of my case is contained in the demonstration that 'good' functions as a practical modal concept and that predications of goodness have a peculiar logical form, analogous to that exhibited by theoretical predications of existence. (shrink)