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.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis and re-evaluation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Kant viewed Hume as the sceptical destroyer of metaphysics. Yet for most of this century the consensus among interpreters is that for Hume scepticism was a means to a naturalistic, anti-sceptical end. The author seeks here to achieve a balance by showing how Hume's naturalism leads directly to a kind of scepticism even more radical than Kant imagined. In the process it offers the first systematic treatment (...) of Humean associationalist psychology, including detailed exploration of his views on time-consciousness, memory, aspect-seeing, and the comparison with animal reason. Within this framework, Hume's views on language, belief, induction, causality, and personal identity emerge in a novel and revealing light. (shrink)

Wayne Waxman here presents an ambitious and comprehensive attempt to link the philosophers of what are known as the British Empiricists--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--to the philosophy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Much has been written about all these thinkers, who are among the most influential figures in the Western tradition. Waxman argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Kant is actually the culmination of the British empiricist program and that he shares their methodological assumptions and basic convictions about human thought and (...) knowledge. (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)

Before surveying examples of Kant's transcendental psychologism, it may prove helpful to return to the model after which they are patterned: Hume's associationism. Contrary to what is often supposed, Hume did not confine his enquiries into representational origins to what exists in the mind prior to and independently of association. When the materials available pre-associationally are insufficient to yield an idea able to perform a certain prescribed function in human thought and reasoning, he then typically looked to the actions and (...) affects of the associating imagination itself as the sources of the missing elements. The idea of cause and effect is the locus classicus. The pre-eminent function of this idea is to extend the mind's purview ‘beyond our senses’ and inform ‘us of existences and objects, which we do not see or feel’ 74). (shrink)

In this paper, I shall argue that the most moderate and balanced way to view Kant's transcendental philosophy is as a species of psychological investigation analogous to Hume's, but refounded on a doctrine of pure sensibility, such as Hume never allowed himself . This might seem to fly in the face of what many interpreters of Kant deem conventional wisdom: that the burden of proof is on one who claims that psychology is essential to transcendental philosophy. On this view, there (...) is to be found in Kant ‘a more austere strictly transcendental philosophy’, which needs to be carefully distinguished from the psychological doctrines in which it is enmeshed; and they would insist on being convinced of the contrary before abandoning a position that, in their eyes, is the most moderate and balanced an interpreter of Kant can adopt. My purpose in this two-part essay is to urge them to think again. For while there can be no question of Kant's opposition to empiricism, it is equally certain that his praise for Hume was never freer or more unreserved than in respect of the latter's psycho-genetic approach to cognition. So, rather than supposing that Kant ipso facto rejected solutions to philosophical problems grounded on psychology when he rejected Hume's empiricism, it seems to me that the more moderate and balanced interpretive approach is to begin by supposing that Kant's transcendental philosophy is a species of philosophical psychology in the same mould as Hume's, differing from it only by virtue of involving a priori syntheses of a manifold of a priori intuition. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have debated the Molyneux problem since it first appeared in the 1694 edition of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding [ECHU].1 My focus today is Locke’s solution and the account of seeing threedimensional objects it subserves. More particularly, I want to concentrate on the prominence he accorded to inwardly perceived mental activity in experience of the external world. When this aspect is fully understood, I believe, Locke emerges as the philosopher most responsible for establishing the framework in which (...) Berkeley, Hume, and Kant would propound their analyses of cognitive experience. Indeed, I do not think.. (shrink)

Hume's Treatise Book III appendix on personal identity is analyzed as concerned with a difficulty not with the Book I account of personal identity as such (the self as product of associational imagination) but a presupposition of that account: the succession of perceptions present to consciousness (which the imagination associates, thus giving to the fiction of an identity). It is then claimed that while Hume's theory of imagination offers no way out of quandary, Kantian imagination-based transcendental idealism does.

The thesis defended is that, for Hume, all vivacity, including that of impressions, is belief, and all belief, including the "infallibility" of the immediate given, is vivacity. This allows one to treat as different axes of description Hume's categories of perception (sensation, reflexion, and thought) and his categories of the consciousness of perception (belief, felt ease of transition), thus making it possible to defend his distinction between impressions and ideas against the criticisms of Ryle, Russell, and others. The article is (...) an excerpt from my forthcoming book, "Hume's Theory of Consciousness" (Cambridge). (shrink)

An application and confirmation of the thesis of my book, "Kant's Model of the Mind", that, for Kant, space and time exist only in and for imagination, and the given of sense is atemporal and aspatial (=transcendental idealism). On previous interpretations of transcendental idealism, appearances already have temporal and spatial existence; on mine, they lack such existence, and the purpose of the Analogies is to show how they originally acquire it. Existence in space and time is constituted by a priori (...) principles of necessary connection (the Analogies), whose validity with respect to appearances is grounded on the demand for original apperception (i.e., a synthetic unitary sensibility). The implications vis-à-vis Kant's metaphysics of nature and his Euclideanism are then explored. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive analysis and re-evaluation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Kant viewed Hume as the sceptical destroyer of metaphysics. Yet for most of this century the consensus among interpreters is that for Hume scepticism was a means to a naturalistic, anti-sceptical end. The author seeks here to achieve a balance by showing how Hume's naturalism leads directly to a kind of scepticism even more radical than Kant imagined. In the process it offers the first systematic treatment (...) of Humean associationalist psychology, including detailed exploration of his views on time-consciousness, memory, aspect-seeing, and the comparison with animal reason. Within this framework, Hume's views on language, belief, induction, causality, and personal identity emerge in a novel and revealing light. (shrink)