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 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)

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 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)

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.

Kant took up the issue of origin in the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories. He sought to demonstrate that the concepts of metaphysics, considered in themselves, are mere logical functions, that is, ways of synthesizing concepts to form judgments Accordingly, the metaphysical concept of substance/accident contains nothing more than the logical form of subject/predicate, whereby any arbitrary pair of concepts may be united in a judgment; cause and effect merely the hypothetical form of judgment, whereby any arbitrary pair of judgments (...) may be united as condition and conditioned; totality the form of subordination of one concept to another whereby any species of the one has the other as its genus; and so forth. Logical functions are what remain after we abstract from all content of the concepts in a judgment; they are merely the various ways in which any concept, or judgment, may be combined with any other, and so are utterly devoid of objective sense or signification. More importantly, they comprise the totality of that which may be attributed to the understanding taken by itself, in isolation from the other faculties of the mind: sensibility, desire, and feeling. The understanding, for Kant, is the capacity to judge ; it is not, when considered without relation to other faculties, a faculty of concepts, rules, principles, or even categories. Indeed, if categories may be said to express any content at all, it is simply and solely the relation of the understanding to another faculty. In the case of sensibility--a faculty comprising the manifold of the senses and its synthesis in imagination--categories are obtained when this synthesis is represented universally and a priori, and so represent the "pure synthetic unity of the manifold in general." Similarly, the categories tabulated in the Critique of Practical Reason express the relation of the capacity to judge to the capacity of desire. Thus, aside from "their possibility as a priori cognitions of objects of an intuition in general," the categories of the first Critique are nothing over and above sheer logical forms, through which no objective necessary connection whatsoever can be thought; indeed, so entirely void of all content and objective import are they that even Hume almost certainly would have countenanced them. (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)

This book presents an interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as a priori psychologism. It groups Kant's philosophy together with those of the British empiricists--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--in a single line of psychologistic succession and offers a clear explanation of how Kant's psychologism differs from psychology and idealism. The book reconciles Kant's philosophy with subsequent developments in science and mathematics, including post-Fregean mathematical logic, non-Euclidean geometry, and both relativity and quantum theory. Finally, the author reveals the ways in which (...) Kant's philosophy dovetails with contemporary scientific theorizing about the natural phenomenon of consciousness and its place in nature. This book will be of interest to Kant scholars and historians of philosophy working on the British empiricists. (shrink)

Elections are not the solution to political crisis, they’re the problem. In lively dialogue form, The Democracy Manifesto explains why elections are anti-democratic and should be replaced with government in which decision-makers are randomly selected from the population at large.

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)

In “Kant, Mendelssohn, Lambert, and the Subjectivity of Time,” and its companion piece “Was Kant A Nativist?”, Lorne Falkenstein advances the intriguing thesis that.

I situate historically, analyze, and examine some of the implications of Kant’s thesis that the analytic unity of apperception — the representation of the identity of the I think — is what transforms any representation to which it is attached into a universal.

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)