According to Kant, being purely rational or purely reasonable and being autonomously free are one and the same thing. But how can this be so? How can my innate capacity for pure reason ever motivate me to do anything, whether the right thing or the wrong thing? What I will suggest is that the fundamental connection between reason and freedom, both for Kant and in reality, is precisely our human biological life and spontaneity of the will, a conjunctive intrinsic structural (...) property of our animal bodies, which essentially constitutes human personhood and rational agency. I say ‘suggest’ because, obviously, no proper argument for such a conclusion could ever be worked out in a short essay. I would nevertheless like to motivate my suggestion by way of a commentary on the second part of Adrian Moore's extremely rich and interesting recent book, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty. (shrink)

On 11thOctober 2007, at the first international conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS1) hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, Ernan McMullin (University of Notre Dame) portrayed a rather gloomy scenario concerning the current relationship between history and philosophy of science (HPS), on the one hand, and mainstream philosophy, on the other hand, as testified by a significant drop in the presence of HPS papers at various meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA).

Very often, the rise of non-Euclidean geometry and Einstein's theory of relativity are seen as the decisive defeat of Kant's theoretical philosophy. Scientific progress seems to render Kant's philosophy obsolete. This view became dominant during the first decades of the twentieth century, when the movement of logical positivism arose. Despite extensive criticism of basic tenets of this movement later in the twentieth century, its view of Kant's philosophy is still common. Although it is not my intention to defend Kant infinitely, (...) I think that this view is rather unsatisfactory and even misleading.Let us consider the first factor: non-Euclidean geometry. If one reads the firstCritiquecarefully, it becomes clear that the claims of transcendental logic do not imply Euclidean geometry. Kant's notion of space, as explained in the aesthetics chapter, is rather limited: it does neither entail nor presuppose a specific form of geometry. None of his statements about the form of space is specific enough to imply or support Euclidean geometry. Although Kant uses several examples, Euclidean geometry does not play any systematic role; only the pure form of space is at issue in the aesthetics chapter. In my view, the same holds in the case of Newton's physics: it is neither presupposed nor entailed by Kant's transcendental logic. The justification of Newton's physics requires further specialisation and application of the transcendental framework to empirical concepts like matter and motion. Kant took this step in hisMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. (shrink)