According to the ‘One Object’ reading of Kant's transcendental idealism, the distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself is not a distinction between two objects, but between two ways of considering one and the same object. On the ‘Metaphysical’ version of the One Object reading, it is a distinction between two kinds of properties possessed by one and the same object. Consequently, the Metaphysical One Object view holds that a given appearance, an empirical object, is numerically identical to (...) the thing in itself that appears as that object. I raise various indiscernibility arguments against that view; because an appearance has different spatiotemporal and modal properties than a thing in itself, no appearance can be identical to a thing in itself. I point out that these arguments are similar to arguments against Monism, the view that material objects are numerically identical to the matter of which they are made. I outline some strategies Monists have developed to respond to these indiscernibility arguments and then develop parallel responses on behalf of the Metaphysical One Object view. However, I then raise another indiscernibility argument, to which, I argue, the Metaphysical One Object view cannot respond, even using the resources I have developed thus far. I develop a modified version of the Metaphysical One Object view that can respond to this new indiscernibility argument, but, I argue, this modified version of the One Object view is only a terminological variant of the Two Object view. When the Metaphysical One Object view is fully thought through it becomes the Two Object view. I conclude that Kantian appearances are not numerically identical to the things in themselves that appear to us. (shrink)

In the part of the first Critique known as “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason” Kant seeks to explain how even the most acute metaphysicians could have arrived, through speculation, at the ruefully dogmatic conclusion that the self (understood as the subject of thoughts or "thinking I") is a substance. His diagnosis has two components: first, the positing of the phenomenon of “Transcendental Illusion”—an illusion, modelled on but distinct from, optical illusion--that predisposes human beings to accept as sound--and as known to (...) sound--certain in fact flawed arguments for substantive theses about the nature of the self; second, the identification of the fallacy we commit when we succumb to this illusion. It is explained how these two elements combine to produce a central instance of (what Kant sees as) dogmatic speculative metaphysics, namely, the doctrine that the self is a substance in the sense of a necessarily non-inhering subject of inherence. It is argued that Kant has a novel, ingenious, and even somewhat plausible account of the route by which the rational psychologist arrives--or might arrive--at this view, an account that involves identifying a rather deep-rooted confusion about the very nature of conceivability. (shrink)

I argue that a variety of influential accounts of self-knowledge are flawed by the assumption that all immediate, authoritative knowledge of our own present mental states is of one basic kind. I claim, on the contrary, that a satisfactory account of self-knowledge must recognize at least two fundamentally different kinds of self-knowledge: an active kind through which we know our own judgments, and a passive kind through which we know our sensations. I show that the former kind of self-knowledge is (...) in an important sense fundamental, since it is intimately connected with the very capacity for rational reflection, and since it must be present in any creature that understands the first-person pronoun. Moreover, I suggest that these thoughts about self-knowledge have a Kantian provenance. (shrink)

In seiner Geschichtsphilosophie, insbesondere der „Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht" (1784) erforscht Kant die Geschichte nicht in der bunten Fülle der Geschehnisse. Diese Aufgabe überlässt er der „eigentlichen bloß empirisch abgefassten Historie". Er betrachtet die Geschichte vielmehr, insoweit sie für den Menschen als praktisches Vernunftwesen von Interesse ist. Dabei wahrt er den Zusammenhang mit der transzendentalen Vernunftkritik und fragt, unter welchen erfahrungsunabhängigen Bedingungen der Gang der Geschichte als vernünftig, als sinnvoll erscheint. So wirft Kant jene Sinnfrage auf, (...) die von den empirischen Geschichtswissenschaften weder gestellt noch beantwortet wird. Für die 2. Auflage anlässlich des 300. Jubiläums Immanuel Kants wurden die einzelnen Beiträge komplett überarbeitet und auf den neuesten Forschungsstand gebracht. Mit Beiträgen von: Karl Ameriks, Reinhard Brandt, Volker Gerhardt, Otfried Höffe, Christoph Horn, Patrick Kain, Pauline Kleingeld, Jane Kneller, Dieter Langewiesche, Jean-Michel Muglioni, Alessandro Pinzani und Wolfgang M. Schröder. (shrink)

I argue that Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego draws on Kant's theory of spontaneity to articulate its metaphysical account of consciousness's mode of being, to defend its phenomenological description of the intentional structure of self‐consciousness, and to diagnose the errors that motivate views of consciousness qua person or substance. In addition to highlighting an overlooked dimension of Sartre's early relation to Kant, this interpretation offers a fresh account of how Sartre's argument for the primacy of pre‐personal consciousness works, and brings (...) the extent of his proximity to idealist models of mind into greater relief. It also affords Sartre the resources to respond to criticisms that his account of self‐consciousness relies on a spurious distinction and that his view of freedom cannot explain how consciousness is conditioned by its world. (shrink)

RésuméLa critique kantienne de la psychologie rationnelle est une expérience de pensée visant ni un individu ni une école, mais une tendance de la raison humaine à « hypostasier » la condition intellectuelle suprême d'une connaissance quelconque (le « Je pense ») en connaissance du « moi ». Cette tendance implique une circularité qui est également la cible des critiques transcendantales bien plus familières qui visent Locke et Hume. De même qu'un nouveau type de cercle (dit « de niveau »), (...) cet article propose une conception des arguments transcendantaux différente de celle présupposée dans la plupart des débats contemporains sur l'empirisme, le naturalisme et le fondationnalisme cartésien. (shrink)

Incongruent counterparts are pairs of objects which cannot be enclosed in the same spatial limits despite an exact similarity in magnitude, proportion, and relative position of their parts. Kant discerns in such objects, whose most familiar example is left and right hands, a “paradox” demanding “demotion of space and time to mere forms of our sensory intuition.” This paper aims at an adequate understanding of Kant’s enigmatic idealist argument from handed objects, as well as an understanding of its relation to (...) the other key supports of his idealism. The paper’s central finding is that Kant’s idealist argument from incongruent counterparts rests essentially on his theory of freedom. The surprising result sheds new light on deep and overlooked links among the pillars of transcendental idealism, pointing the way to a comprehensive and unified reading of Kant’s system of idealist arguments. (shrink)

Do plants represent according to Kant? This is closely connected to the question of whether he held plants are alive, because he explains life in terms of the faculty to act on one’s own representations. He also explains life as having an immaterial principle of self-motion, and as a body’s interaction with a supersensible soul. I argue that because of the way plants move themselves, Kant is committed to their being alive, to their having a supersensible ground of their self-activity, (...) and to their having desires (although these are not conscious). This has important ramifications for Kant’s teleology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Famously, Kant is a transcendental idealist. Yet he also endorses empirical realism, and even boasts that only the transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. The difficulty of making sense of those commitments together leads many interpreters to begin by attributing to Kant some variant of conventional, subjective idealism. That in turn requires that Kant's empirical realism be at best a merely ersatz or quasi-realism. But that drains Kant's boast of its significance. For any idealist can be a realist if (...) the 'realism' in question is defined in terms of a prior commitment to idealism. Thus I argue, on the contrary, that we must begin the interpretation of Kant's Critical philosophy by taking his empirical realism to be a genuine, common-sense realism about empirical things. That approach yields a consistent, satisfying, and novel reading of the Critical enterprise, including transcendental idealism, as explaining how empirical realism is possible. Along the way I show, among other things, (1) how to make systematic sense of Kant's controversial theory of meaning, which is standardly either downplayed or regarded as grossly inconsistent with his other core commitments; (2) how to dispense with the centuries-old Neglected Alternative objection; and (3) how to account for the syntheticity of the moral law and its role in conferring experience-immanent meaning on the practical postulates (e.g., of the existence of God). (shrink)

Does inner sense, like outer sense, provide inner sensations or, in other words, a sensory manifold of its own? Advocates of the disparity thesis on inner and outer sense claim that it does not. This interpretation, which is dominant in the preexisting literature, leads to several inconsistencies when applied to Kant’s doctrine of inner experience. Yet, while so, the parity thesis, which is the contrasting view, is also unable to provide a convincing interpretation of inner sensations. In this paper, I (...) argue that this deadlock can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of inner sense shared by both sides. Drawing upon an analysis of the notion of obscure representations, I offer an alternative interpretation of inner sense with a special regard to self-affection, apprehension, and attention. From this basis, I will infer that outer sense delivers sensory content that is initially and intrinsically unaccompanied by phenomenal consciousness; inner sense contributes by endowing such content with phenomenal consciousness. Therefore, phenomenal qualities can be regarded as the sensory manifold of inner sense. This alternative interpretation solves the long-standing dispute concerning inner sensations and would further illuminate Kant’s notion of inner experience. (shrink)

Kant holds that the applicability of the moral ‘ought’ depends on a kind of agent-causal freedom that is incompatible with the deterministic structure of phenomenal nature. I argue that Kant understands this determinism to threaten not just morality but the very possibility of our status as rational beings. Rational beings exemplify “cognitive control” in all of their actions, including not just rational willing and the formation of doxastic attitudes, but also more basic cognitive acts such as judging, conceptualizing, and synthesizing.

In this dissertation, I seek to explain G.W.F. Hegel’s view that human accessible conceptual content can provide knowledge about the nature or essence of things. I call this view “Conceptual Transparency.” It finds its historical antecedent in the views of eighteenth century German rationalists, which were strongly criticized by Immanuel Kant. I argue that Hegel explains Conceptual Transparency in such a way that preserves many implications of German rationalism, but in a form that is largely compatible with Kant’s criticisms of (...) the original rationalist version. After providing background on Hegel’s relationship to the traditional rationalist theory of concepts and Kant’s challenge to it, I claim that Hegel’s central task is to provide a theory of conceptual content that allows a relationship to the objective world without being dependent on the specifically sensory aspect of the world, which Kant’s theory of concepts required. Since many interpreters deny that Hegel’s use of the term “concept” is comparable to other historical philosophers (or our own), I first show that Hegel’s critique of standard conceptions of concepts presupposes an agreement of subject matter. I then show how Hegel’s account of the “formal concept” provides the skeleton for a view of conceptual content that relies on negative relations between terms, rather than a relation to sensibility, to provide content. Hegel’s account of conceptual content is completed when he shows how a universal term is further specified so that it can determine singular objects. This occurs in its adequate form in a teleological process. I argue that Hegel’s account of teleology in the Science of Logic is an attempt to explain how and where Conceptual Transparency obtains. A teleological process is one in which a concept constitutes an object, and this means that a concept is perfectly adequate to express that thing’s nature and not merely to represent it. However, in the final chapter, I show that Hegel’s concept of teleology is meant paradigmatically to illuminate how human purposive processes have constituted a social world that is conceptually accessible to us. In this way, the primary “province” of Hegel’s rationalism is the human constructed world. (shrink)

The paper argues that Kant’s distinction between pure and empirical apperception cannot be interpreted as distinguishing two self-standing types of self-knowledge. For Kant, empirical and pure apperception need to co-operate to yield substantive self-knowledge. What makes Kant’s account interesting is his acknowledgment that there is a deep tension between the way I become conscious of myself as subject through pure apperception and the way I am given to myself as an object of inner sense. This tension remains problematic in the (...) realm of theoretical cognition but can be put to work and made productive in terms of practical self-knowledge. (shrink)

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.

A well-known trilemma faces the interpretation of Kant’s theory of affection, namely whether the objects that affect us are empirical, noumenal, or both. I argue that according to Kant, the things that affect us and cause representations in us are not empirical objects. I articulate what I call the Causal Power Argument, according to which empirical objects cannot affect us because they do not have the right kind of power to cause representations. All the causal powers that empirical objects have (...) are moving powers, and such powers can only have spatial effects. According to Kant, however, the representations that arise in us as a result of the affection of our sensibility are non-spatial. I show that this argument is put forward by Kant in a number of passages, and figures as a decisive reason for rejecting empirical affection and instead endorsing affection by the things in themselves. (shrink)

Eric Voegelin’s writings on the historical development of the concept of race in the early 1930s are important to philosophy today in part because they provide a model upon which scholars can further integrate modern philosophy with the critical philosophy of race. In constructing his history, Voegelin’s methodological orientation depends on the centrality of both Kant’s work and the problem of the mind–body union to the concept of race. This essay asks how one might hold these premises if Kant seems (...) to reject the dominant approach to the mind–body union in the mid-eighteenth century, physical influx, and then go on to publish several essays on race that do not thematize that doctrine in any way. I argue that Kant’s racial union of mind and body cannot be understood as an interaction in space, as his contemporaries had presumed. Rather, the union must be approached as a repetition in time. In this way, Kant’s four racial categories are not merely a part of the mind–body problem, but instead each is a veritable mind–body union. This permits the conclusion that ‘race’, as Kant understood it, is a viable solution to the mind–body problem. (shrink)

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and (...) criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual matrix in which new disciplinary forms, such as psychology, anthropology, and historicism contend for cultural-intellectual standing beside philosophy. I present this assimilationist trajectory by reviewing three well-known moments of this encounter of skepticism and idealism: (1) Kant’s idealization of skepticism as a floating position amidst various philosophical positions through the dialectic, polemics, systematics, and history of pure reason; (2) Fichte’s schematic conception of skepticism as a dispute of systems in the early Wissenschaftslehre following his review of the skeptic G. E. Schulze’s attacks on Critical philosophy; (3) Hegel’s historicizing conception of skepticism in the context of differences between subjective idealism and speculative thought and his early Jena review of another work by the same skeptic Schulze. (shrink)

Collection of papers presented at the 2nd and 3rd Budapest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy.

This publication defends a phenomenalist interpretation of Kant’s idealism, which, however, deviates from usual phenomenalist interpretations in several respects. According to my reading, appearances are the content of representations, but not the true object of cognition. The object to which our cognition refers is rather the thing itself as the transcendental object. Nonetheless, we only cognize them as they appear and not as they are in themselves. Thus the unknowability of things as they are in themselves is retained. In the (...) course of my presentation, I discuss a number of aspects of Kant’s philosophy, among which are the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, Kant’s relationship to Cartesian epistemology, the refutation of idealism, and not least his theory of synthesis. My aim is not only to show that Kant is a phenomenalist, but also to characterize the kind of his phenomenalism. (shrink)

Are the pure intuitions of space and time, for Kant, dependent upon the understanding's activity? This paper defends the recently popular Self-Affection Thesis : namely, that the pure intuitions require an activity of self-affection—an influence of the understanding on the inner sense. Two systematic objections to this thesis have been raised: The Independence objection claims that SAT undermines the independence of sensibility; the Compatibility objection claims that certain features of space and time are incompatible with being the products of the (...) understanding's activity. I show that the resources to rebut these objections can be found in Kant's account of causal influence. (shrink)

Kant’s duty of self-knowledge demands that one know one’s heart—the quality of one’s will in relation to duty. Self-knowledge requires that an agent subvert feelings which fuel self-aggrandizing narratives and increase self-conceit; she must adopt the standpoint of the rational agent constrained by the requirements of reason in order to gain information about her moral constitution. This is not I argue, contra Nancy Sherman, in order to assess the moral goodness of her conduct. Insofar as sound moral practice requires moral (...) self-knowledge and moral self-knowledge requires a theoretical commitment to a conception of the moral self, sound moral agency is for Kant crucially tied to theory. Kant plausibly holds that self-knowledge is a protection against moral confusion and self-deception. I conclude that although his account relies too heavily on the awareness of moral law to explain its connection to moral development, it is insightful and important in Kantian ethics. (shrink)

The article defends Heidegger’s view that the main question of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the question of being. It is also argued that Heidegger special understanding of the level and method of KrV deserves serious attention. Finally it is argued that Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of the KrV is best seen as representative of an hermeneutical conception of phenomenology.

I demonstrate that the pre-Critical Kant is essentialist and intellectualist about the relational properties of substances. That is to say, God can choose whether or not to create a substance, and whether or not to connect this substance with other substances, so as to create a world: but God cannot choose what the nature of the relational properties is, once the substance is created and connected. The divine will is constrained by the essences of substances. Nonetheless, Kant considers that essences (...) depend upon God, in that they depend upon the divine intellect. I conclude by gesturing towards some possible implications of this interpretation, when considering the role that might be played by God – both historically and conceptually – in relation to the notion of ‘laws of nature’, and when understanding Kant's transcendental idealism and his Critical conception of freedom. (shrink)

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines his transcendental empiricism as an “apodictic” aesthetics, by which he means a science not simply of the sensible, but of the being of the sensible. Yet, to the extent that the sensibility which is at stake in the Transcendental Aesthetics is a sensibility without sensation, Kantian aesthetics is not apodictic. Sensation is the only contact we have with the being of the sensible, namely that which is exterior with respect to the interior of representation. (...) But transcendental idealism is a subjectivism. Indeed, if one connects what Heidegger considers to be the greatest achievement of Kant’s Copernican revolution with the achievement that Kant held highest in this regard, then the two main precepts of Kant’s subjective phenomenalism fall into place. The first is that we cannot feel outside of us – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as transcendental idealism; the second is that we can feel inside – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as empirical realism. The aim of this article is to show how Kant's treatment of sensation prevented him from refuting Berkeley’s idealism. (shrink)