The metaphysical “Law of Continuity of Alterations” says that whenever an object alters from one state to another, it passes through a continuum of intermediate states. Kant treated LCA as a transcendental law of understanding. The primary purpose of the paper is to reconstruct and evaluate Kant’s three arguments for LCA. All three are found to be inadequate. However, a secondary goal of the paper is to show that LCA would have more naturally been construed as a regulative principle of (...) reason. I conclude with some remarks about how this could work. (shrink)

In the first Critique, Kant attempts to prove what we can call the "Principle of Intensive Magnitudes," according to which every possible object of experience will possess a determinate "degree" of reality. Curiously, Kant argues for this principle by inferring from a psychological premise about internal sensations (they have intensive magnitudes) to a metaphysical thesis about external objects (they also have intensive magnitudes). Most commentators dismiss the argument as a failure. In this article I give a reconstruction of Kant's argument (...) that attempts to rehabilitate the argument back into his broader transcendental theory of experience. I argue that we can make sense of the argument's central inference by appeal to Kant's theory of empirical intuition and by an analysis of the way in which Kant thinks sensory matter constitutes our most basic representations of objects. (shrink)

The author calls attention to and discusses certain basic but neglected and/or obscured features of Hegel's idealism. He treats these features as paradigmati cally sociological and uses them as a baseline with which to chart Hegel's critique of, and against which to measure, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Section 1 introduces Hegel's criticism of Kant's idealism; in contrast to his own objective idealism, transcendental idealism is individualistic. This criticism is elaborated in section 2, issuing in the quasi-Wittgensteinian indictment that Kant (...) cannot account for the possibility of language and human thought. Section 3 argues that Hegel's criticism that mind is social and that objectivity cannot be understood in isolation from social interaction amounts to a sociological critique of Kant. (shrink)

This article notes six advances in recent analytic Kant research: (1) Strawson's interpretation, which, together with work by Bennett, Sellars, and others, brought renewed attention to Kant through its account of space, time, objects, and the Transcendental Deduction and its sharp criticisms of Kant on causality and idealism; (2) the subsequent investigations of Kantian topics ranging from cognitive science and philosophy of science to mathematics; (3) the detailed work, by a number of scholars, on the Transcendental Deduction; (4) the clearer (...) understanding of transcendental idealism sparked by reactions to Allison's epistemic account; (5) the resulting need—prompted also by new studies of the thing in itself—to face up to the old question of the philosophical defensibility of such idealism; and (6) the active engagement with Kant's ethics and political philosophy that derives from Rawls's and others' work. (shrink)

Essay review of Daniel Garber, 1992, Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, xiv + 389 pp., and Michael Friedman,: 1992, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, xvii + 357 pp. These two books display the historical connection between science and philosophy in the writings of Descartes and Kant. They show the place of science in, or the scientific context of, these authors' central metaphysical doctrines, pertaining to substance and its properties, (...) the metaphysics of force and causal agency, the relation of geometry to matter and to space, and the structure of cognition. In so doing, they provide an image of philosophy as an intellectually and culturally engaged enterprise, an image according to which it makes little sense to make pronouncements about the foundations of knowledge or the possibilities for science without direct engagement with the living practice of scientific and other cognitive enterprises. However, in some areas they did not engage the context as fully as needed; their interpretations of particular arguments and indeed of whole philosophical programs suffered thereby. (shrink)

What method should we use to determine the nature of perceptual experience? My focus here is the Kantian thought that transcendental arguments can be used to determine the nature of perceptual experience. I set out a dilemma for the use of transcendental arguments in the philosophy of perception, one which turns on a comparison ofthe transcendental method with the first-personal method of early analytic philosophy, and with the empirical methods of much contemporary philosophy of mind. The transcendental method can avoid (...) this dilemma only if it commits to our possessing a capacity for imaginative reflection, one which is capable of identifying certain formal properties of experience.This result indicates some of the commitments which must be made if transcendental arguments are to be used in the philosophy of perception, and it has implications for those views that take the philosophy of perception to be autonomous of the empirical science of perception. (shrink)

I argue that Kant thought his Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts could reach skeptical empiricists like Hume by providing an overlooked explanation of the mind's a priori relation to the objects of experience. And he thought empiricists may be motivated to listen to this explanation because of an instability and dissatisfaction inherent to empiricism.

Consider two competing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the epistemic and cognitive interpretations. The epistemic interpretation presents the first Critique as a work of epistemology, but what is more, it sees Kant as an early proponent of anti-psychologism—the view that descriptions of how the mind works are irrelevant for epistemology.2 Even if Kant does not always manage to purge certain psychological-sounding idioms from his writing, the epistemic interpretation has it, he is perfectly clear that he means his evaluation (...) of knowledge to be carried out independently of psychology.3 In contrast, the cognitive interpretation presents the first Critique as a description of the operation of human .. (shrink)

This paper considers Kant's understanding of conceptual representation in light of his view of geometry.

Kant’s Refutation targets what he calls the problematic idealist. This is understood by the mainstream of Kantian scholarship as the global skeptic that Descartes briefly adumbrated in his first Meditation. The widespread view in the literature is that the fate of the Refutation is tied to its success as an argument against this Cartesian global skepticism. This consensus is what I want to question in this paper. I argue that Kant’s opponent – the problematic idealist – is not the Cartesian (...) global skeptic but rather what I prefer to call here the Cartesian problematic external-world idealist. According to Cartesian global skepticism, we cannot know whether our commonsensical beliefs are true until we rule out that the skeptical hypotheses are false. In contrast, the Cartesian external-world idealist sees as problematic the assumption that the underlying nature of outer things of which we have ideas is mind-independent rather than caused by our own thinking. My aim here is to disentangle Cartesian global skepticism from Cartesian problematic external-word idealism and show that, if measured against global skepticism, Kant’s Refutation is doomed to fail, while against problematic idealism, it is at least a promising argument. (shrink)

Kant was never satisfied with the version of his “Refu- tation” published in 1787 (KrV, B 275-279). His dissatisfaction is already evident in the footnote added to the preface of the second edition of the Critique in 1787. As a matter of fact, Kant continued to rework his argument for at least six years after 1787. The main exegetical problem is to figure out who is the target of the “Refutation”: a non-skeptic idealist, a global skeptic of Cartesian provenance or (...) both. In this last case, the related problem is to know whether either of them is the Cartesian skeptic of the first Meditation, the idealist skeptic of the second Meditation and first part of the third Meditation, or some other non-skeptic idealist. I present and defend a new reconstruction of Kant’s “Refu- tation” as a successful argument against Mendelssohnian idealism of Cartesian provenance. This defense is based on a simple logical sketch of the proof provided by Dicker but essentially modified in light of Dyck’s insight about Kant’s opponent. How shall I support my reading? First, by appealing to overwhelming textual evidence according to which the proof is of the existence of mind-independent things, showing that Kant’s main opponent is Mendelssohn’s idealism of Cartesian provenance. Finally, I support my reading by showing that Kant’s “Refutation” is doomed to fail against all forms of global skepticism but is quite successful against Mendelssohn’s idealism. (shrink)

In this critical review of Robert Hanna's ingenious book (2006), I aim to support Hanna‟s main insightful reading of Kant, namely what he calls “a priori truth with a human face," without appealing to Kant's divide between a priori and a posteriori and analytic and synthetic truths. My suggestion is that transcendental propositions are necessary neither in the usual epistemological sense that analytic propositions are, let alone in the metaphysical sense that some empirical propositions are. Instead, they are necessary in (...) the theoretical domain in the weak alternative sense that they make possible the empirical recognition of appearances as an object as an indispensable condition of our self-consciousness experience, and they are a priori in the practical domain in the sense that their truth is vital for our self-comprehension as human beings. (shrink)

Kant: Philosophy of Mind Immanuel Kant was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment Period in Western European history. This encyclopedia article focuses on Kant’s views in the philosophy of mind, which undergird much of his epistemology and metaphysics. In particular, it focuses on metaphysical and epistemological doctrines forming the … Continue reading Kant: Philosophy of Mind →.

Notes on Contributors • Preface • Christopher Peacocke, Introduction: The Issues and their Further Development I OBJECTIVE THOUGHT • John Campbell, Objects and Objectivity Commentaries • Bill Brewer, Thoughts about Objects, Places and Times • John O'Keefe, Cognitive Maps, Time and Causality II OBJECTIVITY AND THE UNITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS • Susan Hurley, Unity and Objectivity Commentaries • Anthony Marcel, What is Relevant to the Unity of Consciousness? • Michael Lockwood, Issues of Unity and Objectivity III UNDERSTANDING THE MENTAL:THEORY OR SIMULATION (...) • MARTIN DAVIES, The Mental Simulation Debate Commentaries • Jane Heal, Simulation vs. Theory Theory: What is at Issue? • Josef Perner, The Necessity and Impossibility of Simulation. (shrink)

The first half of this article is critical: it develops an interpretation of Kant as trying, and failing, to limit our judgments to phenomena and abstain from making claims about noumena, and an interpretation of Wittgenstein as trying, and failing, to develop a theory of meaning that abstains from attempting to say the unsayable. On the reading offered, both Kant and Wittgenstein find themselves saying things that by their own lights cannot be said: in Kant’s case, claims about noumena, and (...) in Wittgenstein’s case, structural claims. While Kant attempts a solution of the problem which also fails, Wittgenstein bites the bullet and leaves his Tractatus, for the most part, void and meaningless. The suggested response is a dialetheic approach—either as an alternative or, potentially, as an amendment to a Kantian or Wittgensteinian theory. According to this approach, certain problems in philosophy arise from true contradictions and thus require a theory that makes sense of contradiction. A subgroup of these problems (among them the noumenal and structural issues in Kant and Wittgenstein) are about things that both are and are not ineffable. The second half of the paper develops a dialetheic account of ineffability and a concise formal theory to ensure that contradiction at the limits of language does not spread to other areas. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the origin, intellectual development and use of a semantic variant of the idea of logical space found implicitly in Kant and explicitly in early Wittgenstein and van Fraassen. It elucidates the idea of logical space as the idea of images or pictures representative of reality organized into a logico-mathematical structure circumscribing a form of all possible worlds. Its main claim is that application of these images or pictures to reality is through a certain conception of self. The (...) first chapter presents a novel interpretation of Kant’s semantic theory of schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason, showing that a structure of the imagination induced by the transcendental self informs an implicit idea of logical space. The second chapter offers an intellectual history of the idea through developments in the organization of images introduced by Helmholtz and Hertz. The third chapter reveals early Wittgenstein’s idea of logical space to be his notion of the self, demonstrating how this serves to unify propositions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning solipsism, realism, ethics, aesthetics and mysticism with those pertaining to the picture theory of meaning. The fourth chapter provides a historical overview of the development of van Fraassen’s empiricism in relation to his adaptation of logical space, and evaluates his recent proposal in Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective that the problem of coordination in the semantic view of theories is dissolved through self-location in logical space. After identifying a number of problems this proposal creates for his empiricism, a brief suggestion is made about how van Fraassen might improve upon his conception of logical space, and how an empiricist view of scientific representation might be understood as a result. (shrink)

A tese de que o conceito espinosista de ideia de afecção, introduzido na Ética, expressa o sentido mais preciso do que seja, para o autor, o conceito de ideia da imaginação. Este texto pretende problematizar essa leitura, procurando fornecer subsídios para a hipótese de que ela não é nem inequivocamente corroborada pelo texto da Ética, nem exigida pela doutrina aí apresentada. -/- It is widely accepted by scholars that Spinoza’s concept of idea of affection, introduced in the Ethics, states his (...) notion of the idea of imagination. In this paper I address this reading, claiming that it is not either unequivocally corroborated by the text of the Ethics, or required by the doctrine developed there. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze an ambiguity concealed in the concept of determination as used by Kant in his characterization of the transcendental schema as “transcendental time-determination”. We claim that, in this context, “determination” can be understood in a dynamic way as well as in a static manner. In the first case, transcendental schemata are procedures of synthesis or temporal determination of the empirical manifold. In the second case, transcendental schemata are the basic temporal properties or determinations produced by those (...) procedures. (shrink)

Kant’s conception of the centrality of intellectual self-consciousness, or “pure apperception”, for scientific knowledge of nature is well known, if still obscure. Here I argue that, for Kant, at least one central role for such self-consciousness lies in the acquisition of the content of concepts central to metaphysical theorizing. I focus on one important concept, that of <substance>. I argue that, for Kant, the representational content of the concept <substance> depends not just on the capacity for apperception, but on the (...) actual intellectual awareness of oneself in such apperception. I then defend this interpretation from a variety of objections. (shrink)

Esta nota crítica consiste en una aproximación a la literatura analítica reciente que discute con mayor o menor interés algunas aristas del principio de apercepción kantiano. Prestando especial atención a la forma en que esta literatura acoge el enlace entre actividad judicativa y apercepción, se identifican grosso modo tres líneas interpretativas. Si bien entrañan teorías generales sobre la mente humana, aquí se trata de ver cómo cada una de ellas propicia una hipótesis de lectura sobre qué es lo que subyace (...) a los argumentos kantianos que enlazan la capacidad de juzgar con la capacidad de apercibir. (shrink)

Живым существам объективный мир представляется как совокупность чувственно воспринимаемых качеств, воспоминаний, ощущений, мыслей, желаний, убеж- дений и т.д. Почему произошло так, что объективный мир способствовал появлению су- ществ, обладающих субъективным представлением об окружающей их действительности. Почему объективный мир породил существ с субъективным восприятием мира? Эта статья во многом посвящена разрыву между объективным и субъективным, а также проблеме качественного характера феноменального сознания. Я утверждаю, что физиологическое, феноменальное и концептуальное составляют трехуровневую иерархию эмергентных кате- горий. Эти категории каузально и онтологически различны (или (...) разделены). Для каждой характерен уникальный механизм интеракции. Этот механизм создает условия для форми- рования наделенного значением дискурсивного взаимодействия с окружающей средой. Повышение уровня сложности организации в рамках каждой категории неизбежно приво- дит к появлению нового уровня в иерархии. Иначе говоря, существует эмергентная иерар- хия развивающихся категорий, определяемая природой их механизмов взаимодействия с окружающим миром. Что касается первой категории, я утверждаю, что биохимические механизмы склонны в своем развитии идти особым, наделенным значением путем, при котором качественно учитываются характеристики окружающей среды и обеспечивается реакция на них. Говоря о второй категории, я показываю, что эти механизмы дают орга- низму возможность оценки и приоритизации квалитативных ассимиляций. Далее я объяс- няю, почему этот процесс характеризует индивидуальный субъективный феноменальный опыт. Наконец, я говорю об этом с точки зрения уникального взгляда на мир, присущего человеку. (shrink)