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)

According to what Jonathan Bennett calls the Kant–Frege view of existence, Frege gave solid logical foundations to Kant’s claim that existence is not a real predicate. In this article I will challenge Bennett’s claim by arguing that although Kant and Frege agree on what existence is not, they agree neither on what it is nor on the importance and justification of existential propositions. I identify three main differences: first, whereas for Frege existence is a property of a concept, for Kant (...) it is a relational property pertaining between the concept and intuition of an object. Second, whereas for Frege truth about individuals presupposes their existence, for Kant truth is in many cases independent of the existence of objects. Third, whereas Frege binds logic to existence and removes modalities from logic, for Kant existence is a modal category that is emphatically removed from the domain of logic and set in the core of metaphysics. Due to these differences in Kant’s and Frege’s theories of existence, Frege cannot be seen as giving logical clarity to Kant’s view. (shrink)

The ArgumentL. E. J. Brouwer and David Hubert, two titans of twentieth-century mathematics, clashed dramatically in the 1920s. Though they were both Kantian constructivists, their notoriousGrundlagenstreitcentered on sharp differences about the foundations of mathematics: Brouwer was prepared to revise the content and methods of mathematics (his “Intuitionism” did just that radically), while Hilbert's Program was designed to preserve and constructively secure all of classical mathematics.Hilbert's interests and polemics at the time led to at least three misconstruals of intuitionism, misconstruals which (...) last to our own time: Current literature often portrays popular views of intuitionism as the product of Brouwer's idiosyncratic subjectivism; modern logicians view intuitionism as simply applying a non-standard formal logic to mathematics; and contemporary philosophers see that logic as based upon a pure assertabilist theory of meaning. These pictures stem from the way Hilbert structured the controversy.Even though Brouwer's own work and behavior occasionally reinforce these pictures, they are nevertheless inaccurate accounts of his approach to mathematics. However, the framework provided by the Brouwer-Hilbert debate itself does not supply an adequate correction of these inaccuracies. For, even if we eliminate these mistakes within that framework, Brouwer's position would still appear fragmented and internally inconsistent. I propose a Kantian framework — not from Kant's philosophy of mathematics but from his general metaphysics — which does show the coherence and consistency of Brouwer's views. I also suggest that expanding the context of the controversy in this way will illuminate Hilbert's views as well and will even shed light upon Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an interpretation of Kant’s theory of perceptual error based on his remarks in the Anthropology. Both hallucination and illusion, I argue, are for Kant species of experience and therefore require the standard co-operation of sensibility and understanding. I develop my account in a conceptualist framework according to which the two canonical classes of non-veridical experience involve error in the basic sense that how they represent the world as being is not how the world is. In (...) hallucination this is due to the misapplication of categories and in illusion to the misapplication of empirical concepts. Yet there is also room in this framework for a distinction in terms of cognitive functionality between the level of experience, which is merely judgementally structured, and that of judgement proper, which involves the free action of a conscious agent. This distinction enables Kant to allow for the otherwise problematic phenomenon of self-aware non-veridicality. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with Graham Bird’s treatment, in The Revolutionary Kant, of Kant’s mathematical antinomies. On Bird’s interpretation, our error in these antinomies is to think that we can settle certain issues about the limits of physical reality by pure reason whereas in fact we cannot settle them at all. On the rival interpretation advocated in this essay, it is not true that we cannot settle these issues. Our error is to presuppose that the concept of the unconditioned has (...) application to physical reality. Once this presupposition has been abandoned, we can retrieve sound arguments from the antinomies, not indeed to demonstrate that the views originally being defended are correct, but to demonstrate that the views originally being attacked are incorrect. The essay concludes with some comments concerning how this disagreement relates to a broader disagreement about the best way to understand Kant. (shrink)

Hart’s criticism of Devlin’s stance on the legal enforcement of morality has been highly influential in shaping a new liberal sensibility and in paving the way to many important legal reforms in the UK. After 50 years it is perhaps time to go back to Law, Liberty and Morality to see it in the perspective of the general evolution of Hart’s thought since the early 50s. This is a period of extraordinary creativity for the Oxford philosopher, in which he writes (...) many important contributions to legal, moral and political philosophy. Prominent among these is ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, an article that sets the agenda for Hart’s subsequent work on liberty, fairness and rights, and provides the philosophical background for the liberal understanding of the relations between law and morality defended in Law, Liberty and Morality. (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)

This paper defends a key aspect of the Peircean conception of truth—the idea that truth is in some sense epistemically-constrained. It does so by exploring parallels between Peirce’s epistemology of inquiry and that of Wittgenstein in On Certainty. The central argument defends a Peircean claim about truth by appeal to a view shared by Peirce and Wittgenstein about the structure of reasons. This view relies on the idea that certain claims have a special epistemic status, or function as what are (...) popularly called ‘hinge propositions’. (shrink)

Many scholars claimed that, according to Immanuel Kant, some judgements lack a truth-value: analytic judgements, judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience, judgements of perception, and non-assertoric judgements. However, no one has undertaken an extensive examination of the textual evidence for those claims. Based on an analysis of Kant's texts, I argue that: (1) according to Kant, only judgements of perception are not truth-apt. All other judgements are truth-apt, including analytic judgements and judgements about items of which humans (...) cannot have experience. (2) Kant sometimes states that truth-apt judgements are actual bearers of truth or falsity only when they are taken to state what is actually the case. Kant calls these judgements assertoric. Other texts ascribe truth and falsity to judgements, regardless of whether they are assertoric. Kant's views on truth-aptness raise challenges for correspondentist and coherentist interpretations of Kant's theory of truth; they rule out the identification of Kant's crucial notion of objective validity with truth-aptness; and they imply that Kant was not a verificationist about truth or meaning. (shrink)

In attempts to come to grips with Kant’s thought, the influence of the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) is often neglected. In this paper, I consider three topics in Kant’s philosophy of mind, broadly construed, where Wolff’s influence is particularly visible: consciousness, self-consciousness, and psychology. I argue that we can better understand Kant’s particular arguments and positions within this context, but also gain a more accurate sense of which aspects of Kant’s accounts derive from the antecedent traditions and which constitute (...) genuine philosophical innovations. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in (...) his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s well known and thoroughly discussed criticism of the cosmological argument, hereafter ‘CA’, is that it presupposes or depends upon the cogency of the ontological argument, hereafter ‘OA’. Call this criticism ‘the Dependency Thesis’. It is fair to say that the received view on the matter is that Kant failed to establish the Dependency Thesis.1 In what follows, I argue that the received view is mistaken. I begin by rehearsing the standard objection to what is typically taken to be (...) Kant’s primary argument for the Dependency Thesis. I defend Kant by presenting a different argument for his thesis. This argument is not vulnerable to the standard objection, and there is good reason to think that Kant had such an argument in mind. (shrink)

Phenomenally, we can distinguish between ownership of thought (introspective awareness) and authorship of thought (an awareness of the activity of thinking), a distinction prompted by the phenomenon of thought insertion. Does this require the independence of ownership and authorship at the structural level? By employing a Kantian approach to the question of ownership of thought, I argue that a thought being my thought is necessarily the outcome of the interdependence of these two component parts (ownership and authorship). In addition, whilst (...) still employing a Kantian approach, I speculate over possible mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of thought insertion. (shrink)

Consider the following objection of Bennett to Kant: The least swallowable part of Kant's whole theory of freedom is the claim that the causality of freedom is not in time. This follows from Kant's doctrine that time is an appearance, and anyway the theory of freedom needs it: it is because the noumenal cause of an event is not in time, and thus is not itself an event, that it escapes the causality of nature. Kant is unembarrassed: ‘Inasmuch as it (...) is noumenon, nothing happens in it; there can be no change requiring dynamical determination in time, and therefore no causal dependence upon appearances … No action begins in this active being itself; but we may yet quite correctly say that the active being of itself begins its effects in the sensible world’ [KrV, A541=B569]. That is indefensible. Something in which ‘nothing happens’ cannot be ‘active’ or ‘begin’ a train of events. (shrink)

Human consciousness usually displays a striking unity. When one experiences a noise and, say, a pain, one is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain. One is conscious of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. Since at least the time of Immanuel Kant (1781/7), this phenomenon has been called the unity of consciousness . More generally, it is consciousness not of A and, separately, of B and, separately, of C, but (...) of A-and-B- and-C together, as the contents of a single conscious state. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs and defends Kant's argument for the transcendental status of reason's principles of the systematic unity of nature in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. On the present account, these principles are neither mere methodological recommendations for conducting scientific inquiry nor do they have the normative force of categorical imperatives, two extant interpretations of Kant's discussion of reason in the Appendix. Instead, they are regulative yet transcendental principles restricted to theoretical cognition. The principles of the systematic unity of (...) nature count as transcendental in virtue of their role as conditions of the inferential articulation of empirical concepts. (shrink)

This paper argues that Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical philosophy attempts to reopen the question of human transcendence in contemporary terms. While his conception of language as self-transcending is deeply Husserlian, Ricoeur also responds to the analytical challenge when he deploys a basic distinction in Fregean logic in order to clarify Heidegger’s phenomenology of world. Ricoeur’s commitment to a transcendental view is evident in his conception of narrative, which enables him to emphasize the role of the performative in literary reading. The meaning (...) of the self in time provides Ricoeur with a discursive basis for distinguishing his own position from that of Kant and other philosophers in the transcendental tradition. (shrink)

SummarySubjecting to a detailed analysis Kant's diagnosis of dialectical error in the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, the author posits that Kant's understanding of such error is, to the extent that it conflates the subjective‐objective, phenomenal‐noumenal, and regulative‐constitutive distinctions, fundamentally incoherent. The author argues not only that these three distinctions cannot on Kant's own terms be conflated, but also that Kant's treatment of dialectical error is further vitiated by circularity of argument: Kant proposes to explain the three distinctions by (...) means of the notion of transcendental error, which however the distinctions themselves were supposed to explain in the first place. After showing that Kant's diagnosis of dialectical error cannot be salvaged even by resorting to the Kantian concept of “transcendental subreption”, the author concludes that unless Kant could in some other way spell out the minimal conditions for dialectical error, Kant's very distinction between understanding and reason becomes difficult to justify. (shrink)

Theory of judgment is a significant problem in contemporary philosophy. Epistemology, logic, semantics and cognitive psychology are important philosophical areas which deal with different faces of the theory of judgment. One of the greatest problems in contemporary Kant Studies concerns Kant’s theory of judgment. Until 1970, an accepted reading of Kant’s theory of judgment was widespread among Kant’s English-speaking interpreters. Since 1970, some scholars began to understand and interpret Kant’s theory of judgment in a different way. This shift has led (...) to huge and wide interpretive-philosophical discussions among Kant’s scholars. According to some scholars, traces of two different theories of judgment are found in Kant’s works: explicit theory of judgment and implicit theory of judgment. In this paper, considering interpretive viewpoints of some of Kant scholars, we contrast these two theories of predication and explicate their differences. Our conclusion is that Kant’s implicit or hidden theory of judgment is more consistent with Kant’s works and philosophical views. Moreover, one of the main implications of implicit theory of judgment is that we must interpret Chapter of Schematism and logico-semantic structure of a priori synthetic judgments in a different way. (shrink)

The problem of the “identity of identity and nonidentity”, which haunted German idealism, has two closely related aspects. The first, epistemological aspect concerns the possibility of knowledge of an objective world. The second, transcendental aspect, concerns the question of how thoughts can be directed towards the world. Reconstructing McDowell’s Kantian account of intentionality as a purported resolution of the transcendental aspect of IINI, I pose the following dilemma for McDowell’s account: Either part ways with Kant’s purported resolution of IINI at (...) a crucial point, thereby being driven towards an approach that McDowell firmly opposes, indeed cannot accept, or follow Kant to the letter, and then face, head-on, a deep problem that Kant’s purported resolution of IINI faces. Parting ways, as I show, with Kant’s purported resolution of IINI, McDowell finds himself impaled upon the first horn of this dilemma. Were he, however, to respond by following Kant to the letter, McDowell would find himself impaled upon the second horn. Thus, I conclude, McDowell’s account of intentionality fails. (shrink)

One argument that Leibniz employed to rule out the possibility of a world soul appears to turn on the assumption that the very notion of an infinite number or of an infinite whole is inconsistent. This argument was considered in a series of three papers published in The Leibniz Review: in the first, by Laurence Carlin, the argument was delineated and analyzed; in the second, by myself, the argument was criticized and rejected; in the third, by Richard Arthur, an attempt (...) was made to defend Leibniz’s argument against my criticisms. In the present paper, I take up the matter again in an attempt to clarify the issues involved and to defend my original criticisms of the argument against the objections raised by Arthur. (shrink)

One third of the transcendental dialectic in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to demolishing the pseudo-science of rational psychology. In this part of his work Kant attacks the idea that there is an ultimate subject of experience — the ‘I’ or Self — which can only be investigated and understood intellectually. The belief that such a study is possible is natural to human reason; but it is based on demonstrable error. Kant tries to exorcize our minds from falling (...) prey to this mistake. (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)

In this paper, I will show to what extent we can use our modern understanding of the Square of Opposition in order to make sense of Kant 's double standard solution to the cosmological antinomies. Notoriously, for Kant, both theses and antitheses of the mathematical antinomies are false, while both theses and antitheses of the dynamical antinomies are true. Kantian philosophers and interpreters have criticized Kant 's solution as artificial and prejudicial. In the paper, I do not dispute such claims, (...) but I show that our modern understanding of the Square of Opposition enables us to more naturally deliver the result Kant was aiming at. Accordingly, the paper does not pretend to be exegetically accurate. It is an attempt to revise the antinomies with the help of standard classical logic. And although such a revision entails some re-interpretation, in the end, it will actually help to unveil some of Kant 's thoughts. (shrink)

‘Metaphysics’, said Bradley, ‘is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’ This idea that reasoning is both instinctive and feeble is reminiscent of Hume; except that reasons in Hume tend to serve as the solvent rather than the support of instinctive beliefs. Instinct leads us to play backgammon with other individuals whom we assume inhabit a world which exists independently of our own perception and which will (...) continue to exist tomorrow in a similar fashion to today. However, when instinct leads us also to reason about these beliefs they are all subject to sceptical attack. Their defence provides a challenge, a challenge which in thumbnail histories of the subject is met by Kant. He does this by use of a powerful new form of argument which he calls transcendental argument and which, in my opinion, provides not only reasons but also good reasons for the defence of some of our most central instinctive beliefs. The strategy involved in this kind of argument is to reflect on the necessary preconditions for comprehensible experience. In this way, some beliefs which are subject to sceptical attack, such as that there is a causal order between objects which exist independently of our experience of them, can be found to be the essential preconditions for having comprehensible experience at all. The reason for accepting them is, therefore, that they are the necessary preconditions of having any beliefs at all; and this provides a good, rather than a bad, reason for accepting these particular instinctive beliefs. (shrink)

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

In the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers an argument for transcendental idealism. This argument is one focus of the longstanding controversy between "one-world" and "two-world" interpretations of the distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear. I present an interpretation of the argument of the "Aesthetic" that supports a novel "one-world" interpretation. On this interpretation, Kant is concerned with the mind-dependence of spatial and temporal properties; and with the idea that space and time (...) can be identified with mental objects. I end by arguing that, for Kant, even on a "one-world" interpretation, we do not know the nature or even the existence of mind-independent things. (shrink)

This paper defends a dynamic model of the way in which perception is integrated with action, a model I refer to as ‘the navigational account’. According to this account, employing vision and other forms of distance perception, a creature acquires information about its surroundings via the senses, information that enables it to select and navigate routes through its environment, so as to attain objects that satisfy its needs. This form of perceptually guided activity should be distinguished from other kinds of (...) semi-automatic responses to visual stimuli that do not necessarily involve conscious experiences. It essentially involves inner states, which involve both the awareness of phenomenal qualities, and also a representational component. The navigational account is compared here with the enactive approach to perception, which opposes the view that perceptual experiences are inner states. This paper argues that a full account of perception raises a number of different questions. One central explanatory project concerns questions about the kinds of processes that currently enable a creature to identify and respond appropriately to distant objects: the answer, it is argued, lies in acknowledging the role of conscious inner representations in guiding navigational behaviour through complex environments. The fact that perception and action are interdependent does not conflict with the claim that inner representational states comprise an essential stage in visual processing. (shrink)

Provides a certain conception of the target of a theory of intentionality in terms of five properties (aboutness, non-existence, aspectuality, generality, and semantic normativity) and provides a guided tour of how different styles of theories of intentionality can meet up these requirements.

: This paper discusses the function and scope of incompatibilist or transcendental freedom in Kant's moral philosophy. The prevailing view among scholars, most notably Allison, is that the function of transcendental freedom is to enable us to articulate a first-person conception of ourselves as rational agents involved in deliberation and choice. Thus, the scope of transcendental freedom is rational agency in general. In order to perform this function, freedom has to be merely conceivable. Pace Allison, I argue that our first-person (...) conception is neutral with respect to causal determinism, and that the function of transcendental freedom is to provide the metaphysical conditions of the possibility of genuine moral responsibility and perfect justice, and to get rid of moral luck. In order to perform this function, transcendental freedom has to be not just conceivable, but metaphysically real. My view suggests that we only have reason to attribute freedom to ourselves in situations in which we are aware that the moral law commands us categorically. We do not have a similar reason to believe we are free in purely prudential choices. Thus, the scope of transcendental freedom is not rational agency in general, but only moral agency. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the 'indeterminate objective validity' possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.

La philosophie analytique de l'action se réclame du langage ordinaire de l'action comme une des sources de ses data philosophiques. Elle se propose d'en examiner le fonctionnement, d'en extraire les concepts clés, de caractériser les formes de propositions dans lesquelles s'expriment nos actions et notre façon spontanée de les comprendre, d'examiner l'articulation propre aux stratégies d'action et au discours qui les justifie, et de faire des « proposals » pour la construction d'une théorie de l'action. En somme, il s'agit d'ériger (...) le langage ordinaire en instance de contrôle aussi bien sur le plan du traitement de problèmes philosophiques que sur celui de la construction de méta-théories des sciences de l'homme. Ce travail sur le langage de l'action peut revêtir plusieurs fonctions: fonction de clarification ou de détection de confusions, fonction thérapeutique pour guérir le langage de maladies philosophiques, c'est-à-dire des pseudo-problèmes, fonction heuristique pour prescrire une diète appropriée au traitement des perplexités philosophiques qui surgissent « quand le langage tourne à vide, non quand il travaille », pour employer le mot de Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In order to understand Hegel's approach to philosophy, we need to ask why, and how, he reacts to the well-known criticism of German Romantics, like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, against philosophical system building in general, and against Kant's system in particular. Hegel's encyclopedic system is a topical ordering of categorically different ontological realms, corresponding to different conceptual forms of representation and knowledge. All in all it turns into a systematic defense of Fichte's doctrine concerning the primacy of us as actors (...) with respect to any knowledge claim or scientific theory. Hegel's limitations of the principle of causality and of the possibility of using mathematical methods in science show, in fact, how a merely compatibilist solution of Kant's third antinomy can be overcome. (shrink)

I argue that Kant's refutation of Mendelssohn's proof of the immortality of the soul also refutes his own proof of the permanence of material substance. To evade this result, Kant would have had to rely on premises that can only be established empirically. This difficulty brings up deep and disturbing difficulties with Kant's theory of matter and body in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and suggests that his early Physical Monadology offered a better account, one he was constrained by (...) later commitments to abandon to the detriment of the coherence of his matter theory. (shrink)