Abstract: Philosophers interested in Kant's relevance to contemporary debates over the nature of mental content—notably Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais—have argued that Kant ought to be credited with being the original proponent of the existence of ‘nonconceptual content’. However, I think the ‘nonconceptualist’ interpretations that Hanna and Allais give do not show that Kant allowed for nonconceptual content as they construe it. I argue, on the basis of an analysis of certain sections of the A and B editions of the (...) Transcendental Deduction, for a ‘conceptualist’ reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. My contention is that since Kant's notion of empirical intuition makes essential reference to the categories, it must be true for him that no empirical intuition can be given in sensibility independently of the understanding and its categories. (shrink)

I explain Kant’s critique of Leibniz’s rejection of real opposition in the Amphiboly in the context of Kant’s pre-Critical writings on vis viva and negative magnitudes and his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Properly contextualized in terms of the vis viva controversy, I argue, Kant’s arguments against Leibniz succeed, even though they are laden with theoretical inconsistencies and operate under false physical premises.

La mayoría de los lectores de la primera Crítica casi siempre interpretan la Deducción trascendental de las categorías (DTC) como una respuesta al problema de la causalidad planteado por Hume. Pero no todos parecen haberse dado cuenta de que la DTC también comporta uma réplica al desafio de Hume a la noción de identidad personal. Para aclarar este punto el autor sugiere, primero, que el ataque de Hume no se dirige a Locke, sino más bien a la supuesta substancialidad del (...) sujeto cartesiano. A continuación, sostiene que Kant redefine la identidad del sujeto en términos lógicos y reconstruye su argumento en la primera parte de la DTC como una respuesta al desafio humeano. Por fin, presenta y discute, en términos generales, la concepción kantiana de la unidad y de la identidad lógicas de la autoconciencia. (shrink)

: This essay considers the place of mechanisms in ancient theories of science. It might seem therefore to promise a meager discussion, since the importance of mechanisms in contemporary scientific explanation is the product of a revolution in scientific thinking connected with the late Renaissance and its mechanization of nature. Indeed the conception of astronomy as devoted merely to "saving the appearances" without reference to the physics of planetary motion might seem an instance of ancient science vigorously rejecting mechanisms. This (...) fact should suggest to us that there is no simple truth about the role of mechanisms in science that is not relative to a particular strategy or historical moment in the development of a scientific tradition. It should also remind us of a parallel question concerning scientific theory, the question now expressed in the issue of realism and instrumentalism. A discussion of Aristotle's views on scientific explanation in the Posterior Analytics, and particularly his concept of what is prior and better known by nature, shows the ways in which Aristotle resists a crude choice between realism and instrumentalism. Early modern theories of science were committed to realism, and the notion of mechanisms was important to that commitment. Part of the force of mechanisms was that they were thought to reveal the activities by which phenomena are truly brought into being. In this way they often served early philosophers of science by promising a realistic science, able to discover the actual mechanisms by which phenomena were brought about in a universe increasingly viewed as mechanistic. Mechanisms, then, are of critical importance if one is a realist, but of considerably less importance if one is an instrumentalist. Since Aristotle, at least, was neither a realist nor an instrumentalist, his view might be thought to be typically Aristotelian: in some ways they're important, in some not. A glance at some contemporary instances suggests similarly that there can be no general view from a theoretical perspective of the status of mechanisms. Their place is dependent on specific features of specific projects of scientific research and explanation. (shrink)

In his Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter on the antinomy of pure reason, Kant not only argues that aprioristic cosmology is doomed to failure; he also implies that empirical knowledge about the universe is impossible. Today, such a negative verdict about the possibility of cosmological knowledge seems implausible because physical cosmology has made substantial progress. In particular, the spatiotemporal extension of the universe now seems a matter of empirical investigation in which models figure centrally. But I think it (...) is worth considering the possibility that Kant got something right and that he offers insights that can help us to better understand problems in present-day cosmology. In this article, I explore a striking coincidence: according to both Kant and current wisdom, cosmology faces a serious underdetermination problem regarding the spatiotemporal extension of the world. As a closer analysis reveals, however, Kant and modern cosmology differ on the reasons why underdetermination arises. In current cosmology, underdetermination follows from laws that are knowable a posteriori, and not only from the very idea of cosmological knowledge, as Kant would have it. This suggests that the current underdetermination problem is not fully a Kantian one. (shrink)

. This essay considers the place of mechanisms in ancient theories of science. It might seem therefore to promise a meager discussion, since the importance of mechanisms in contemporary scientific explanation is the product of a revolution in scientific thinking connected with the late Renaissance and its mechanization of nature. Indeed the conception of astronomy as devoted merely to “saving the appearances” without reference to the physics of planetary motion might seem an instance of ancient science vigorously rejecting mechanisms. This (...) fact should suggest to us that there is no simple truth about the role of mechanisms in science that is not relative to a particular strategy or historical moment in the development of a scientific tradition. It should also remind us of a parallel question concerning scientific theory, the question now expressed in the issue of realism and instrumentalism. A discussion of Aristotle's views on scientific explanation in the Posterior Analytics, and particularly his concept of what is prior and better known by nature, shows the ways in which Aristotle resists a crude choice between realism and instrumentalism. Early modern theories of science were committed to realism, and the notion of mechanisms was important to that commitment. Part of the force of mechanisms was that they were thought to reveal the activities by which phenomena are truly brought into being. In this way they often served early philosophers of science by promising a realistic science, able to discover the actual mechanisms by which phenomena were brought about in a universe increasingly viewed as mechanistic. Mechanisms, then, are of critical importance if one is a realist, but of considerably less importance if one is an instrumentalist. Since Aristotle, at least, was neither a realist nor an instrumentalist, his view might be thought to be typically Aristotelian: in some ways they're important, in some not. A glance at some contemporary instances suggests similarly that there can be no general view from a theoretical perspective of the status of mechanisms. Their place is dependent on specific features of specific projects of scientific research and explanation. (shrink)