A novel solution to the knowability paradox is proposed based on Kant’s transcendental epistemology. The ‘paradox’ refers to a simple argument from the moderate claim that all truths are knowable to the extreme claim that all truths are known. It is significant because anti-realists have wanted to maintain knowability but reject omniscience. The core of the proposed solution is to concede realism about epistemic statements while maintaining anti-realism about non-epistemic statements. Transcendental epistemology supports such a view by providing for a (...) sharp distinction between how we come to understand and apply epistemic versus non-epistemic concepts, the former through our capacity for a special kind of reflective self-knowledge Kant calls ‘transcendental apperception’. The proposal is a version of restriction strategy: it solves the paradox by restricting the anti-realist’s knowability principle. Restriction strategies have been a common response to the paradox but previous versions face serious difficulties: either they result in a knowability principle too weak to do the work anti-realists want it to, or they succumb to modified forms of the paradox, or they are ad hoc. It is argued that restricting knowability to non-epistemic statements by conceding realism about epistemic statements avoids all versions of the paradox, leaves enough for the anti-realist attack on classical logic, and, with the help of transcendental epistemology, is principled in a way that remains compatible with a thoroughly anti-realist outlook. (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)

In On a Discovery, Kant depicts monads as simple beings that are thought in the idea as the ground of appearances. He argues that his account of monads is partially in line with both Leibniz's monadology and his own critical philosophy. However, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant appears to depart from the monadologies of his predecessors. In this article, I make sense of Kant's late subscription to a version of Leibniz's monadology by arguing that Kant considers monads to (...) be the objects represented through cosmological and psychological ideas posited by reason in its search for the unconditioned conditions of appearances. In particular, I point to what I take to be two instances of what Kant calls “objects in the idea” in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely (a) the substratum of matter qua ground of external appearances, and (b) the soul qua ground of internal appearances. Drawing on Kant's reply to Eberhard and the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, I highlight the merely regulative—and yet fundamental—role that monads conceived as objects of reason play in Kant's critical philosophy. (shrink)

Shedding new light on Kant’s use of the term ‘transcendental’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, this article aims to determine the elements that Kant’s transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolffian ontology as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. On this basis I argue that Wolff’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of metaphysics – qua first philosophy – have a deeper affinity than is commonly assumed. Bracketing the issue of Kant’s alleged subjectivism, I challenge the opposition (...) between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s Science of Logic. One the one hand, I argue that Hegel was more deeply indebted to Kant than he generally admits. On the other hand, I hold that this debt concerns Kant’s conception of metaphysics rather than his alleged subjectivism. (shrink)

This essay examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Logic and its interpretation of Kant's “science of transcendental analysis” as a theory of the cognitive faculties and their “inherent forms” or “several functional powers”. I explain why Coleridge characterises transcendental analysis as an “investigation into the constitution and constituent forms” of the faculties, and consider the reasons behind his schematic division of such inquiry into “transcendental [ … ] Æsthetic, Logic, and Noetic”. I argue that Coleridge's claims about the forms, operations, and contents (...) that derive from different cognitive powers, and the philosophical method that enables us to prove such derivation, are based on Kant's theory of “transcendental reflection”. I also explain how Coleridge's facultative conception of transcendental analysis relates to recent scholarship on Kant's accounts of (i) our cognitive capacities and (ii) the purposes of transcendental reflection. My essay does not aim to defend Coleridge's interpretation of Kant, but rather to provide a clearer picture of how this interpretation informs Coleridge's analysis of cognitive activity and mental content in Logic, including his “transcendental noetic”, which seeks to explain the possibility of the kind intellectual intuition that Kant explicitly denies. (shrink)

If it seems unquestionable that C. I. Lewis is a Kantian in important respects, it is more difficult to determine what, if anything, is original about his Kantianism. For it might be argued that Lewis’ Kantianism simply reflects an approach to the a priori which was very common in the first half of the twentieth century, namely, the effort to make the a priori relative. In this paper, I will argue that Lewis’ Kantianism does present original features. The latter can (...) be detected by focusing on Lewis’ account of the method of philosophy in the first chapter of Mind and the World Order. In that context, Lewis argues that the method of philosophy should be reflective and critical. It will be my contention that this understanding of philosophy involves a therapeutic perspective, which bears important resemblances to Kant’s account of transcendental reflection in the Amphiboly of the Critique of Pure Reason. I will illustrate how this therapeutic application of reflection works in Lewis’ metaphysics. In this context, reflection can correct errors of reasoning that occur when we are operating within a particular conceptual scheme and use the criteria of reality that are appropriate in another. (shrink)