En este artículo, realizo una breve presentación de la interpretación de E. Watkins del modelo causal kantiano, y analizo algunos argumentos que el autor propone contra la posibilidad de entender la tercera analogía de la experiencia a partir del modelo causal “evento-evento”. Partiendo de una lectura alternativa de los textos kantianos, trato de demostrar, contra la opinión de Watkins, que la tercera analogía de la experiencia podría resultar inteligible a partir del modelo causal “evento-evento”, y que el modelo propuesto por (...) Watkins podría volver ininteligible, o al menos oscurecer, el signi cado de la segunda analogía de la experiencia. (shrink)

El artículo trata de una reflexión que presupone un largo trajinar con los textos de Kant, ofrece pautas para la lectura de la obra filosófica. En primer lugar, atender a su incompletud, dado que es de su ser el ser continuada en la reflexión de los problemas que trata. En el caso específico de la filosofía de Kant, se enfatiza en la polivalencia de sus conceptos fundamentales, así como en la mundaneidad de los mismos.

This thesis aims to throw an illuminating light on the as yet neglected concept of nothing in Kant’s system, a concept which is taken into consideration, by Kant, in accordance with the guiding thread of the categories of the understanding. My main argument is that Kant has a fourfold division of nothing and each has a transcendental function in his system. This function is basically a limiting one; setting up negative determinations without which Kant’s system would have never been constituted (...) as it is now. It is shown in the thesis that the concept of nothing is divided basically into four: first, nothing as ens rationis that limits and thereby protects knowledge, secondly nothing as nihil privativum that defines the boundaries of phenomenal reality, thirdly nothing as ens imaginarium that makes possible the unity of experience and finally, nothing as nihil negativum that draws the lines of logical thinking. All make, in the last resort and by being the concepts of the opposite, experience possible. The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter is an exposition of all four divisions of nothing, the second is the display specifically of the concepts of ens rationis and nihil negativum, and the third is of the concepts of ens imaginarium and nihil privativum. The auxiliary argument of the thesis is that while Hegel makes a strong charge of externality against and thereby severely criticizes the Kantian concept of the thing-in-itself, - the concept of which I propose to be contained under the concept of ens rationis- Kant has equally convincing arguments against such a charge. This is the topic of the fourth and final chapter which has an implicit aim of creating the image of a powerful critical Hegel but on the other hand an equally enduring and war-like Kant. Kant is presented as a philosopher who has powerful responses to institute a balance between himself and his opponent. When Kant’s differing concepts of nothing are taken into account, Hegel’s attack of externality, it is maintained, appears not to have taken into account the full measure of the resources of the Kantian position. Even when it is said that the attack is against one specific concept of the thing-in-itself alone, Kant still seems to have enough resources for toleration and defence indeed. (shrink)

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 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 being. 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’s account of cognitive judgment is sophisticated, sound and philosophically far more illuminating than is often appreciated. Key features of Kant’s account of cognitive judgment are widely dispersed amongst various sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, whilst common philosophical proclivities have confounded these interpretive difficulties. This paper characterises Kant’s account of causal-perceptual judgment concisely to highlight one central philosophical achievement: Kant’s finding that, to understand and investigate empirical knowledge we must distinguish between predication as a grammatical form of sentences, (...) statements or judgments, and predication as a cognitive act of ascribing some characteristic to some localised particular. With Kant’s finding in view, I then elucidate how we have occluded his achievement. My results are not merely interpretive, but philosophical, because they show that Kant’s account of perceptual judgment accords with – and indeed justifies – a central and sound point regarding language, thought and reference advocated by apparently unlikely philosophical comrades. These finding highlight some methodological cautions which require re-emphasis today. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to cast new light on an important and often overlooked notion of perspectival knowledge arising from Kant. In addition to a traditional notion of perspectival knowledge as "knowledge from a vantage point", a second novel notion — "knowledge towards a vantage point" —is here introduced. The origin and rationale of perspectival knowledge 2 are traced back to Kant's so-called transcendental illusion. The legacy of the Kantian notion of perspectival knowledge 2 for contemporary discussions on (...) disagreement and the role of metaphysics in scientific knowledge is discussed. (shrink)

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

The paper is a sustained analysis of some recent work on transcendental arguments with a view to assessing both its relevance to Kant's philosophy and its historical accuracy. Robert Stem's reading of Kant's philosophical aims is examined and criticized narrowly, and Barry Stroud's influential objection to transcendental arguments as a class is shown to be harmless. Kant is presented as a friend rather than a foe of scepticism, and his 'proto-verificationist' criterion of meaning is shown to underpin, rather than undermine, (...) the sceptical position. (shrink)

Kant, in various parts of his treatment of causality, refers to determinism or the principle of sufficient reason as an inescapable principle. In fact, in the Second Analogy we find the elements to reconstruct a purely phenomenal determinism as a logical and tautological truth. I endeavour in this article to gather these elements into an organic theory of phenomenal causality and then show, in the third section, with a specific argument which I call the “paradox of phenomenal observation”, that this (...) phenomenal determinism is the only rational approach to causality because any logico-reductivistic approach, such as the Humean one, would destroy the temporal order and so the very possibility to talk of a causal relation. I also believe that, all things said, Kant did not achieve a much greater comprehension of the problem than Hume did, in his theory of causality, for he did not free a phenomenal approach from the impasse of reductivism as his reflections on “simultaneous causation” and “vanishing quantities” indeed show, and this I will argue in Sect. 4 of this article. (shrink)

There is little doubt that Salomon Maimon was both highly respected by, and highly influential upon, his contemporaries; indeed, Kant himself referred to Maimon as the best of his critics. The appraisal and reformulation of the Kantian project detailed in Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy played a significant role in determining the criteria of success for post-Kantian philosophy, and was thus crucial to the early development of German Idealism. Key aspects of Maimon’s transcendental philosophy remain, however, relatively obscure. In particular, (...) it remains unclear to what degree Maimon’s skepticism is internal to the Kantian framework, and how this skepticism is related to Maimon’s so-called dogmatic rationalism. The central aim of this project is to present Maimon’s as a distinct form of post-Kantian skepticism: one which poses significant problems for Kant’s theoretical project and which motivates a reformulation of the critical framework. In Kant’s eyes, pre-Kantian forms of skepticism are insufficiently critical insofar as they involve a commitment to transcendental realism. By contrast, I argue that Maimon’s skepticism does not involve a commitment to transcendental realism and that it strikes at the heart of Kant’s critical project insofar as it constitutes what I term ‘critical’ as opposed to merely ‘empirical’ skepticism. I further argue that Maimon’s rationalism provides the materials for a response to this form of skepticism. This thesis contributes to contemporary debates in the history of philosophy concerning the nature of Maimon’s coalition system and its relation to German Idealism, but also provides an alternative perspective on contemporary problems in the philosophy of perception concerning, in particular, the possibility of non-conceptual intentional content. (shrink)

. Between 1833 and 1835, Victor Cousin and F.W.J. Schelling engaged in an “amical but serious critique” of each other’s philosophies. I argue that, despite perceptions to the contrary, key to this exchange is a common vision of an atypical, speculative empiricism. That is, against the grain of most commentaries, I contend that there are significant similarities between Cousin’s and Schelling’s philosophies of the early 1830s—similarities that converge on the possibility of a post-Kantian speculative empiricism, which they respectively dub metaphysical (...) psychology or a priori empiricism. (shrink)

Kant’s Refutation of Idealism has often been assessed either from a realistic or from a transcendental point of view. Each of them proves to be unsufficient. The realistic approach wouldn’t it enough the tenets of the Transcendental Esthetics, and the transcendental approach doesn’t allow us to go beyond our representations. We put forward a logical and structural analysis of the famous paragraph from the System of all principles and its rewriting in the Preface to the Second edition of the first (...) Critique. Additional evidence from the Opus Postumum leads us to suggest that Kant more or less willingly endorses an equivocation on the phrase “existing outside me”, which wonderfully serves his double purpose of saving the transcendental deduction and facing the so-called “scandal of idealism.”. (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)

Perhaps one of the most pivotal ideas of Kant which connects all of the periods of his continuous intellectual work is the idea of the nature as the whole. According to Kant the nature as the whole is equivalent to totality and universality. This is the rule of the fundamental idea: the particulars finally must be under the general in order to be explicable. But it is interesting to note that this general rule which remains unchanged in Kant’s three periods (...) of intellectual work has a special meaning in each period. So we seek to answer the question of how Kant begins with the nature as the objective and then reaches the nature as the ideal of the pure reason and consider it as the necessary totality for the power of judgment and from there reaches the nature as something that has legal requirements. But such a transformation into the legal and historical nature is possible only if we pay attention to the power of reflective judgments which are contained of aesthetic and teleological judgments. Because it is the power of reflective judgment that provides Kant with the necessary tools to view the nature as a totality whose purpose is the realization of rights. In this sense the nature is something that offers hope to the human race.. (shrink)