Why does Kant say that a “skeptical satisfaction of pure reason” is “impossible” (A758/B786)? I answer this question by giving a reading of “The Discipline of Pure Reason in Respect of Its Polemic Employment.” I explain that Kant must address skepticism in this context because his warning against developing counterarguments to dogmatic attacks encourages a comparison between the critical and the skeptical methods. I then argue that skepticism fails to “satisfy” [befriedigen] reason insofar as it cannot “pacify” reason’s tendency to (...) go beyond its own boundaries. The skeptical method reveals the past failures of dogmatic metaphysics but cannot rule out future successes. Only critical knowledge of reason’s proper bounds can do this, thereby pacifying our restless reason. I close by arguing that Kant’s discussion implies that a skeptic must feel dissatisfied with her renunciation of metaphysics, and that this dissatisfaction can lead her to take interest in Kant’s critical philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter intervenes in recent debates in Kant scholarship about the possibility of a general logical alien. Such an alien is a thinker whose laws of thinking violate ours. She is third-personal as she is radically unlike us. Proponents of the constitutive reading of Kant’s conception of general logic accordingly suggest that Kant rules out the possibility of such an alien as unthinkable. I add to this an often-overlooked element in Kant’s thinking: there is reason to think that he grants—and (...) in fact presupposes—the possibility of a transcendental logical alien. Such an alien is a knower whose laws of experience purport to violate ours. She is first-personal as she is radically like us. In other words, she is us, insofar as we are alienated from ourselves and our experience. I go on to draw an analogy between her, a dogmatist, and another transcendental alien, an evil agent. Just as a dogmatist is alienated from her (our) experiential laws, an evil agent is alienated from her (our) moral law. These forms of theoretical and practical self-conceit require self-knowledge in the form of a critique of speculative or practical reason. In bringing this point out, I aim to shift from the question of whether logical laws constitute our thinking to the question of whether grasping our experiential and moral laws as our laws constitutes our reason. (shrink)

Fichte argues that the conclusion of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is correct yet lacks a crucial premise, given Kant’s admission that the metaphysical deduction locates an arbitrary origin for the categories. Fichte provides the missing premise by employing a new method: a genetic deduction of the categories from a first principle. Since Fichte claims to articulate the same view as Kant in a different, it is crucial to grasp genetic deduction in relation to the sorts of deduction that (...) Kant offers. I propose to interpret genetic deduction as the simultaneous fulfillment of two tasks: answering the question quid facti by deriving the categories from the I and answering the question quid juris by establishing our entitlement to the categories as conditions of experience. While the second task represents Fichte’s agreement with Kant’s transcendental deduction, the first reflects his correction of Kant’s metaphysical deduction. (shrink)

Dieter Henrich ‘s “Notion of a Deduction” (1989), opened up approaches to both Deductions in terms of legal as opposed to syllogistic reasoning. Since the CpR is shot through with juridical metaphors and analogies, many points of connection suggest themselves. In this paper, I extend and modify Henrich’s approach, in order to extract a particular logic of evidence. I argue that the three syntheses of the A-Deduction correspond to parts of a deductive procedure, and that their names have been chosen (...) to indicate this connection to the reader. Nonetheless, the principal aim of the paper is not to develop and defend these historiographical claims, but to explicate the structure of the logic of evidence in question and link it to Kant’s intended refutation of Hume. Since the procedures Kant describes are part of the law of evidence of many nations and are equally well at work in contemporary information-theory, a precise reconstruction can map directly onto contemporary problems in philosophy, physics, and informatics, without any loss of historical accuracy. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Kant's puzzling claim that the B-Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason should be considered as having two main steps. Previous commentators have tended to agree in general on the first step as arguing for the necessity of the categories for possible experience, but disagree on what the second step is and whether Kant even needs a second step. I argue that the two parts of the B-Deduction correspond to the two aspects of (...) a priori cognition: necessity and universality. The bulk of the paper consists of support for the second step, the universality of the categories. I show that Kant's arguments in the second half of the B-Deduction aim to define the scope of that universality for possible experience by considering the possibilities of divine intellectual intuition, of non-human kinds of sensible intuition, and of apperception of the self. In these ways Kant delimits the boundaries of the applicability of the categories and excludes any other possible experience for human beings. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kant’s doctrine of definitions, as it is developed in theTranscendental Doctrine of Method(TDM) and in the lectures on logic, lays down the semantic background of the problem of the objective reality of the categories and of the solution Kant provides for it in theTranscendental Analytic. The distinction between nominal and real definitions introduces a two-dimensional element in Kant’s theory of concepts, and this, I argue, provides a compelling explanation for the assumption Kant makes in (...) §13 that it is possible to possess a concept without knowing the conditions of its legitimate application. This view is supported by the parallels between Kant’s discussion of empirical, mathematical, and philosophical concepts in §13 and in theTDM. And, it allows clarifying the sense in which the arguments that prove the objective reality of the categories are, at the same time, counterfactual reflections that give us (incomplete) insight into their real definitions. (shrink)

This paper uses a distinction drawn from the Kantian legal theorist Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach to categorize two approaches to analysing the concept of right, each of which is represented by vari...

Kant worries that if we are not free, morality will be nothing more than a phantasm for us. In the final section of the Groundwork, he attempts secure our freedom, and with it, morality. Here is a simplified version of his argument: A rational will is a free willA free will stands under the moral lawTherefore, a rational will stands under the moral lawIn this paper, I attempt to defuse two prominent objections to this argument. Commentators often worry that Kant (...) has not managed to establish that we are rational beings with wills in the first place, and that he equivocates in his use of ‘free’ between premise 1 and 2. I argue that both of these objections can be overcome, and thus seek to offer some hope for Kant’s approach in Groundwork III. (shrink)

My aim is to reconstruct the basic steps and the fundamental idea of Kant’s transcendental deduction of categories as well as Hegel’s interpretation and reframing of Kant’s idea. Hegel’s reading is crucial for two reasons: first, for fixing the basic form of the Kant­ian argument and secondly, for understanding its metaphilosophical relevance. For Hegel, philosophical proof has a specific nature, which distinguishes it from scientific proof and brings it closer to a juridical one. In this perspective the transcendental deduction, which (...) is universally considered one of the most difficult chapters in the history of philosophy, reveals itself as the genuine clarification of specifically philosophical proof. I first present the idea of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as its Hegelian reading in the Science of Logic and reformulation as the very method of philosophy in the Philo­sophy of Right. I show what in the Kantian argumentation constituted the basis for Hegel’s own interpretation and transformation. In so doing, I highlight a ‘red thread’ between the two ideas of the transcendental deduction. I conclude by proposing a formal account of Kant’s and Hegel’s ideas and by summing up the main metaphilosophical insights we can gain from Kant’s idea and its Hegelian interpretation. (shrink)

Focusing on Walter Benjamin's earliest pieces dedicated to school reform and the student movement, this article traces the basic critical approaches informing his mature thought back to his struggle to critically implement and transform the theory of concept formation and value presentation developed by his Freiburg teacher, Heinrich Rickert. It begins with an account of Rickert's work, specifically of the concept of Darstellung (presentation) and its central role in Rickert's postmetaphysical theory of historical research (which he characterizes as exclusively concerned (...) with the Kantian quid juris). It shows that Rickert develops a speculative but practical theory of value recognition, which nevertheless leaves the status of value itself undetermined. Contra Rickert, Benjamin returns to the ignored quid facti, or origin of value, and shows that a metacritical, postmetaphysical approach such as Rickert's ultimately limits possible experience rather than grounding it. This basic insight, it is argued, is the cornerstone of Benjamin's concept of critique. (shrink)

A key theme throughout Maimon’s works is a circularity he diagnoses at the heart of Kant’s response to Hume. The objective validity of Kant’s category of causality ultimately rests, Maimon argues, upon the logical status of the hypothetical judgement – on its inclusion among the forms of pure general logic. In turn, however, the inclusion of the hypothetical within pure general logic itself rests upon the objective validity of causal judgements. This article examines Maimon’s diagnosis and traces it back to (...) a debate that has its origins in Wolff’s German Logic, concerning the relationship between categorical and hypothetical judgements. (shrink)

The 13th International Kant Congress was held on August 6-9, 2019 in Oslo, Norway. The main tasks of this review are to analyse the central theme of the Congress, “The Court of Reason”, the related spheres of philosophical inquiry such as metaphilosophy and philosophical methodology, as well as to reveal the main approaches and development trends of transcendental philosophy in “theoretical” and “practical” fields and modern Kant studies, notably transcendental philosophy of language and consciousness. The solution of these tasks will (...) make it possible to raise the question of the prospects of Kantian transcendentalism in relation to the pressing problems of our time and to chart the paths of such development. (shrink)

William Boos (1943–2014) was a mathematician, set theorist, and philosopher. His work is at the intersection of these fields. In particular, Boos looks at the classic problems of epistemology through the lens of the axiomatic method in mathematics and physics, or something resembling that method.

The purpose of the third section of Kant’s Groundwork is to prove the possibility of the categorical imperative. In the end of the second section, Kant establishes that a proof like this is necessary to show that morality is ‘something’ and ‘not a chimerical idea without any truth’ or a ‘phantom’. Since the categorical imperative was established as a synthetic a priori practical proposition, in order to prove its possibility it is necessary ‘to go beyond cognition of objects to a (...) critique of the subject, that is, of pure practical reason’. Kant names this kind of proof a deduction. The present paper intends to show the argument whose purpose is to justify the categorical imperative; show that the argument is a transcendental deduction; present the argument as it is reconstructed by Allison, and show that, although it seems compelling, the position of the commentator could not be accepted by Kant himself. (shrink)

This article attempts to read the Transcendental Dialectic through Meillassoux’s model of the absolute contingency of being in order to rethink some of its central difficulties. Specifically, this concerns better understanding the role played by the categories of relation and modality in the empirical use of the ideas of reason, which underlies their regulative use that is directed at an absolute unity of reason. It will be discussed which questions are implied in the central claim of Meillassoux’s ontology, i.e., that (...) it is possible to derive from the necessity of contingency the existence and noncontradictory being of the thing in itself. First, I will retrace basic points of Meillassoux’s critique of “correlationism”, by means of which he reconfigures the divisions between metaphysics, physics, and ontology. Second, against the background of the Kantian concept of hope, I will examine a relation between the Transcendental Dialectic and ethics, as, respectively, conceived of in Kant and in Meillassoux’s reinterpretation. Third, I will critically ask in how far absolute contingency can be understood as grounding a concept of experience and in which sense the idea of the antinomy chapter in the Transcendental Dialectic contains an argument more complex than Meillassoux’s model suggests. (shrink)

Le but de cet article est d’éclairer l’interprétation par Maimon des Catégories d’Aristote et de montrer comment elle vise à défendre le traité aristotélicien contre les objections émises par Kant dans la Critique de la raison pure. De plus, au travers d’une analyse de cette interprétation, nous tentons de clarifier l’entreprise de réforme de la philosophie transcendantale que Maimon développe dans son Essai d’une nouvelle logique ou théorie de la pensée.

In this paper, I shall discuss the assumption that Kant’s method in the Critique of Pure Reason is a transcendental analysis of experience. In order to do this, I will consider the conception of transcendental analysis that Marburg Neo-Kantianism powerfully introduced into Kant interpretation. I shall first develop a general model of transcendental analysis in the Marburg sense. I shall then ask whether this is a suitable model for the interpretation of the first Critique. Kant’s distinction between the analytic and (...) synthetic method in the Prolegomena seems to contradict this, given that it is a distinction between two different mathematical methods of demonstration. However, I shall argue that any such reading is incompatible with the Critique, and that transcendental analysis is indeed a legitimate interpretative model for understanding Kant. I shall finally turn to Strawson’s conception of descriptive metaphysics, which has strong affinities to Kant and the Marburg school. Most importantly, Strawson helps us to understand three significant aims at which transcendental analysis is directed. Finally, comparing transcendental analysis to dominant conceptions of analysis in philosophy, I shall argue that it constitutes a variety of philosophical analysis sui generis. (shrink)