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)

The article defends Heidegger’s view that the main question of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the question of being. It is also argued that Heidegger special understanding of the level and method of KrV deserves serious attention. Finally it is argued that Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of the KrV is best seen as representative of an hermeneutical conception of phenomenology.

Although coming from two very different paths, both Kant and Patañjali present similar strategies to refute the skeptic argument that denies the real and independent existence of physical objects. This essay examines both strategies through the reconstruction of Kant’s and Patañjali’s twofold refutation of idealism: one based on the perceptual distinction between the real and the illusory, and the other one based on the ontological necessity of a permanent external object to understand change. I argue that the second strategy is (...) philosophically stronger due to its phenomenological recognition of the body as a grounding point, and that this is possible only on account of an anti-realist conception of time. Both Kant and Patañjali utilize a similar line of realist argumentation while diverging in the type of realism that they each hold. (shrink)

The Kantian project of investigating the necessary structure of experience presupposes answers to three questions: what is the purpose of such an investigation, what is the source of necessary features of experience, and by what means is it possible to establish the necessary structure of experience? This paper is a critical examination of Strawson's answers to these questions in The Bounds of Sense and his later work. The realism that is implicit in The Bounds of Sense is much more explicit (...) in Strawson's later work but relies on problematic assumptions about the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the origin, intellectual development and use of a semantic variant of the idea of logical space found implicitly in Kant and explicitly in early Wittgenstein and van Fraassen. It elucidates the idea of logical space as the idea of images or pictures representative of reality organized into a logico-mathematical structure circumscribing a form of all possible worlds. Its main claim is that application of these images or pictures to reality is through a certain conception of self. The (...) first chapter presents a novel interpretation of Kant’s semantic theory of schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason, showing that a structure of the imagination induced by the transcendental self informs an implicit idea of logical space. The second chapter offers an intellectual history of the idea through developments in the organization of images introduced by Helmholtz and Hertz. The third chapter reveals early Wittgenstein’s idea of logical space to be his notion of the self, demonstrating how this serves to unify propositions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning solipsism, realism, ethics, aesthetics and mysticism with those pertaining to the picture theory of meaning. The fourth chapter provides a historical overview of the development of van Fraassen’s empiricism in relation to his adaptation of logical space, and evaluates his recent proposal in Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective that the problem of coordination in the semantic view of theories is dissolved through self-location in logical space. After identifying a number of problems this proposal creates for his empiricism, a brief suggestion is made about how van Fraassen might improve upon his conception of logical space, and how an empiricist view of scientific representation might be understood as a result. (shrink)