En este trabajo se analizan algunas observaciones formuladas por Kant respecto de las dificultades implicadas en la selección y uso de los términos lingüísticos en el proceso de escritura filosófica. Consideramos que dicho análisis no sólo resulta relevante para una reconstrucción general de su concepción acerca del lenguaje, sino que proporciona asimismo elementos significativos para analizar la distinción entre concepto y palabra formulada en el marco de la epistemología crítica. Observaremos asimismo que, si bien en esta sección preliminar de la (...) “Dialéctica” se identifican importantes problemáticas que serán discutidas intensamente a partir del posterior desarrollo de la Filosofía del lenguaje, la estrategia metodológica adoptada por Kant para la resolución de los problemas específicos abordados en la primera Crítica impide que tales problemáticas sean visualizadas como aspectos significativos para la determinación de los límites del conocimiento humano. (shrink)

Do plants represent according to Kant? This is closely connected to the question of whether he held plants are alive, because he explains life in terms of the faculty to act on one’s own representations. He also explains life as having an immaterial principle of self-motion, and as a body’s interaction with a supersensible soul. I argue that because of the way plants move themselves, Kant is committed to their being alive, to their having a supersensible ground of their self-activity, (...) and to their having desires (although these are not conscious). This has important ramifications for Kant’s teleology and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

One of the most controversial issues to emerge in recent studies of Fichte concerns the status of his normative ethics, i.e., his theory of what makes actions morally good or bad. Scholars are divided over Fichte’s view regarding the ‘final end’ of moral striving, since it appears this end can be either a specific goal permitting maximizing calculations (the consequentialist reading defended by Kosch 2015), or an indeterminate goal permitting only duty-based decisions (the deontological reading defended by Wood 2016). While (...) I think each interpretive position contains an element of truth, my aim in this paper is to defend a third alternative, according to which Fichte’s normative ethics presents us with a unique form of social perfectionism. (shrink)

Paul Crowther, in his book, The Kantian Sublime (1989), works to reconstruct Kant's aesthetics in order to make its continued relevance to contemporary aesthetic concerns more visible. The present article remains within the area of Crowther's "cognitive" sublime, to show that there is much space for expanding upon Kantian varieties of the sublime, particularly in art.

This paper concentrates on some aspects of the history of the analytic-synthetic distinction from Kant to Bolzano and Frege. This history evinces considerable continuity but also some important discontinuities. The analytic-synthetic distinction has to be seen in the first place in relation to a science, i.e. an ordered system of cognition. Looking especially to the place and role of logic it will be argued that Kant, Bolzano and Frege each developed the analytic-synthetic distinction within the same conception of scientific rationality, (...) that is, within the Classical Model of Science: scientific knowledge as cognitio ex principiis . But as we will see, the way the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or propositions functions within this model turns out to differ considerably between them. (shrink)

This paper examines Kant’s anthropological project and its relationship to his conception of ‘man’ in order to show that Kant’s answer to the question ‘what is man?’ entails a decisive re-evaluation of traditional conceptions of human nature. I argue that Kant redirects the question ‘what is man?’ away from defining man in terms of what he is, and towards defining him in terms of what he does, in particular through the distinction between three levels of what I will call ‘man’s (...) praxis’: the levels of technicality, prudence, and morality. As soon as man is understood in terms of what he makes of himself rather than in terms of what he is, two crucial issues arise: what is the purpose of his making? And how can he reach this destination? My claim is that whilst the first question is answered by ethics and a doctrine of prudence, the second question is answered by anthropology. In this sense, anthropology plays the crucial role of identifying the worldly helps and hindrances to the realisation of man’s purposes—and this is the reason why it should be understood as a ‘pragmatic’ discipline.Keywords: Immanuel; Kant; Pragmatic; Anthropology; Praxis; Aliens; Human nature. (shrink)

Concerning Descartes and Kant, Michel Fichant and Jean Luc Marion claim that “when Kant thinks, Descartes still implicitly advances”. Yet, is a convergence among ontological theses (Heidegger) sufficient to nullify divergences among methodological grounds? To refuse the relationship of inherency "Descartes in Kant”, it is necessary to move from the standpoint of being to that of thinking, and observe in what sense words like “evidence” and “certainty”, once redefined by Kant, clarify the originality of the methodological problem of the Critique (...) of Pure Reason. (shrink)

In a variety of disciplines, there exists a consensus that human rights are individual claim rights that all human beings possess simply as a consequence of being human. That consensus seems to me to obscure the real character of the concept and hinder the progress of discussion. I contend that rather than thinking of human rights in the first instance as “claim rights” possessed by individuals, we should regard human rights as higher order norms that articulate standards of legitimacy for (...) sociopolitical and legal institutions. (shrink)

Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue (...) that its goal is to establish a set of rules for the use of pure reason that, if followed, will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate our tendency to make judgments about supersensible objects. Since Kant's justification for these rules relies crucially on claims he has defended in the Doctrine of Elements, I argue further that, far from being a dispensable part of the Critique as commentators have tended to claim, the Discipline is, in fact, the culmination of Kant's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)

La ciencia económica preponderante descuidó el estudio de la cooperación humana. Esto se debe a que hay una contradicción entre ser seres racionales con propensión a maximizar el bienestar, por un lado, y la posibilidad de concretar objetivos de beneficiocomún e implementar procesos relacionales no coercitivos, por el otro lado. Sin embargo, la economía experimental se ha preocupado por hallar explicación a la actitud de reciprocidad que muestran los agentes en distintos juegos de estrategia, ya que posibilita concretar acciones colectivas (...) en las que subyace una intencionalidad compartida que permite cumplir objetivos mutuamente dispuestos. Se busca mostrar cuándo y por qué los seres humanos empiezan a relacionarse con sus semejantes y cuáles el fundamento normativo que logra orientar estos comportamientos. (shrink)

I argue that, by the time of his essay "Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space" (1768), Kant had come to question the status of the Principle of Sufficient Reason as a result, at least in part, of his recognition of the existence of incongruent counterparts. Though Kant's argument against absolute space based on the existence of incongruent counterparts has been much discussed in recent years, its importance as a useful benchmark by which to judge the (...) direction of Kant’s thinking during this period has gone unnoticed. This paper is a modest attempt to remedy this deficiency. (shrink)

Kant is well known as the philosopher who spent his life hunting for a prioris, philosophically identifiable characteristics of the make-up of human beings. These characteristics are species-universal, and are necessary presuppositions of the possibility of the success of various kinds of cognitive and cultural strategies. Kant bagged some big game. Space, time and the categories are a priori conditions of the possibility of human cognition. God, freedom and immortality are a priori conditions of the possibility of morality. The sensus (...) communis is the a priori condition of the possibility of the universalization of judgments of taste. The hard-won trophies are presuppositions of possibilities. Once they were thought to be properties of a universe well ordered by a substantive god. No longer. Now we must look upon them as entrenched contributions of what it is to be human, as preconditions of human potentialities. (shrink)

Rawls says that public reason is the reason of the citizens of a democratic state and takes the Supreme Court in the USA as the exemplar of public reason. It differs from non public reason, which is used e.g., in universities and academic institutions. Rawls contrasts with Kant, which opposes the public reason of the scholar—or the philosopher—, who speaks before the world, to the private reason of state or church officials. The later, once they accept an authority, cannot think (...) by themselves (selbst denken). A closer examination shows that Rawls is not so far from Kant as it seems, because he takes the constitutional judges not as they are, but as they should be. However Rawls still apparently refuses Kant’s unity of reason. Further investigation of the relations between ethical reason, democratic reason and legal reason is needed. Democratic reason is tantamount both to public reason and to legal reason in a modern constitutional state. It is a requirement of ethics but still not identical with ethical reason, since it is possible to accept democratic reason and to argue against it from an ethical point of view. There is just one good way of reasoning, in spite of the constraints that the sources of law and the rules of procedure impose on legal reasoning, compared with ethics. Such constraints are based on the democratic principle, which is again based on ethical reason, which at last both grounds and limits the constraints that law imposes on reason. (shrink)

A socialist health service cannot be a socialist island in a sea of capitalism, as the record of the British National Health Service shows. Nonetheless, since health is a basic need, it can be a key component of the advocacy of socialism. I propose two central socialist principles. On the basis of these I suggest that a socialist health system would emphasise care rather than service; insist on democratic structures and control of resources; and require the prohibition of private medicine.

the article deals with the interrelation between galileo and the visual arts. it presents a couple of drawings from the hand of galileo and confronts them with viviani's report that galileo had not only wanted to become an artist in his youth but stayed close to the field of visual arts throughout his lifetime. in the ambiance of these drawings the famous moon watercolors are not in the dark. they represent a very acute and reasonable tool to convince the people (...) who trusted images more than words. the article ends with panofsky's argument that it was galileo's anti-mannerist notion of art that evoked a repulsion of kepler's ellipses. it tries to show that it was again an aesthetical prejudice that hindered einstein from accepting panofsky's theory. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe article deals with the interrelation between Galileo and the visual arts. It presents a couple of drawings from the hand of Galileo and confronts them with Viviani's report that Galileo had not only wanted to become an artist in his youth but stayed close to the field of visual arts throughout his lifetime. In the ambiance of these drawings the famous moon watercolors are not in the dark. They represent a very acute and reasonable tool to convince the (...) people who trusted images more than words. The article ends with Panofsky's argument that it was Galileo's anti-Mannerist notion of art that evoked a repulsion of Kepler's ellipses. It tries to show that it was again an aesthetical prejudice that hindered Einstein from accepting Panofsky's theory. (shrink)

This paper develops a Kantian account of the moral assessment of institutions. The problem I address is this: while a deontological theory may find that some legal institutions are required by justice, it is not obvious how such a theory can assess institutions not strictly required (or prohibited) by justice. As a starting-point, I consider intuitions that in some cases it is desirable to attribute non-consequentialist moral value to institutions not required by justice. I will argue that neither consequentialist nor (...) virtue-ethical accounts account for these intuitions, suggesting that a distinctive deontological account is needed. The account I give is drawn from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals; I distinguish it from Kantian views of institutions developed by Barbara Herman and Onora O’Neill. Throughout, I use marriage as an example. (shrink)

Kant is well known for his restrictive conception of proper science. In the present paper I will try to explain why Kant adopted this conception. I will identify three core conditions which Kant thinks a proper science must satisfy: systematicity, objective grounding, and apodictic certainty. These conditions conform to conditions codified in the Classical Model of Science. Kant’s infamous claim that any proper natural science must be mathematical should be understood on the basis of these conditions. In order to substantiate (...) this reading, I will show that only in this way it can be explained why Kant thought (1) that mathematics has a particular foundational function with respect to the natural sciences and (2) as such secures their scientific status. (shrink)

The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of (...) disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The third part is dedicated to the relation of theories of disinterested pleasure to the meta-aesthetical debate between realism and anti-realism. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty. (shrink)

The universalism of rights is a corollary to the individualistic semantics of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the grounds of universalism were those legal and political concepts that theoretically describe the 19th century nation-state (such as sovereignty of the people, citizenship, rights, and the like). All these concepts of the liberal tradition construct the nation-state on the presupposition of a highly homogeneous political community of rational subjects, whose homogeneity consists in the very social, economic, political and sexual conditions (...) of their rationality. This kind of legal and political semantics is no longer adequate to characterize contemporary society which is a multicultural, highly in-homogeneous world-society. It no longer incorporates an ethic which is able to enforce universal leading values for human action. (shrink)

This piece presents an account of Kant's notion of provisional right and connects this conception to his defence of two principles of publicity. The argument is to the effect that understanding the notion of provisional right will enable us to comprehend the Kantian picture of the state of nature, the basis of the transition from such a state to the civil condition and also his treatment of international right. The paper also presents the sketch of a Kantian theory of normatively (...) justified institutions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is threefold. First, I critically examine two dominant Kantian views of practical justification and argue that they cannot provide an appropriate account of the normative force of moral and political principles. Secondly, as the main reason for these unsuccessful attempts, I identify a certain interpretation of Kant's account of practical judgement. Finally, I point to some of the differences between this interpretation and Kant's own claims on practical judgement, in order to suggest an alternative approach; (...) I also note the tension between slogans, like ‘political, not meta – physical’ or ‘we must stay philosophically on the surface’, on the one hand, and, on the other, the appeal this alternative approach must make to some elements of Kant's metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of Kant's categories of freedom, explaining how they fit together and what role they are supposed to play. My interpretation places particular emphasis on the structural features that the table of the categories of freedom shares with the table of judgements and the table of categories laid out by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. In this way we can identify two interpretative constraints, namely (i) that the categories falling under each heading must form (...) a synthetic unity whereby the third one derives from the combination of the other two. and (ii) that the first two categories falling under each heading must be morally undetermined and sensibly conditioned, while the third category is sensibly unconditioned and determined only by the moral law. (shrink)

This paper explores a pair of puzzling and controversial topics in the history of late nineteenth-century philosophy: the psychologism debates, and the nature of neo-Kantianism. Each is sufficientl...

Officially, for Kant, judgments are analytic iff the predicate is "contained in" the subject. I defend the containment definition against the common charge of obscurity, and argue that arithmetic cannot be analytic, in the resulting sense. My account deploys two traditional logical notions: logical division and concept hierarchies. Division separates a genus concept into exclusive, exhaustive species. Repeated divisions generate a hierarchy, in which lower species are derived from their genus, by adding differentia(e). Hierarchies afford a straightforward sense of containment: (...) genera are contained in the species formed from them. Kant's thesis then amounts to the claim that no concept hierarchy conforming to division rules can express truths like '7+5=12.' Kant is correct. Operation concepts ( ) bear two relations to number concepts: and are inputs, is output. To capture both relations, hierarchies must posit overlaps between concepts that violate the exclusion rule. Thus, such truths are synthetic. (shrink)

_An exploration of philosophical and religious ideas about humor in modern philosophy and their secular implications._.

Philosophy is general and systematic reflection about what there is, what ought to be done or is good, and how knowledge about both is possible. Legal philosophy raises these questions with respect to the law. In so doing, legal philosophy is engaged in reasoning about the nature of law. The arguments addressed to the question of the nature of law revolve around three problems. The first problem addresses the question: In what kinds of entities does the law consist, and how (...) are these entities connected such that they form the overarching entity we call “law”? The answer is that law consists of norms as meaning contents which form a normative system. The second problem addresses the question of how norms as meaning contents are connected with the real world. This connection can be grasped by means of the concepts of authoritative issuance and social efficacy. The latter includes the concept of coercion or force. The third problem addresses the correctness or legitimacy of law, and, by this, the relationship between law and morality. To ask about the nature of law is to ask about necessary relations between the concepts of normative meaning, authoritative issuance as well as social efficacy, and correctness of content. (shrink)

The argument of this article is that the dual-nature thesis is not only capable of solving the problem of legal positivism, but also addresses all fundamental questions of law. Examples are the relation between deliberative democracy and democracy qua decision-making procedure along the lines of the majority principle, the connection between human rights as moral rights and constitutional rights as positive rights, the relation between constitutional review qua ideal representation of the people and parliamentary legislation, the commitment of legal argumentation (...) to both authoritative and non-authoritative reasons, and the distinction between rules as expressing a real “ought” and principles as expressing its ideal counterpart. All of this underscores the point that the dual nature of law is the single most essential feature of law. (shrink)

The author's thesis is that human rights can be substantiated on the basis of discourse theory. The argument has two steps. The first step is the justification of the rules of discourse. The second step consists in the foundation of human rights.

Contemporary discussions about practical reason or practical rationality invoke four competing views which can be named as follows by reference to their historical models: Aristotelian, Hobbesian, Kantian and Nietzschean. The subject-matter of this article is a defence of the Kantian conception of practical rationality in the interpretation of discourse theory. At the heart, lies the justification and the application of the rules of discourse. An argument consisting of three parts is pre sented to justify the rules of discourse. The three (...) parts are as follows: a transcen dental-pragmatic argument; an argument which takes account of the maximisation of individual utility and an empirical premise about an interest in correctness. Within the framework of the problem of application, the article outlines a justification of human rights and of the basic institutions of the democratic constitutional state on the basis of discourse theory. (shrink)

Salomo Friedlaender was a prolific German-Jewish philosopher, poet, and satirist. His Kant for Children is intended to help young people learn about Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Friedlaender writes, “Morality is inherent in us organically. But its abstract formula should be imprinted on schoolchildren.” Published in 1924, 200 years after Kant’s birth, the book sparked interest in some quarters, attracting the attention of the first Newbery Award winner, Hendrik Willem van Loon, who corresponded with Friedlaender in 1933 requesting an English translation. That (...) didn’t happen. This is the first English translation of the book. During the National Socialist period, Kant for Children troubled the Nazis. They banned Friedlaender’s work. Rebecca Hanf, friend of Ernst Marcus, the philosopher who claimed to have resurrected Kant, recognized that Friedlaender’s Kant for Children could counter the Nazi appropriation of Kant and realign Kant with egalitarianism and anti-fascist politics, meaning the book has contemporary relevance in light of an international resurgence of fascism. A lifelong student of Kant’s works, Friedlaender deserves a wider audience among Kant scholars and students. This first English translation includes an introduction to Friedlaender as well as essays by Paul Mendes-Flohr, Sarah Holtman, Robert Louden, Kate Moran, Krista Thomason, and Jens Timmermann. For translating and editing Kant for Children, Bruce Krajewski received The 2023 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. The Robert B. Silvers Foundation is a charitable trust established by a bequest of the late Robert B. Silvers, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, with the aim of supporting writers in the fields of long-form literary and arts criticism, the intellectual essay, political analysis, and social reportage. (shrink)

Philosophy strives to give us a firmer hold on our concepts. But what about their hold on us? Why place ourselves under the sway of a concept and grant it the authority to shape our thought and conduct? Another conceptualization would carry different implications. What makes one way of thinking better than another? This book develops a framework for concept appraisal. Its guiding idea is that to question the authority of concepts is to ask for reasons of a special kind: (...) reasons for concept use, which tell us which concepts to adopt, adhere to, or abandon, thereby shoring up—or undercutting—the reasons for action and belief that guide our deliberations. Traditionally, reasons for concept use have been sought either in timeless rational foundations or in concepts’ inherent virtues, such as precision and consistency. Against this, the book advances two main claims: that we find reasons for concept use in the conceptual needs we discover when we critically distance ourselves from a concept by viewing it from the autoethnographic stance; and that sometimes, concepts that conflict, or exhibit other vices such as vagueness or superficiality, are just what we need. By considering not what concepts are absolutely best, but what concepts we now need, we can reconcile ourselves to the contingency of our concepts, determine the proper place of efforts to tidy up thought, and adjudicate between competing conceptions of things,—even things as contested as liberty or free will. A needs-based approach separates helpful clarification from hobbling tidy-mindedness, and authoritative definition from conceptual gerrymandering. (shrink)

In his notes and lectures on anthropology, Kant explicitly refers to Alexander Gerard's 1774 Essay on Genius, and his own position that genius is necessary for art but not for science is clearly a response to Gerard. Kant does not explicitly mention Gerard's 1759 Essay on Taste, but it was probably an influence on his own conception of free play, and in any case a comparison of the two theories of aesthetic response is instructive. Gerard's development of a version of (...) the theory of free play without Kant's assumptions that aesthetic judgments must be independent of concepts and yet always intersubjectively valid allows him to accommodate a variety of facts about aesthetic experience in general and our experience of the fine arts in particular more readily and more fully than Kant can, especially those concerning the affective dimension of our experience of art. (shrink)

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged (...) closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person’s exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes’s mind-body problem, Fanon’s experience of being ‘not-yet human,’ and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy’s most enduring and canonical problems. -/- “Harfouch has written an important book on the intersection of race and the Western construction of the mind-body problem … This book is a significant resource for theorists dealing with race and decolonization issues, but it is more significant for the critique of philosophy itself and the continued teaching of mind-body issues. Readers will need some knowledge of philosophy, but the volume is in general accessible. It should be required reading for scholars of philosophy. Harfouch establishes a logically strong argument and makes a unique contribution to the field.” — CHOICE. (shrink)

Abstract In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the pleasure that we feel when judging that an object is beautiful as the pleasure of "mere reflection". Yet Kant never makes explicit what exactly is the relationship between the activity of "mere reflection" and the feeling of pleasure. I discuss several contemporary accounts of the pleasure of taste and argue that none of them is fully accurate, since, in each case, they leave open the possibility that one (...) can reflect without having a feeling of pleasure, and hence allow a possible skepticism of taste. I then present my own account, which can better explain why Kant thinks that when one reflects one must also have a feeling of pleasure. My view, which emphasizes the role of attention in Kant, depicts well what we do when we judge something to be beautiful. It can also suggest a way to explain the relation between judgments of taste and moral feeling, and begin to show how the faculty of feeling fills a gap in the system of our cognitive faculties. (shrink)

What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand “becoming better” as a combined improvement process bringing persons “up from” a negative condition and “up to” a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the mastery of cognitive skills, neglecting the negative conditions that can make these skills mis-educative. I therefore tell six stories in the Western tradition about conditions (...) for a combined improvement process. The first three stories belong to our cultural ABC: an Aristotelian story about moral wisdom which brings people up from being enslaved by passions and up to a good life of virtues; a Biblical story about God’s word bringing listeners up from a self-centred life and up into creative work as God’s fellow workers, and a short Cave story by Plato about liberation—up from living by common illusions and up to enlightenment from what is perfectly good. The subsequent three stories interpret and actualise these basic stories in different ways: a story about moral wisdom and divine love (Thomas Aquinas), a story about individual freedom and rationality (Immanuel Kant), and a story about the love that builds us up as equal human beings (Søren Kierkegaard). These stories may directly guide us adults—and indirectly the children and youth who learn from our examples—when we struggle to become better human beings. (shrink)

The paper asks about the difficulty of reading Schelling's work today given the historical biases that dominate contemporary philosophical inquiry. But if we cannot succeed as the readers Schelling himself appears to be looking for, this does not already have to mean that his work cannot speak to our time. Such a possibility, however, presupposes that we consider Schelling's work as it is inseparably connected to a critique of the modern project and as it points thereby to the monstrous discord (...) that defines human philosophical discourse as such. In particular, the paper considers the Kantian opposition between faith and knowledge and claims that this opposition itself appears to establish a kind of limit for philosophical inquiry today. In this context, some reflections are offered on the history of European nihilism and the death of God. The paper concludes by giving several indications of how Schelling's thought promises to subvert this opposition and this limit. (shrink)

It has long been disputed whether Kant's transcendental idealism requires two worlds ? one of appearances and one of things in themselves ? or only one. The one-world view must be wrong if it claims that individual spatio-temporal things can be identified with particular things in themselves, and if it fails to take seriously the doctrine of double affection; versions that insist on one world, without making claims about the identity of individual things, cannot say in what way the world (...) as we know it and the world of things in themselves can be ?the same?. The two-world view must be wrong if it denies Kant's empirical realism, or offers a phenomenalist interpretation of it. On moral grounds Kant ?identifies? each human person with a particular thing in itself, but the relationship here cannot be strict identity; instead its closeness may warrant regarding the two distinct entities as part of a composite whole. Perhaps up to the first edition of the Critique, Kant thought that empirical knowledge required a particular kind of close correspondence between appearances and things in themselves, one that would make it appropriate to speak of composite wholes here also. By the time of the second edition, he saw that there could be no good grounds for thinking that. In this respect something a bit like the one-world theory might make more sense for the first edition than for the second; but in both cases there is room to speak of two worlds as well. Talk of the number of worlds is metaphorical, and both metaphors have their dangers. (shrink)

Many scholars claimed that, according to Immanuel Kant, some judgements lack a truth-value: analytic judgements, judgements about items of which humans cannot have experience, judgements of perception, and non-assertoric judgements. However, no one has undertaken an extensive examination of the textual evidence for those claims. Based on an analysis of Kant's texts, I argue that: (1) according to Kant, only judgements of perception are not truth-apt. All other judgements are truth-apt, including analytic judgements and judgements about items of which humans (...) cannot have experience. (2) Kant sometimes states that truth-apt judgements are actual bearers of truth or falsity only when they are taken to state what is actually the case. Kant calls these judgements assertoric. Other texts ascribe truth and falsity to judgements, regardless of whether they are assertoric. Kant's views on truth-aptness raise challenges for correspondentist and coherentist interpretations of Kant's theory of truth; they rule out the identification of Kant's crucial notion of objective validity with truth-aptness; and they imply that Kant was not a verificationist about truth or meaning. (shrink)