This paper compares Kant's positions on space, time, the relational character of noumena, and the relational character of the self, with the somewhat similar accounts of those things in two philosophers of the Kyoto school: Keiji Nishitani and Nishida Kitaro. I will argue that the philosophers of the Kyoto school had a more coherent and better integrated account of those ideas, that was open to Kant. I think that the comparison both clarifies Kant's position on these topics, and elucidates the (...) topics. (shrink)

Phenomenally, we can distinguish between ownership of thought (introspective awareness) and authorship of thought (an awareness of the activity of thinking), a distinction prompted by the phenomenon of thought insertion. Does this require the independence of ownership and authorship at the structural level? By employing a Kantian approach to the question of ownership of thought, I argue that a thought being my thought is necessarily the outcome of the interdependence of these two component parts (ownership and authorship). In addition, whilst (...) still employing a Kantian approach, I speculate over possible mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of thought insertion. (shrink)

While purely causal theories of reference have provided a plausible account of the meanings of names and natural kind terms, they cannot handle vacuous theoretical terms. The causal homeostasis theory can but incurs other difficulties. Theories of reference that are intensional and not purely causal tend to be molecularist or holist. Holist theories threaten transtheoretic reference, whereas molecularist theories must supply a principled basis for selecting privileged meaning-determining relations between terms. The causal homeostasis theory is a two-factor molecularist theory, but (...) it fails to provide such a principled basis and collapses into holism. A naturalistic, non-foundationalist holism that deploys strategies of intertheoretic reduction and co-evolutionary pluralism can, however, yield a credible version of transtheoretic reference. (shrink)

Both the sociological as well as biblical-theological concepts of secularism may make use of the phenomenological discussions of implicit horizonal knowledge as informing explicit forms of knowing. If secularism may mean the erosion of faith by way of appropriation of fundamental beliefs about oneself or the world, the deep secularism may mean an appropriation of beliefs which make faith itself appear reprehensible. But perhaps the deepest form of secularism is the existence of scientific, reductionist naturalism; this may take the forms (...) eliminativism or of identity theory. This ‘secularism’ is such that it makes knowing itself impossible. Its basic move is to reduce the transcendental conditions of the manifestation, description, or display of the world to physical causes. Its most startling thesis is that first-person experience itself is an illusion and this illusion is the source of the major lies and beliefs that are most harmful for the culture, e.g. religious faith and belief in immortality. Unfortunately for deep secularism, as scientistic reductionistic materialist naturalism, it self-destructs. (shrink)

The author calls attention to and discusses certain basic but neglected and/or obscured features of Hegel's idealism. He treats these features as paradigmati cally sociological and uses them as a baseline with which to chart Hegel's critique of, and against which to measure, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Section 1 introduces Hegel's criticism of Kant's idealism; in contrast to his own objective idealism, transcendental idealism is individualistic. This criticism is elaborated in section 2, issuing in the quasi-Wittgensteinian indictment that Kant (...) cannot account for the possibility of language and human thought. Section 3 argues that Hegel's criticism that mind is social and that objectivity cannot be understood in isolation from social interaction amounts to a sociological critique of Kant. (shrink)

Esta nota crítica consiste en una aproximación a la literatura analítica reciente que discute con mayor o menor interés algunas aristas del principio de apercepción kantiano. Prestando especial atención a la forma en que esta literatura acoge el enlace entre actividad judicativa y apercepción, se identifican grosso modo tres líneas interpretativas. Si bien entrañan teorías generales sobre la mente humana, aquí se trata de ver cómo cada una de ellas propicia una hipótesis de lectura sobre qué es lo que subyace (...) a los argumentos kantianos que enlazan la capacidad de juzgar con la capacidad de apercibir. (shrink)

Consider two competing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the epistemic and cognitive interpretations. The epistemic interpretation presents the first Critique as a work of epistemology, but what is more, it sees Kant as an early proponent of anti-psychologism—the view that descriptions of how the mind works are irrelevant for epistemology.2 Even if Kant does not always manage to purge certain psychological-sounding idioms from his writing, the epistemic interpretation has it, he is perfectly clear that he means his evaluation (...) of knowledge to be carried out independently of psychology.3 In contrast, the cognitive interpretation presents the first Critique as a description of the operation of human .. (shrink)