: It has been said that Kant's critical philosophy made it impossible to pursue either the Cartesian rationalist or the Lockean empiricist program of providing a foundation for the sciences (e.g., Guyer 1992). This claim does not hold true for much of nineteenth century French philosophy, especially the eclectic spiritualist tradition that begins with Victor Cousin (1792-1867) and Pierre Maine de Biran (1766-1824) and continues through Paul Janet (1823-99). This tradition assimilated Kant's transcendental apperception of the unity of experience to (...) Descartes's cogito. They then took this to be the method of a philosophical psychology that reveals the active self as substance or cause and thus provides the epistemological grounding for these categories. However, to dismiss these philosophers as simply confused or mistaken would be to overlook the historical role that their interpretations of Kant played in the subsequent development of philosophy and the social sciences in France. Specifically, Émile Durkheim's (1858-1917) sociological theory of the categories was deeply influenced by the eclectic spiritualist tradition and yet at the same time developed in reaction to it, as he thought that its psychological account of the categories failed to bring out their shared or universal character and the extent to which our conceptions of the categories are cultural products. (shrink)

George Boole emerged from the British tradition of the “New Analytic”, known for the view that the laws of logic are laws of thought. Logicians in the New Analytic tradition were influenced by the work of Immanuel Kant, and by the German logicians Wilhelm Traugott Krug and Wilhelm Esser, among others. In his 1854 work An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, Boole argues that the laws of thought acquire (...) normative force when constrained to mathematical reasoning. Boole’s motivation is, first, to address issues in the foundations of mathematics, including the relationship between arithmetic and algebra, and the study and application of differential equations (Durand-Richard, van Evra, Panteki). Second, Boole intended to derive the laws of logic from the laws of the operation of the human mind, and to show that these laws were valid of algebra and of logic both, when applied to a restricted domain. Boole’s thorough and flexible work in these areas influenced the development of model theory (see Hodges, forthcoming), and has much in common with contemporary inferentialist approaches to logic (found in, e.g., Peregrin and Resnik). (shrink)

Podemos afirmar de modo fundamental que a crítica de Jacobi à filosofia deriva de seu afastamento do sensível em direção à constituição de verdades cada vez mais abstratas e passíveis de demonstração. Com isso a filosofia apenas conseguiu gerar disputas a respeito do que ela seja, sem conseguir demonstrar qual posição filosófica deu conta da tarefa e que terminam por levar à perda de confiança no empreendimento, ou em outras palavras, levar ao ceticismo. Trata-se aqui de, sem desconsiderar a influência (...) da filosofia do senso comum de Thomas Reid, além em certa medida também da influência de Hume, como Jacobi procura sair desse impasse a partir do modo como compreende a noção de crença. (shrink)

Similar to Immanuel Kant, Adam Ferguson links freedom of the will, the existence of God, and immortality to the possibility of moral conduct. We explore these three dimensions of Ferguson's thought across several of his works. Ferguson's account of these postulates of morality not only anticipates Kant but incorporates a religious sensibility that manifests an appeal to nature rather than scripture.

In this essay I position Kant's "psychology" portion of the lectures on metaphysics against the backdrop of Kant's work to develop a new lecture course on anthropology during the 1770s. I argue that the development of this course caused significant trouble for Kant in three distinct ways, though in each case the difficulty would turn on Kant's approach to "empirical psychology." The first problem for Kant had to do with refashioning psychology such that empirical psychology could be reassigned to anthropology (...) and rational psychology protected from the spectre of subreption. The second problem, and in many way the larger one for Kant during this time period, followed from Kant's desire to make use of empirical psychology's account of the mental faculties in his own transcendental theory of cognition. This introduced a separate problem for Kant, however, since this was a time during which physiological psychology was on the rise, a psychology that was being promoted by Ernst Platner and his followers, as "anthropology." This left Kant with the unwelcome task of simultaneously distinguishing his own philosophical anthropology from Platner's, and distancing his own transcendental theory of cognition from the likes of Herder and Tetens, given their embrace of the "embodied mind" approach being advanced by the physiological psychologists. (shrink)