Overview of the (non)conceptualism debate in Kant studies.

Kant’s published arguments for the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves have not been well received. I argue that Kant has available to himself an argument for the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves that is premised upon a disparity between the compositional structure of the intelligible world and the structure of space and time. I argue that Kant was unwaveringly committed to the premises of this argument throughout his career and that he was aware of their idealistic implications. I also argue (...) that this argument is consistent with Kant’s restrictive mature epistemology. If my argument is successful, then even if Kant’s published arguments for transcendental idealism fail, we need not regard his ambitious metaphysical project as a failure. (shrink)

There is no consensus concerning how to understand the ‘two-step proof structure’ (§§15–20, 21–7) of the Transcendental Deduction in the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. This disagreement invites a closer examination of what Kant might have meant by a ‘transcendental deduction’. I argue that the transcendental deduction consists of three tasks that parallel Kant’s broader project of a ‘critique’ of pure reason; first, an origin task to justify reason’s authority to use them; second, an analytical task that determines (...) the conditions under which this authority can be legitimately exercised; and third, a dialectical task to determine the conditions under which this authority cannot be legitimately exercised. So long as we continue to read the B-Deduction solely in terms of its two-step proof structure, we overlook how Kant’s notion of ‘critique’ constitutes the real grounds for his argumentative strategy there. (shrink)

Famously, in the essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Prize Essay), Kant attempts to distance himself from the Wolffian model of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, Kant scholars have pointed out Kant’s claim that philosophy should not imitate the method of mathematics and his appeal to Newton’s “analytic method.” In this article, I argue that there is an aspect of Kant’s critique of the Wolffian model that has been neglected. Kant presents a powerful (...) attack of the idea that philosophy should proceed through the analysis of concepts and argues that we should give up the aim of arriving at “complete” concepts as one of its fundamental desiderata. Importantly, this attack of philosophy conceived as conceptual analysis is distinctive and original if one compares it with Kant’s critique of analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason, which rests on the idea that analysis is insufficient to ground substantial metaphysical truths. I also make an additional point: Scholars have debated whether the appeal to Newton’s analytic method involves a form of empiricism. I submit that this debate is ill-conceived because Kant uses a notion of “given concepts” that is indeterminate with respect to their a priori or a posteriori status. (shrink)