Kant was never satisfied with the version of his “Refu- tation” published in 1787 (KrV, B 275-279). His dissatisfaction is already evident in the footnote added to the preface of the second edition of the Critique in 1787. As a matter of fact, Kant continued to rework his argument for at least six years after 1787. The main exegetical problem is to figure out who is the target of the “Refutation”: a non-skeptic idealist, a global skeptic of Cartesian provenance or (...) both. In this last case, the related problem is to know whether either of them is the Cartesian skeptic of the first Meditation, the idealist skeptic of the second Meditation and first part of the third Meditation, or some other non-skeptic idealist. I present and defend a new reconstruction of Kant’s “Refu- tation” as a successful argument against Mendelssohnian idealism of Cartesian provenance. This defense is based on a simple logical sketch of the proof provided by Dicker but essentially modified in light of Dyck’s insight about Kant’s opponent. How shall I support my reading? First, by appealing to overwhelming textual evidence according to which the proof is of the existence of mind-independent things, showing that Kant’s main opponent is Mendelssohn’s idealism of Cartesian provenance. Finally, I support my reading by showing that Kant’s “Refutation” is doomed to fail against all forms of global skepticism but is quite successful against Mendelssohn’s idealism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present a novel reading of Kantian idealism. In want of a better name, I call my interpretation “one-object-plus-epistemic phenomenalism”. I partially endorse Allison’s celebrated position, namely his rejection of metaphysical world-dualism. Yet, I reject Allison’s deflationary two-aspect view. I argue that Kantian idealism is also metaphysically committed to an ontological noumenalism (one-object), namely the claim that the ultimate nature of reality is made up of unknown things in themselves (substantia noumena). Natural sciences can (...) only reveal the relational/structural properties of things as they appear rather than the intrinsic properties of substantia noumena in the negative sense. My anti-deflationary reading is similar to Allais’s, and my agnostic monism to Hanna’s. However, against both, I hold that appearances are not the accusative objects of our sensible representations, but rather, as Kant repeatedly states: “mere representations”. The accusative objects of our senses are substantia noumena in the negative sense. Moreover, my view is also similar to Langton’s. Again, against Langton, I hold that appearances are not merely relational properties of substantia noumena but the way that such substantia noumena exist inside our mind as “mere representations”. In this regard, I also partially endorse Guyer’s and Van Cleve’s phenomenalist reading because these substantia noumena in the negative sense can only be cognized mind-dependently, namely as appearances. However, against Guyer and Van Cleve, I hold that the phenomenalist side of Kantian idealism is purely epistemological rather than ontological: what Kant calls the necessary unity of representations according to categories is not a logical construction of objects out of representations, that is, an ontological reduction of noumena to appearances, but rather the way we sense-independently cognize mind-independent noumena. (shrink)

Qualifiers such as “insofar as” and “in itself” have always been important ingredients in key philosophical claims. Descartes, for instance, famously argues that insofar as he is a thinker, he is not made of matter, and Kant equally famously argues that we cannot know things in themselves. Neither of these claims is meant to be true without qualification. Descartes is not simply denying that humans consist of matter, and Kant is not simply denying that we know things. Therefore, we cannot (...) even begin to understand such claims without knowing how qualifiers work. Unlike the logic of quantification, however, the logic of qualification is rather underexplored. In this paper, I examine several instances of philosophical uses of qualifiers, taken from Aristotle, Avicenna, Descartes, Kant, and 20th c. action theory. In the light of these examples, I discuss several accounts of how such qualifiers work. (shrink)

Readings of Kant’s Critique as endorsing phenomenalism have occupied the spotlight in recent times: ontological phenomenalism, semantic phenomenalism, analytical phenomenalism, epistemological phenomenalism, and so on. Yet, they raise the same old coherence problem with the Critique : are they compatible with Kant’s Refutation of Idealism? Are they able to reconcile the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition with the Refutation of the second, since Kant repeatedly claimed that he never changed his mind in-between the two editions of his Critique? This (...) paper addresses the key question: was Kant a phenomenalist and, if he was, in which precise sense? I propose a metaphysical but not ontologically reductionist reading of Kant as a phenomenalist. I argue for the following claims. To be sure, for Kant appearance is mere representation. Yet, appearance is representation only insofar as we take “appearance” in the empirical sense, namely the way that the mind-independent existing noumenon appears in space and, crucially, when we take “representation” in the transcendental sense, namely the mind -dependent way that we can cognize the same mind-independent existing noumenon. How shall I argue in defense of my alternative reading? First, I argue that my reading is pretty much compatible with Kant’s Refutation. Second, I argue that my reading reconciles the causal with the intentional readings of the Refutation. Third, I argue that my reading makes the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition and the Refutation of Idealism of the second completely compatible. (shrink)

Realism takes many forms. The aim of this paper is to show that the “Critique of pure Reason” is the founding document of realism and that to the present-day Kant’s discussion of realism has shaped the theoretical landscape of the debates over realism. Kant not only invents the now common philosophical term ‘realism’. He also lays out the theoretical topography of the forms of realism that still frames our understanding of philosophical questions concerning reality. The paper explores this by analysis (...) of Kant’s methodological procedure to distinguish between empirical and transcendental realism. This methodological procedure is still of great help in contemporary philosophy, although it has its limits. (shrink)

This article concerns Quentin Meillassoux’s claim that Kant’s revolution is responsible for philosophy’s catastrophic loss of the ‘great outdoors’, of our knowledge of things as they are in themselves. I argue that Meillassoux’s critique of Kant’s ‘weak’ correlationism and his defence of ‘strong’ correlationism are predicated on a fallacious argument (termed ‘the Gem’ by David Stove) and the traditional, but in my view mistaken, metaphysical interpretation of Kant’s transcendental distinction. I draw on Henry Allison’s interpretation of Kant’s idealism to argue (...) that when Kant’s transcendental distinction is understood epistemologically we can avoid the fallacious reasoning underpinning Meillassoux’s argument, and at the very least attenuate his concerns about the ‘Kantian catastrophe’. (shrink)

The present work proposes to examine the problem of the empirical thing in itself and the objective sensation as an access route to the concrete content of empirical reality in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The main notion of ‘empirical thing in itself’, offered by Gerold Prauss’ interpretation, provides a key to understand and solve central problems of transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless Prauss’s position still exhibits certain imperfections that might lead any lecture of Kant towards a phenomenalist understanding. In order to avoid this (...) misleading, it will be intended to complement Prauss’s interpretation, analyzing the objectivity of sensation, trying within to restore the objectivity of appearance. Finally, it will be possible to make an evaluation about advantages and limits of Prauss’s hermeneutical reconstruction of this problematic. (shrink)

In recent years non-conceptual content theorists have taken Kant as a reference point on account of his notion of intuition (§§ 1-2). The present work aims at exploring several complementary issues intertwined with the notion of non-conceptual content: of these, the first concerns the role of the intuition as an indexical representation (§ 3), whereas the second applies to the presence of a few epistemic features articulated according to the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description (§ 4). (...) This work intends to dismiss the possibility that intuition may have an autonomous function of de re knowledge in support of an interpretative reading which can be labelled as weak conceptualism. To this end, the exploration will be conducted from a strictly transcendental perspective – i.e., by referring to the so called theory of the “concept of a transcendental object”. (shrink)

How do we form concepts like those of three, bicycle and red? According to Kant, we form them by carrying out acts of comparison, reflection and abstraction on information provided by the senses. Kant's answer raised numerous objections from philosophers and psychologists alike. "Kant e la formazione dei concetti" argues that Kant is able to rebut those objections. The book shows that, for Kant, it is possible to perceive objects without employing concepts; it explains how, given those perceptions, we can (...) form categories and empirical concepts; and it argues that theories like Kant's - abstractionist theories of concept formation - are more plausible than is often assumed. (shrink)

This article offers the first systematic investigation of the linguistic forms in which Kant expresses his transcendental idealism since Gerold Prauss’ seminal book Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich. It is argued that Prauss’ own argument for the claim that ‘in itself’ is an adverbial expression that standardly modifies verbs of philosophical reflection is flawed and that there is hence very poor exegetical evidence for so-called ‘methodological two-aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. A comprehensive investigation of Kant’s adverbial (...) uses of ‘in itself’ rather reveals that there are various groups of verbs that ‘in itself’ modifies, which can more or less all be reduced to a standard use in which ‘in itself’ modifies verbs of predicative being such as the copula. It is also discussed how these findings can be accommodated by the two main alternative kinds of interpretations, that is, two-object and ontological two-aspect interpretations. (shrink)

We shall address from a conceptual perspective the duality between algebra and geometry in the framework of the refoundation of algebraic geometry associated to Grothendieck’s theory of schemes. To do so, we shall revisit scheme theory from the standpoint provided by the problem of recovering a mathematical structure A from its representations \ into other similar structures B. This vantage point will allow us to analyze the relationship between the algebra-geometry duality and the structure-semiotics duality. Whereas in classical algebraic geometry (...) a certain kind of rings can be recovered by considering their representations with respect to a unique codomain B, Grothendieck’s theory of schemes permits to reconstruct general rings by considering representations with respect to a category of codomains. The strategy to reconstruct the object from its representations remains the same in both frameworks: the elements of the ring A can be realized—by means of what we shall generally call Gelfand transform—as quantities on a topological space that parameterizes the relevant representations of A. As we shall argue, important dualities in different areas of mathematics can be understood as particular cases of this general pattern. In the wake of Majid’s analysis of the Pontryagin duality, we shall propose a Kantian-oriented interpretation of this pattern. We shall use this conceptual framework to argue that Grothendieck’s notion of functor of points can be understood as a “relativization of the a priori” that generalizes the relativization already conveyed by the notion of domain extension to more general variations of the corresponding domains. (shrink)

No presente artigo, pretendo analisar uma das interpretações da distinção transcendental entre fenômenos e coisas em si mesmas, a tese dos dois aspectos [the two-aspect view]. Meu objetivo é indicar e esclarecer alguns pressupostos fundamentais dessa interpretação, nem sempre explicitados pelos seus defensores. Um dos maiores desafios dessa interpretação é explicar como é possível conciliá-la com a tese kantiana da não espacialidade das coisas em si mesmas. Pretendo mostrar que a conciliação pressupõe a satisfação das três seguintes condições: em primeiro (...) lugar, é necessário admitir que, para Kant, a relação cognitiva entre objeto e sujeito cognoscente é _constitutiva_ do objeto; em segundo lugar, é preciso conceber a identidade entre fenômeno e coisa em si mesma como uma _identidade relativa_, não absoluta; em terceiro lugar, é preciso admitir que certos enunciados sobre o objeto da cognição possuem uma estrutura lógica peculiar, a estrutura de um _juízo reduplicativo_. A análise desses pressupostos visa contribuir para a elucidação dos compromissos teóricos da tese kantiana do idealismo transcendental. (shrink)

The central question of this paper is: what has Kant’s Refutation of Idealism argument proven, if anything? What is the real scandal of philosophy and universal human reason? I argue that Kant’s Refutation argument can only be considered sound if we assume that his target is what I call ‘metaphysical external-world skepticism.’ What is in question is not the ‘existence’ of outside things but their very ‘nature,’ that is, the claim that the thing outside us, which appears to us as (...) a persistent body in space, exists in itself _as a substantia noumenon_. Assuming the indirect-realist view that we only immediately know ideas and that their putative objects are known by inference, the metaphysical external-world skeptic doubts that the nature of things outside oneself is mind-independent. (shrink)

The article is trying to present reception not as such, but as a problem which reception is for historian of philosophy. It is clearly visible in the process of formation on neo-Kantianism, which programme distance themselves from any orthodoxy. As a consequence there is a need of treating a neo-philosophy as original and one-off phenomenon and not a renewal of old philosophy. As an example can serve a dead dog motif present at Hegel and Jacobi related to Spinoza.

In this contribution, I comment on Raffaella Campaner’s defense of explanatory pluralism in psychiatry (in this volume). In her paper, Campaner focuses primarily on explanatory pluralism in contrast to explanatory reductionism. Furthermore, she distinguishes between pluralists who consider pluralism to be a temporary state on the one hand and pluralists who consider it to be a persisting state on the other hand. I suggest that it would be helpful to distinguish more than those two versions of pluralism – different understandings (...) of explanatory pluralism both within philosophy of science and psychiatry – namely moderate/temporary pluralism, anything goes pluralism, isolationist pluralism, integrative pluralism and interactive pluralism. Next, I discuss the pros and cons of these different understandings of explanatory pluralism. Finally, I raise the question of how to implement or operationalize explanatory pluralism in scientific practice; how to structure the “genuine dialogue” or shape “the pluralistic attitude” Campaner is referring to. As tentative answers, I explore a question-based framework for explanatory pluralism as well as social-epistemological procedures for interaction among competing approaches and explanations. (shrink)

The book addresses two main areas of Kant’s theoretical philosophy: the doctrine of transcendental idealism and various central aspects of the arguments from the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions, as well as the relation between the deduction argument and idealism. -/- Among the topics covered are the nature of objective validity, the role and function of transcendental logic in relation to general or formal logic, the possibility of contradictory thoughts, the meaning of the Leitfaden at A79 and the unity of cognition, (...) the two-steps-in-one-proof interpretation and categorial instantiation, categorial illusion, Strawson’s transcendental argument, the persistently perplexing question of the derivation of the categories, and the relation between apperception, objectivity, judgement, and idealism. -/- With regard to idealism in particular, the focus is on the metaphysical two-aspect interpretation and its problems, on the merits and demerits of the controversial phenomenalist reading of Kant’s idealism, and on the topic of subjectivism and epistemic humility. -/- In all of the aforementioned topics, the book presents wholly novel interpretations compared to the standard or mainstream interpretations. (shrink)

Famously, Kant is a transcendental idealist. Yet he also endorses empirical realism, and even boasts that only the transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. The difficulty of making sense of those commitments together leads many interpreters to begin by attributing to Kant some variant of conventional, subjective idealism. That in turn requires that Kant's empirical realism be at best a merely ersatz or quasi-realism. But that drains Kant's boast of its significance. For any idealist can be a realist if (...) the 'realism' in question is defined in terms of a prior commitment to idealism. Thus I argue, on the contrary, that we must begin the interpretation of Kant's Critical philosophy by taking his empirical realism to be a genuine, common-sense realism about empirical things. That approach yields a consistent, satisfying, and novel reading of the Critical enterprise, including transcendental idealism, as explaining how empirical realism is possible. Along the way I show, among other things, (1) how to make systematic sense of Kant's controversial theory of meaning, which is standardly either downplayed or regarded as grossly inconsistent with his other core commitments; (2) how to dispense with the centuries-old Neglected Alternative objection; and (3) how to account for the syntheticity of the moral law and its role in conferring experience-immanent meaning on the practical postulates (e.g., of the existence of God). (shrink)

In this dissertation, I seek to explain G.W.F. Hegel’s view that human accessible conceptual content can provide knowledge about the nature or essence of things. I call this view “Conceptual Transparency.” It finds its historical antecedent in the views of eighteenth century German rationalists, which were strongly criticized by Immanuel Kant. I argue that Hegel explains Conceptual Transparency in such a way that preserves many implications of German rationalism, but in a form that is largely compatible with Kant’s criticisms of (...) the original rationalist version. After providing background on Hegel’s relationship to the traditional rationalist theory of concepts and Kant’s challenge to it, I claim that Hegel’s central task is to provide a theory of conceptual content that allows a relationship to the objective world without being dependent on the specifically sensory aspect of the world, which Kant’s theory of concepts required. Since many interpreters deny that Hegel’s use of the term “concept” is comparable to other historical philosophers (or our own), I first show that Hegel’s critique of standard conceptions of concepts presupposes an agreement of subject matter. I then show how Hegel’s account of the “formal concept” provides the skeleton for a view of conceptual content that relies on negative relations between terms, rather than a relation to sensibility, to provide content. Hegel’s account of conceptual content is completed when he shows how a universal term is further specified so that it can determine singular objects. This occurs in its adequate form in a teleological process. I argue that Hegel’s account of teleology in the Science of Logic is an attempt to explain how and where Conceptual Transparency obtains. A teleological process is one in which a concept constitutes an object, and this means that a concept is perfectly adequate to express that thing’s nature and not merely to represent it. However, in the final chapter, I show that Hegel’s concept of teleology is meant paradigmatically to illuminate how human purposive processes have constituted a social world that is conceptually accessible to us. In this way, the primary “province” of Hegel’s rationalism is the human constructed world. (shrink)

Kant said that we were never be able to know about the true nature of matter. The things in themselves would remain unknown to us. There is a similar problem in quantum mechanics. You cannot provide directly any property to a physical state represented by a ray in a Hilbert space. The general theory of relativity teaches time and space were not how they appear to us, but claims to know that in fact space and time would belong to a (...) curved space-time. It turned out in the last decades that it is extraordinary difficulty to combine both theories. Based on quantum mechanics I argue in this paper that the things in themselves remain unknown. There is probably no substance which we can call space-time. (shrink)

Many commentators of Kant assume that the Refutation of Idealism is directed against a radical sceptic whose sole claim is immediate knowledge of his own representations in inner experience, including, to some extent, their temporal order. Accordingly, the Refutation is viewed as an attempt to establish that the perception of external objects is a prerequisite of knowing the temporal order of our representations. Here it will be argued that this minimal claim has to be supplemented by the proposition that the (...) idealist is aware of himself as a substance in time, if Kant’s Refutation is to be reconstructed as a successful argument. In addition, the view will be defended that the argument is not appropriate to decide the questio facti whether there are external objects or not. It rather establishes that the determination of the self as a substance in time is conceptually dependent on the perception of external objects. As a consequence, the argument does not preclude the possibility that some people are brains in a vat, as Q. Cassam justly remarked. (shrink)

This paper takes issue with the widespread view that Kant rejects epistemic phenomenalism. According to epistemic phenomenalism, only cognition of states of one’s own mind can be certain, while cognition of outer objects is necessarily uncertain. I argue that Kant does not reject this view, but accepts a modified version of it. For, in contrast to traditional skeptics, he distinguishes between two kinds of outer objects and holds that we have direct access to outer appearances in our mind; but he (...) still considers objects outside our mind unknowable. This sheds new light on Kant’s refutation of idealism. (shrink)

This article discusses Kant's transcendental idealism in relation to his perplexing use of ‘body’ and related terms in Prolegomena §13. Here Kant admits the existence of bodies external to us, although unknown as what they might be in themselves. It is argued that we need to distinguish between a phenomenal and a noumenal use of ‘body’ to make sense of Kant's argument. The most important recent discussions of this passage, i.e., Prauss (1977), Langton (1998) and Bird (2006), are presented and (...) shown to suffer from both systematic and exegetical shortcomings. The article is a contribution to understanding the nature of Kant's transcendental idealism, defending the view, especially against Prauss and Bird, that Kant is committed to the existence of things in themselves. (shrink)

Kant's distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear, or appearances, is commonly attacked on the ground that it delivers a radical and incoherent ‘two world’ picture of what there is. I attempt to deflect this attack by questioning these terms of dismissal. Distinctions of the kind Kant draws on are in fact legion, and they make perfectly good sense. The way to make sense of them, however, is not by buying into a profligate ontology but by using (...) some rather different tools – surprisingly enough, tools first developed in the area of aesthetics. Once this is done, much of what Kant says begins to look perfectly coherent. In the final part of the paper, I point out that none the less all is not well. Kant's Critical doctrines make it hard for us to accept Kant's own version of this otherwise coherent distinction. (shrink)

For many reasons mainstream Hegel scholarship has disregarded Hegel's interests in epistemology, hence also his response to scepticism. From the points of view of defenders and critics alike, it seems that 'Hegel' and 'epistemology' have nothing to do with one another. Despite this widespread conviction, Hegel was a very sophisticated epistemologist whose views merit contemporary interest. This article highlights several key features and innovations of Hegel's epistemology-including his anti-Cartesianism, fallibilism, realism (sic) and externalism both about mental content and about justification-by (...) considering his systematic responses to Pyrrhonian, Humean, Cartesian and Kantian scepticism. (shrink)

Kant’s Refutation targets what he calls the problematic idealist. This is understood by the mainstream of Kantian scholarship as the global skeptic that Descartes briefly adumbrated in his first Meditation. The widespread view in the literature is that the fate of the Refutation is tied to its success as an argument against this Cartesian global skepticism. This consensus is what I want to question in this paper. I argue that Kant’s opponent – the problematic idealist – is not the Cartesian (...) global skeptic, but rather what I prefer to call here the Cartesian problematic external-world idealist. According to Cartesian global skepticism we cannot know whether our commonsensical beliefs are true until we rule out the skeptical hypotheses are false. In contrast, the Cartesian external-world idealist sees as problematic the assumption that the underlying nature of outer things of which we have ideas is mind-independent rather than caused by our own thinking being. My aim here is to disentangle Cartesian global skepticism from Cartesian problematic external-word idealism and show that, if measured against global skepticism, Kant’s Refutation is doomed to fail; while against problematic idealism, it is at least a promising argument. (shrink)

Kant was never satisfied with the version of his “Refutation” published in 1787 (KrV, B 275-279). His dissatisfaction is already evident in the footnote added to the preface of the second edition of the Critique in 1787. As a matter of fact, Kant continued to rework his argument for at least six years after 1787. The main exegetical problem is to figure out who is the target of the “Refutation”: a non-sceptic idealist or a global sceptic of Cartesian provenance or (...) both. In this last case, a related problem is to know whether either of them is the Cartesian sceptic of the first Meditation, the idealist sceptic of the second Meditation and first part of the third Meditation, or some other non-sceptic idealist. I present and defend a new reconstruction of Kant’s “Refu­tation” as a successful argument against Mendelssohnian idealism of Cartesian provenance. This defence is based on a simple logical sketch of the proof provided by Dicker, but essentially modified in the light of Dyck’s insight about Kant’s opponent. How shall I support my reading? First, by appealing to overwhelming textual evidence according to which the proof is of the existence of mind-independent things, showing that Kant’s main opponent is Mendelssohn’s idealism of Cartesian provenance. Finally, I support my reading by showing that Kant’s “Refutation” is doomed to fail against all forms of global scepticism, but is quite successful against Mendelssohn’s idealism. (shrink)

In The Philosophical Criticism, Alois Riehl developed a realistic interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism based on his theory of space and time. In doing so, more than 100 years ago, he formulated an interpretation of the relation between the thing in itself and appearances that is discussed in current research as the metaphysical „dual aspect“ interpretation, although it is rarely attributed to Riehl. To reconstruct Riehl’s position, the research results of comparative studies on Moritz Schlick are systematically extended and applied (...) to the current debate on Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 1 Seiten: 124-146.

In this paper I examine Kant''s use of causal language to characterize things in themselves. Following Nicholas Rescher, I contend that Kant''s use of such causal language can only be understood by first coming to grips with the relation of things in themselves to appearances. Unlike Rescher, however, I argue that things in themselves and appearances are not numerically distinct entities. Rather, I claim that it is things in themselves that we are intentionally related to in veridical experience, though of (...) course we know them only as they appear to us via our subjective experiential faculties. In light of this account of the role of things in themselves in Kant''s account of experience, I argue that his use of causal locutions to describe things in themselves is simply his attempt to capture the fact that as the objects that we are related to in experience, the existence of things in themselves is presupposed by any account of the nature of our experienceof them. (shrink)