I offer a new reconstruction of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s idealism. Kant held that we impose categorial form on experience, while sensation provides its matter. Hegel argues that the matter we receive cannot guide our imposition of form on it. Contra recent interpretations, Hegel’s argument does not depend on a conceptualist account of perception or a view of the categories as empirically conditioned. His objection is that given Kant’s dualistic metaphysics, the categories cannot have material conditions for correct application. This (...) leads to subjectivism in the content of experience: the subject is given an implausibly strong role in determining what is the case. Hegel’s own absolute idealism solves this problem. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a partial rehabilitation of Cohen’s Kant interpretation. In particular, I will focus on the center of Cohen’s interpretation in KTE, reflected in the title itself: his interpretation of Kant’s concept of experience. “Kant hat einen neuen Begriff der Erfahrung entdeckt,”7 Cohen writes at the opening of the first edition of KTE (henceforth, KTE1), and while the exact nature of that new concept of experience is hard to pin down in the 1871 edition, he states it (...) succinctly in the second edition (henceforth KTE2): experience is Newtonian mathematical natural science.8 While this equation of experience with mathematical natural science has few contemporary defenders, I believe it is substantially correct, with one important qualification. Kant uses the term Erfahrung in a number of different senses in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (henceforth, KrV). I will argue that a central, and neglected, sense of that key technical term aligns with Cohen’s reading; what Kant sometimes refers to as ‘universal experience’ (sometimes, simply ‘experience’) is, in broad outlines, correctly interpreted by Cohen as mathematical natural science. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what we can legitimately say about things in themselves in Kant's critical doctrine. Many Kant scholars believe that Kant allows that things in themselves can be characterized through the unschematized or ‘pure’ concepts of our understanding such as ‘substance’ or ‘causality’. However, I show that on Kant's view things in themselves do not conform to the unschematized categories : the pure categories, like space and time, are merely subjective forms of finite, discursive cognition. I (...) then examine what this interpretation might entail for central aspects of Kant's system such as his doctrine of noumenal freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of the core issues where interpreters of Kant disagree concerns his alleged Noumenalism—the claim that the objects of our experience, which are in space and time, are underpinned by entities that are not spatio-temporal and that non-spatio-temporally cause our representations of empirical objects. Although there is much textual evidence in favour of Noumenalism, non-Noumenalists have also gathered a significant number of philosophical and exegetical challenges to such a reading of Kant. I present a novel way of understanding the (...) Noumenalist view, which characterises the distinction between appearances and things in themselves as the distinction between referents and truthmakers. I show that, on this interpretation of Kant, the most pressing problems for the Noumenalist reading are primarily based on equivocations between features of reference and features of truthmaking. (shrink)

Interpreters of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism face a dilemma: it seems to either beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic or else offer a disappointingly Berkeleyan conclusion. In this article I offer an interpretation of the Refutation on which it does not beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic. After defending a principle about question-begging, I identify four premises concerning our representations that there are textual reasons to think Kant might be implicitly assuming. Using those assumptions, I offer a reconstruction (...) of Kant’s Refutation that avoids the interpretative dilemma, though difficult questions about the argument remain. (shrink)

This article presents a metaphysical approach to the interpretation of the role of things-in-themselves in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. This focuses upon identifying their transcendental function as the grounding of appearances. It is interpreted as defining the relation of appearing as the grounding of empirical causality. This leads to a type of dual-aspect account that is given further support through a detailed examination of two sections of Kant’s first Critique. This shows the need to embed this dual-aspect account within a two-perspective (...) framework. The resulting picture is contrasted with the main rival theories and objections are addressed. (shrink)