Kant’s claim in the Subjective Deduction that we have multiple fundamental mental powers appears to be susceptible to some a priori metaphysical arguments made against multiple fundamental mental powers by Christian Wolff who held that these powers would violate the unity of thought and entail that the soul is an extended composite. I argue, however, that in the Second Paralogism and his lectures on metaphysics, Kant provides arguments that overcome these objections by showing that it is possible that a composite (...) could ground the unity of thought, that properties are powers and therefore the soul could possess multiple powers, and the soul is a thing in itself so it cannot be an extended composite. These arguments lend additional support to the attribution of multiple mental powers to us in the Subjective Deduction. (shrink)

The article examines Kant's various criticisms of the broadly Cartesian ontological argument as they are developed in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is argued that each of these criticisms is effective against its intended target, and that these targets include—in addition to Descartes himself—Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten. It is argued that Kant's most famous criticism—the charge that being is not a real predicate—is directed exclusively against Leibniz. Kant's argument for this thesis—the argument proceeding from his example of a hundred (...) thalers—although it may seem to beg the question, in fact succeeds against Leibniz. It does so because the charge of begging the question can be rebutted if one makes certain Leibnizian assumptions. (shrink)

In an intriguing but neglected passage in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant appears to link the synthetic activity of the understanding in experience with the phenomenon of attention (B156-7n). In this paper, we take up this hint, and draw upon Kant's remarks about attention in the Anthropology to shed light on the vexed question of what, exactly, the understanding's role in experience is for Kant. We argue that reading Kant's claims about synthesis in this light allows us to combine two aspects (...) of Kant's views that many commentators have thought are in tension with one another: on the one hand, Kant's apparent commitment to naïve realism about perception and, on the other, his apparent commitment to the necessity of synthetic activity by the understanding for any kind of cognitive contact with external objects. (shrink)

According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a relational account of perceptual experience.

In attempts to come to grips with Kant’s thought, the influence of the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) is often neglected. In this paper, I consider three topics in Kant’s philosophy of mind, broadly construed, where Wolff’s influence is particularly visible: consciousness, self-consciousness, and psychology. I argue that we can better understand Kant’s particular arguments and positions within this context, but also gain a more accurate sense of which aspects of Kant’s accounts derive from the antecedent traditions and which constitute (...) genuine philosophical innovations. (shrink)

This paper argues that in Christian Wolff’s theory of knowledge, logical regimentation does not take the place of experiential justification, but serves to facilitate the application of empirical information and clearly exhibit its warrant. My argument targets rationalistic interpretations such as R. Lanier Anderson’s. It is common ground in this dispute that making concepts “distinct” issues in the premises on which all deductive justification rests. Against the view that concepts are made distinct only by analysis, which is carried out by (...) the understanding independently of experience, I contend that for Wolff some distinct concepts are arrived at through experience. I emphasize that Wolff countenances empirical methods of obtaining distinct concepts even in mathematics. This striking feature of his view indicates how its empiricist elements can be reconciled with his injunction to follow “mathematical” method. (shrink)

Emilie Du Chatelet and Christian Wolff both argue, from the principle of sufficient reason, that extended objects and composite objects simpliciter must ultimately be composed of simple beings (monads). Leonhard Euler, who makes extended use of the principle of sufficient reason in his works on mechanics and natural science, argues the contrary: Every extended object is composed of other, composite, extended objects. In this chapter I attempt to locate the differences between these figures that drive them to disparate conclusions. I (...) argue that the difference comes, not from their different applications of the principle of sufficient reason, but from two other sources. First, they endorse different explicability principles which do not themselves follow from the principle of sufficient reasons; and second, they differ with respect to the kinds of explanations (what I call that-explanations and how-explanations) that the question of the composition of extension requires. (shrink)

In the second chapter of her <i>Institutions de Physique</i> Emilie Du Chatelet gives two cosmological arguments for the existence of God. In this chapter I focus on the first of these arguments. I argue that, while it bears some significant similarities to arguments given by John Locke and Christian Wolff, it improves on these arguments in at least two ways. First, it avoids a potential equivocation in Locke's argument; and second, it avoids Wolff's mere stipulation that whoever claims that there (...) cannot be an infinite regress of contingent beings does not understand what a sufficient reason is. I finally argue that her argument avoids a related objection, considered by David Hume, on which to explain a causal chain is merely to explain each link in the chain. (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)

This thesis seeks to provide a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s project in the late twenties and of its breakdown and transformation around the turn of the decade. I argue that Heidegger develops a unified project in the late Marburg period that is constructed around the question of the unity of the concept of being in light of its regional multiplicity. Furthermore, I argue that Heidegger’s conception of the framework of this project is highly influenced by his reception of Kant in (...) this same period. Specifically, I identify the elements of the Kantian framework that Heidegger retains and appropriates for his project, as well as those elements that he rejects. In the former case, Heidegger takes up primarily Kant’s framework of a priori transcendental conditions that are to make empirical experience possible, which Heidegger reformulates in terms of the pre-understanding of being that makes possible the apprehension of entities. In the latter case, I isolate two primary criticisms that will serve as desiderata for the execution of Heidegger’s project, namely: that the categories have an excessively subjectivistic status, and that they are based solely on logical functions of judgement. The former constitutes a problem because the location of the categories on the subject side make s difficult their applicability to the objective realm, and lead Heidegger to reject both the quid juris form of posing the question as well as the results of the transcendental deduction in general. The latter, though closely connected, points to a different set of problems, and targets not the applicability claim but the exhaustiveness claim of the metaphysical deduction. In articulating a theory of categories based on logical functions of judgments, Kant’s resulting theory of possible objects of experience is limited merely to objects of explicit judgement, roughly the objects of the natural sciences, at the expense of other kinds of objects. Paradigmatic of these ‘other kinds of objects’, for Heidegger, are ready-to-hand entities, which are neither spatio-temporally individuated, nor fit into the Kantian conditions for what it would be to count as an object of possible experience. I argue that Heidegger develops his late Marburg project as a development of the Kantian-inspired framework of pre-understanding of being in a manner that responds to the two above problems. Specifically, Heidegger seeks to ground the understanding of being in temporal schemata rather than in logical functions of judgement, which is intended to provide both a wider range of possible objects and to provide a unified backdrop against which the subject can apprehend objects. I end with an assessment of Heidegger’s project, arguing that while it is ultimately unsuccessful in its aims, it nonetheless represents a philosophically interesting and innovative post-Kantian project that sheds exegetical light both on Heidegger’s middle period as well as on his later works. (shrink)

Recent debates in the interpretation of Kant’s theoretical philosophy have focused on the nature of Kantian intuition and, in particular, on the question of whether intuitions depend for their existence on the existence of their objects. In this paper we show how opposing answers to this question determine different accounts of the nature of Kantian cognition and we suggest that progress can be made on determining the nature of intuition by considering the implications different views have for the nature of (...) cognition. (shrink)