In On a Discovery, Kant depicts monads as simple beings that are thought in the idea as the ground of appearances. He argues that his account of monads is partially in line with both Leibniz's monadology and his own critical philosophy. However, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant appears to depart from the monadologies of his predecessors. In this article, I make sense of Kant's late subscription to a version of Leibniz's monadology by arguing that Kant considers monads to (...) be the objects represented through cosmological and psychological ideas posited by reason in its search for the unconditioned conditions of appearances. In particular, I point to what I take to be two instances of what Kant calls “objects in the idea” in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely (a) the substratum of matter qua ground of external appearances, and (b) the soul qua ground of internal appearances. Drawing on Kant's reply to Eberhard and the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, I highlight the merely regulative—and yet fundamental—role that monads conceived as objects of reason play in Kant's critical philosophy. (shrink)

The first issue of the Décade philosophique appeared on 29 April 1794. In all, fifty-four volumes of the journal were published between that date and 1807, when, on Napoleon's orders, it was forced to merge with the Mercure français. The Décade was published three times a month and the periodical soon became one of the intellectual powerhouses of the French republic after Robespierre. But quite what, in this particular setting, an intellectual powerhouse might have been is still an open question. (...) Alongside Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham, and their vast and varied intellectual legacies, the significance of the dozens of writers, including Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours and Jean-Baptiste Say, who contributed to the Décade, is now more difficult to specify. There have, of course, been several fine studies of the Décade and its contributors, notably by Joanna Kitchen and Marc Régaldo, and more broadly by Sergio Moravia, Martin Staum and Cheryl Welch. But it is still somewhat easier to associate the periodical with a number of keywords, such as idéologie and science sociale, than with anything comparable to those more comprehensively articulated bodies of thought that came to be labelled “idealism” or “utilitarianism”. “Ideologism” never seems to have existed, and certainly never caught on. But this very indeterminacy may still be an advantage. It may help to open up, both historically and analytically, rather more of the intellectual space once covered by the broad range of subjects and arguments that first helped to shape—and then came to be buried by—idealism and utilitarianism. (shrink)

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)

This article aims to make further progress in revising the standard account of Wolff’s philosophy as a popularisation and systematisation of Leibniz’s doctrines. It focuses on the topic of the communication among substances and the metaphysics of simples and activity underlying it. It is argued that Wolff does not accept the pre-established harmony in its orthodox Leibnizian version. The article explains Wolff’s departure from Leibniz’s PEH as stemming from his rejection of Leibniz’s construal of the activity of every simple as (...) representational power and of the metaphysics of unity and activity in which that construal is rooted. (shrink)