According to Kant, the opacity of human motivation takes two distinct forms – a psychological form: man ‘can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind [his] covert incentives’ – and a social form: ‘everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely’. In other words, first, men's ‘interior’ cannot be entirely revealed to themselves and, second, they tend not to reveal their ‘interior’ to others. A number of Kant (...) scholars have acknowledged the importance of the first form of opacity in Kant's thought and have attempted to draw out from it implications for moral deliberation and ethics in general. The aim of this paper is to examine the second, social form of opacity and draw out its anthropological implications, an issue that has been overlooked in the literature. To do so, I focus on Kant's contrast between men and beings that I would like to call ‘sincere aliens’. These sincere aliens are beings who have the opposite features of man's opacity, namely beings who cannot but reveal their ‘interior’ both to others and to themselves. (shrink)

In 1792 and 1798 Kant noticed two basic problems with hisMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MAdN) which opened a crucial gap in the Critical system as a whole. Why is theMAdN so important? I show that the Analogies of Experience form an integrated proof of transeunt causality. This is central to Kant's answer to Hume. This proof requires explicating the empirical concept of matter as the moveable in space, it requires the specifically metaphysical principle that every physical event has an (...) external cause, and it requires a metaphysical principle regarding the individuation of spatio-temporal things. These three doctrines are not defended in the firstCritique, but only in theMAdN. Kant's transcendental analysis of the conditions of experience thus requires the special metaphysics of theMAdN. This marks an important shift in Kant's view of the metaphysical basis of the transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

The externalist interpretation of Kant allows for a ratumal reconstruction of what is fundamental to transcendental idealism: action. Kant resorts to action several times in the Critique of Pure Reason. The very notion of "synthesis," which plays a vital role in his philosophy, is presented as a Handlung. The externalist interpretation endeavours to expiam what Kant means by action in those contexts so as to make philosophical sense of Kant's thought and at the same time to prevent it from being (...) turned into a flawed internalism. Whereas internalism struggles to present synthesis as a mental act that is as private as thinking quietly, or even as an unconscious activity, externalism shows that, according to Kant, human knowledge depends on the ability to carry out observable actions that involve human body in a very particular way. In this article, externalism will be vindiicated in relaticm to (1) the foundations of Kant's conception of figurative synthesis of transcendental imagmation, and (2) the nature of transcendental esquemata in his critical speculative philosophy. (shrink)