This collection of essays by one of the foremost Kant scholars of our time is a welcome and timely addition to the literature. Henrich is a very prolific scholar, and the lack of English translations of most of his works may account in some measure for the fact that there has been surprisingly little sustained engagement with them by Anglo-American scholars, especially those working on Kant’s ethics. It is to be hoped that this volume will help provoke such an engagement.

Kant famously declares that “although all our cognition commences with experience, … it does not on that account all arise from experience”. This marks Kant’s disagreement with empiricism, and his contention that human knowledge and experience require both sensation and the use of certain a priori concepts, the Categories. However, this is only the surface of Kant’s much deeper, though neglected view about the nature of reason and judgment. Kant holds that even our a priori concepts are acquired, not from (...) sensation, but “originally,” because our mind has a fundamental capacity to judge that, upon sensory stimulation, generates the Categories through its basic logical functions of judgment. This “epigenesis” of reason and our fundamental capacity to judge that drives it is the topic of Longuenesse’s fascinating book, and the source of her title. (shrink)

"Kant and the Capacity to Judge" will prove to be an important and influential event in Kant studies and in philosophy.

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Leibniz on Innate Ideas and the Early Reactions to the Publication of the Nouveaux Essais (1765)* GIORGIO TONELLI LIzmNIz' Nouve~ Essais,written in 1703-1705 (citedhereafter as NE), were posthumously published by Raspe x in 1765, at the beginning of a Leibniz revivalwhich was alsomarked by thelargeDutens editionof 1768. As the greatupheaval in Kant's thought took place in 1769, and as thisupheaval had as one of itsmain characteristicsthe rejection of sensibility (...) as the sole source of knowledge,2 it is easy to infer that Kant's reading of the NE may have been one of the elements prompting him to adopt his new solution. It is not the ambition of this paper to answer that difficult question: rather it is an attempt towards clearing the ground for an answer to it, by inquiring into the early reactions of philosophical circles, especially German, to the appearance of the NE. To what extent was the significance of the particular doctrines expounded in the NE noticed? To what extent did contemporary philosophers realize that these were to profoundly modify the picture of Leibniz' psychological tenets? And, therefore, to what extent could Kant have been stimulated by a widespread reaction to pay special attention to the peeu!ia~lies of that work7 In conformity with this purpose, I shall focus my research on the question o/the origin of knowledge. As it is my task to reconstruct a general philosophical atmosphere, I will not confine my research to philosophic reactions prior to 1769, but will also take into consideration some attitudes of the following decade. As frequently happens in the history of ideas, the impact of a certain event may be noticed almost immediately after its occurrence, but the documentation of its effects may be available only after a certain delay. But they are nevertheless indicative of that prior impact. Before starting this enquiry, I shall: (1) point out the difference between the doctrine in question as it is expounded in the NE and as it appeared in the previously published works of Leibniz; (2) examine the interpretations of Leibniz' psychology prior to 1765, especially as represented in the version which was accepted by Wolff and incorporated into his system. * I want to expressmy gratitude to my friend Dr. Heinrieh Schepers,Director of the LeibnizStelle of Miinster University, for severalreferences and suggestions,and for his sympathy with the subjectof this paper. 1 Oeuvres philosophique$ latines et franfaises du feu Mr. de Leibniz tir~es de ses Manuscrits qui #e conservent dans la Biblioth~que royale ~ Hanovre et publi~es par M. Rud. Eric Raspe. Avec une preface de Mr. Kaestner, Professeur en math$matique d GOttingue (Amsterdam et Leipzig, 1765). Cf. (3. Tondli, "Die Umwiilzung yon 1769 bed Kant," Kant-Studien,LIV (1963), 369 ft. [437] 438 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY I. It is an obvious principle in Leibniz' metaphysics that all knowledge stems from the interior of the soul, or monad: from this point of view, it may correctly be stated that for Leibniz all knowledge is innate. It is equally obvious in our day that Leibniz held that there is a basic distinction between the way we know necesstwy and universal truths, emerging from the soul's intellect, and the way we know contingent and particular truths, emerging from the soul's sensibility. Therefore, from a psychological and exoteric point of view (as in the NE) the first kind of truths may be called innate (par excellence), while the second may be called acquired. As it happened, the works of Leibniz published prior to 1765 almost exclusively represented the general metaphysical point of view, and this led to a fatal distortion of his thought by his followers. The interpretations of Leibniz were from the very beginningm and still are in our day---profoundly influenced by the fact that many of Leibniz' works were not published in his lifetime, but appeared (and still shall appear) posthumously during more than two centuries. Consequently the distinction between the origin of necessary and the origin of contingent truths was generally overlooked. This is clearly explained by an examination of Leibniz' worksa which were published before his death (1716) and shortly thereafter. One of the most influential... (shrink)

It is quite common when explicating the nature of Kant's break with the preceding Early Modern tradition to cite his attitude towards the acquisition and deployment of concepts. It is claimed that Kant sought to distinguish two tasks that had become unfortunately intertwined and conflated — explaining how we come to acquire our concepts on the one hand and showing how we are justified in deploying them in judgement on the other. This conflation can be expressed in terms of a (...) conflation of the natural and the normative, of descriptive and prescriptive questions. The topic of the conditions ofconcept-possession, i.e. how we have come to possess the concepts that we do, is an entirely psychological inquiry, involving ‘natural’ descriptive inquiries. The topic ofconcept-deployment, the story about how we use our concepts in veridical judgements about the world, is an entirely philosophical question, since it involves the question of how weoughtto deploy those concepts in judgement. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the normative is drawn by Kant, it is claimed, in order to distinguish these two practices of acquisition and deployment.The manner in which this claim is expressed is through Kant's distinction between the question of fact (quaestio facti) and the question of right (quaestio juris). I want to claim that a proper understanding of this distinction doesn't support this notion of Kant's ‘normative turn’. In fact, the distinction is best understood within an interpretation whereby Kant is understood as continuing to endorse the Early Modern conviction that the provision of a concept's possession-conditionsissufficient to determine that concept's deployment-conditions, and that the task of the Transcendental Deduction is to determine thepossession-conditions for the Categories. (shrink)

(This paper has since been republished in _Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays_, edited by Patricia Kitcher [Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998], 21-44.) Kant's claim that space and time are "forms of intuition" is contrasted with the nativist claim that space is an innate idea or construct of the mind and with the empiricist claim that space is given in or learned from experience. It is argued that the nativism/empiricism debate masks a more fundamental disagreement between sensationism and constructivism. (...) Kant's account of space- and time-cognition is shown to be neither sensationist nor constructivist and as a consequence to be "nativistic" in a sense which commentators from Vaihinger and Kemp Smith to Patricia Kitcher have failed to capture. (shrink)

Phillip R. Sloan - Performing the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant's A Priori - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 229-253 Preforming the Categories: Eighteenth-Century Generation Theory and the Biological Roots of Kant's A Priori Phillip R. Sloan Situating Kant's philosophical project in relation to the natural sciences of his day has been of concern to several scholars from both the history of science and the history of (...) philosophy. Historians of philosophy have displayed an expanded awareness of, and interest in, the importance of the scientific context of the period in which Kant carried out his "Copernican" revolution. Most commonly among philosophers, this interest has been analyzed in relation to Kant's concerns with the foundations of mechanics, matter theory, and the epistemology of Newtonian science, with the central text of interest being the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe. On the other hand, historians of philosophy and historians of science, interested in the issues of the third Critique and in the several papers of Kant dealing with biological and anthropological issues, have emphasized the unified nature of Kant's inquiries into the natural sciences, and the importance of his continued interest in the life and human sciences alongside his interests in the foundations of the physical sciences. The effort to understand the unity of Kant's.. (shrink)

The common assumption that the Transcendental Deduction aims to refute scepticism often leads interpreters to conclude that it fails and even that Kant is confused about what it is supposed to achieve. By examining what Kant himself says concerning the Deductions' relation to scepticism, this article seeks to determine what sort of scepticism he has in view and how he responds to it. It concludes that the Deduction aims neither to refute Cartesian, outer- world scepticism nor to refute Humean, empiricist (...) scepticism, and it outlines an alternative conception of the Deduction's task, as one of reconciling apparently conflicting claims of reason. (shrink)

This book presents a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of all of the major arguments and explanations in the "aesthetic" of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The first part of the book aims to provide a clear analysis of the meanings of the terms Kant uses to name faculties and types of representation, the second offers a thorough account of the reasoning behind the "metaphysical" and "transcendental" expositions, and the third investigates the basis for Kant's major conclusions about space, time, appearances, things in (...) themselves, and the cognitive constitution of the subject. A major goal of the work is to establish that Kant takes spatiotemporal form to be originally given through the constitution of the subject's receptive faculty, not generated through synthetic procedures of the imagination or understanding. (shrink)

"First Published in 1999, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".