There is a certain emotion of repugnance which I, and I hope a good many would-be philosophers, feel when asked the conventional question, “If you are a philosopher, to what school of thought do you belong? Are you an Idealist or a Realist, a Platonist or a Hobbist, a Monist or a Pluralist?”.

In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant searched for a universal concept of reason different from the understanding and offered the short formula “the faculty of principles”. I will argue that this is only one and not the most pertinent and general mark of the concept of reason. There are more compelling short expressions in Kant’s Reflexionen, the third Critique and/or in the reception of Kant’s works: “the faculty of ideas” or reason in the narrower sense. The latter narrows down the logical (...) sphere of the concept of rational faculties, and the former contains reason’s most basic mark: ideas. The first part of this article will focus on preliminary remarks on Kant’s philosophical methodology and conceptual analysis. The second part will analyze the division of the logical sphere of the concept of reason by nine necessary and coherent marks. These marks are centered around the concept of ideas, which allows for an ideas-first understanding of reason and preference for the formulas the faculty of ideas and reason in the narrower sense. The article will end with an “imperfect definition” of reason based on those nine marks. (shrink)

While the term “metaphilosophy” enjoys increasing popularity in Kant scholarship, it is neither clear what distinguishes a metaphilosophical theory from a philosophical one nor to what extent Kant’s philosophy contains metaphilosophical views. In the first part of the article, I will introduce a demarcation criterion and show how scholars fall prey to the fallacy of extension confusing Kant’s philosophical theories with his theories about philosophy. In the second part, I will analyze eight elements for an “imperfect definition” of philosophy outlining (...) the scope of Kant’s explicit metaphilosophy against the backdrop of recent metaphilosophical research: scientific concept of philosophy, philosophy as an activity, worldly concept, philosophy as a science, philosophy as an architectonic idea, philosophy as a social practice and the appropriate holding-to-be-true, reason as the absolute condition and subject of philosophy, and methodology of philosophy. I will put these elements together for an attempt to give an imperfect definition of philosophy – something that Kant promised but never did – in the conclusion. (shrink)

This chapter aims to attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. It deals with a few sketchy remarks on the historiography of recent analytic philosophy. Writing in 1981, David Lewis described “a reasonable goal for a philosopher” as bringing one’s opinions into stable equilibrium. A natural comparison is between Lewis’s Quinean or at least post‐Quinean methodology and the methodology of Peter Strawson, Quine’s leading opponent from the tradition of ordinary language (...) philosophy. Analytic epistemology provides a good case study of the philosophical application of Gricean pragmatics outside the philosophy of language. On Michael Dummett picture of the history of philosophy, Descartes had made epistemology first philosophy, the engine for the rest of philosophy, and then Frege had replaced epistemology by the philosophy of language as first philosophy. The chapter suggests that philosophy sometimes already uses an abductive methodology and ought to use it more in the future. (shrink)

Much of the scholarship on Kant’s theory of concept formation has focused on the question of whether his theory suffers from circularity, i. e., whether it presupposes the very concepts whose origin it should explain. In this article, I defend Kant against a well-known objection raised by Hannah Ginsborg. Ginsborg, I argue, overlooks the relatively narrow aim of Kant’s theory of concept formation. Kant explicitly frames it as an account of a concept’s inherent generality, or form. However, Ginsborg’s objection is (...) not about a concept’s form; it concerns the concept’s content. Moreover, Kant addresses the issue that she raises in his theory of definitions, which explains how a concept’s content can be revised and perfected. Kant considered all empirical concepts to be incomplete and imprecise. For this reason, he denied that they can be properly defined. Kant also did not regard the content of empirical concepts as fixed or permanent. Indeed, he expected that we would continually expand and revise their content on the basis of experience. I argue that these facts, along with the narrow scope of Kant’s theory of concept formation, effectively defuse Ginsborg’s objection. (shrink)

Special Issue: What is Analytic Philosophy.

In the modern discussions about possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, the theory of definition has a fundamental importance, because the most definition’s theories hold that analytic judgments are involved by explicit definition . However, for Kant –first author who pointed out the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions–many analytic judgments are made by analysis of concepts which need not first be established by definition. Moreover, for him not all a priori knowledge is analytic. The statement that not all analytic (...) judgment is derived from definition and possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, indicates Kant didn’t believe, contrary to modern theories about analytic judgment, the definition is an essential ground of knowledge. (shrink)