This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we (...) are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice. (shrink)

The Great Philosophers, by Jeremy Stangroom and James Garvey, Arcturus 2005/ 2008 ISBN 9781848370180, pp160 UKP9.99 and Twenty Greatest Philosophy Books, by James Garvey, Continuum 2006, pp181 UKP 10.99100 Essential Thinkers, by Philip Stokes, Arcturus 2002/2006 ISBN 0572032064 pp218 UKP 8.99A Brief History of Philosophy from Socrates to Derrida, by Derek Johnston, Continuum 2006 pb ISBN 0826490204 pp206The Great Philosophers: the lives and ideas of History's greatest thinkers, by Stephen Law, Quercus UKP15 ISBN 1-84724-398-3 hb.

One recent trend in Kant scholarship has been to read Kant as undertaking a project in philosophical semantics, as opposed to, say, epistemology, or transcendental metaphysics. This trend has evolved almost concurrently with a debate in contemporary philosophy of mind about the nature of concepts and their content. Inferentialism is the view that the content of our concepts is essentially inferentially articulated, that is, that the content of a concept consists entirely, or in essential part, in the role that that (...) concept plays in a system of inferences. By contrast, relationalism is the view that this content is fixed by a mental or linguistic item's standing in a certain relation to its object. The historical picture of Kant and the contemporary debate about concepts intersect in so far as contemporary inferentialists about conceptual content often cite Immanuel Kant not only as one of the founding fathers of a tradition that leads more or less straightforwardly to contemporary inferentialism, but also as the philosopher who first saw the fatal flaws in any attempt to articulate the content of our concepts relationally. (shrink)

Drawing on recent Aristotelian readings of Kant's notion of natural causality with an emphasis on substances as causes, I will try to explain how persons can make a difference in the world of appearances by virtue of their rationality. For Kant, the clue is that the peculiar mode of a substance's natural causality supervenes on in-itself features, among which is the mode or character of the person's rationality. Thus, a wedge can be driven between natural necessity and metaphysical necessity, opening (...) up space for a strategy both reminiscent of and superior to that of Leibniz. (shrink)

I present and evaluate Johann Gottfried Herder's criticisms of Kant's account of the sublime and Herder's own theory of the sublime, as presented in his work, Kalligone. Herder's account and criticisms ought to be taken seriously, I argue, as (respectively) a non-reductive, naturalist aesthetics of the sublime, and as illuminating the metaphysical, moral, and political presuppositions underlying Kant's (and Burke's) accounts of the sublime.

Kant's discussion of the feeling of respect presents a puzzle regarding both the precise nature of this feeling and its role in his moral theory as an incentive that motivates us to follow the moral law. If it is a feeling that motivates us to follow the law, this would contradict Kant's view that moral obligation is based on reason alone. I argue that Kant has an account of respect as feeling that is nevertheless not separate from the use of (...) reason, but is intrinsic to willing. I demonstrate this by taking literally Kant's references to force in the second Critique. By referring to Kant's pre-critical essay on Negative Magnitudes (1763), I show that Kant's account of how the moral law effects in us a feeling of respect is underpinned by his view that the will is a kind of negative magnitude, or force. I conclude by noting some of the implications of my discussion for Kant's account of virtue. (shrink)

: Kant’s 1763 essay, Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy, is one of the least discussed of all his pre-critical writings. When it is referred to, it is usually just to note a few passages that anticipate Kant’s later, Critical philosophy. I argue that instead of understanding these early anticipations of the Critical philosophy as separable from Kant’s discussion of negative magnitudes, we should take their origin in Kant’s investigation of negative magnitudes to be of central (...) importance, since it can help us to understand aspects of Kant’s Critical view of cognition where negative magnitudes still play a role. I argue that negative magnitudes suggest to Kant a kind of cognitive activity that is neither the spontaneity of discursive thought not the receptivity of the senses. Rather it is an “effort” of the mind, of which we are conscious through a feeling. I show that Kant’s early views about negative magnitudes are retained in his Critical philosophy. (shrink)

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1995.

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of Kant's recorded thought beyond his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, this essay presents an overview of Kant's account of practical agency as embodied practical agency and argues against the intellectualized interpretations of Kant's account of practical agency presented by Christine Korsgaard and Henry Sidgwick. In both Kant's empirical-psychological and metaphysical descriptions of practical agency, he presents a recognizably human practical agent that is broader and deeper than the faculty of reason alone. This agent (...) chooses action from a reflective distance, but not from the complete affective distance of reason. We choose neither as reason alone, nor even as the sum of all of our ‘higher’ faculties, of cognition (including reason), feeling, and desire, in Kant's view. Instead, we choose as an agent that also has ‘lower’, ‘sensible’ faculties, of cognition (including sense), feeling, and desire, which together comprise our ‘sensibility’. These mental states of sensibility are not merely confused versions of our higher cognitions, feelings, or desires, and so different from them in degree only, but are instead distinct from our higher states in kind also; and these distinct sensible states are not dependent on our higher states and so on a commitment to the value of humanity, for example. For this reason, a choice in favour of sensible states and in opposition to the moral law need in no way undermine its own foundations and thus be incoherent, as Korsgaard and Sidgwick argue, but instead only immoral. Because Kant does not reduce the problem of immoral choice to one of insufficient reflection and ensuing confusion, he does not view moral progress in cognitive terms alone, whether in the form of a clearer understanding of the moral law, improved judgment in applying it, or deeper insight into our own nature as practical agents. Kant instead recognizes the crucial importance of cultivating our feelings and desires over the course of a lifetime both as a way to make ourselves worthy of the humanity within us directly and also as a way to facilitate future moral choices. (shrink)

Steven Halliwell’s book has set a new standard in the scholarship on the philosophical aspects of mimesis. The book is clearly written, extensively researched, and, most importantly, it is a comprehensive analysis of the history and development of the complex, but often oversimplified, notion of mimesis. This is the kind of book scholars are lucky to come across in doing their own research, and a book of this level of achievement is something that we can all use as a model (...) for our own writing. This is undoubtedly the most extensive and useful book on the subject of mimesis available today. (shrink)

This essay seeks to contribute to current debates about value in Kant's ethics. Its main objective is to dislodge the widely shared intuition that his view of autonomy requires constructivism or some other alternative to moral realism. I argue the following. Kant seems to think that the value of persons is due to their very nature, not to what anyone decides is the case (however rational or pure those decisions may be). He also seems to think that when we treat (...) persons as ends in themselves we are responding appropriately to the fact that their very nature elevates them above all other concerns. Neither of these beliefs is incompatible with his view of autonomy. So it is a mistake to think that Kant's ethics requires constructivism or any other form of anti-realism. (shrink)

Arthur Ripstein's book Force and Freedom insists that, ‘Freedom, understood as independence of another person's choice, is [all] that matters’. In this paper I suggest that this premise leads Ripstein to an instrumentalization of democracy that neglects a properly public and collective notion of freedom. The paper first criticizes Ripstein's key argument against any extension of public purposes beyond the upholding of persons’ ‘independence of others’ choice’. More constructively, the paper then suggests that a space of public freedom is opened (...) up when people deliberate in order to form and pursue democratic purposes. Citizens may act together to promote ends that they think are worthwhile, without dominating one another or restricting individual freedom. (shrink)

Abstract Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its (...) qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful. (shrink)

Kant is well known for claiming that we can never really know our true moral disposition. He is less well known for claiming that the injunction "Know Yourself" is the basis of all self-regarding duties. Taken together, these two claims seem contradictory. My aim in this paper is to show how they can be reconciled. I first address the question of whether the duty of self-knowledge is logically coherent (§1). I then examine some of the practical problems surrounding the duty, (...) notably, self-deception (§2). Finding none of Kant's solutions to the problem of self-deception satisfactory, I conclude by defending a Kantian account of self-knowledge based on his theory of conscience (§3). (shrink)

Kant claims that the nominal definition of truth is: “Truth is the agreement of cognition with its object”. In this paper, I analyse the relevant features of Kant's theory of definition in order to explain the meaning of that claim and its consequences for the vexed question of whether Kant endorses or rejects a correspondence theory of truth. I conclude that Kant's claim implies neither that he holds, nor that he rejects, a correspondence theory of truth. Kant's claim is not (...) a generic way of setting aside a correspondence definition of truth, or of considering it uninformative. Being the nominal definition of truth, the formula “truth is the agreement of cognition with its object” illustrates the meaning of the predicate “is true” and people's ordinary conception of truth. True judgements correspond to the objects they are about. However, there could be more to the property of truth than correspondence. (shrink)

: Although Kant holds that the universal communicability of aesthetic judgments logically follows from the disinterested character of the pleasure upon which they are based, Kant’s emphasis on the a priori validity of judgments of beauty can be viewed as a rebuttal of the kind of empiricist arguments that Burke offers to justify the social nature of the experience of beauty. I argue that the requirement of universal communicability is not a mere addition to the requirement of universal validity and (...) is far more relevant to an adequate characterisation of the beautiful than has customarily been assumed. I further argue that the ‘exemplary necessity’ of pure judgments of taste, if understood correctly, reveals beauty’s primordial social significance, enabling us to become alive to a profound universal solidarity among aesthetic subjects. (shrink)

Here I revisit Bolzano's criticisms of Kant on the nature of logic. I argue that while Bolzano is correct in taking Kant to conceive of the traditional logic as a science of the activity of thinking rather than the content of thought, he is wrong to charge Kant with a failure to identify and examine this content itself within logic as such. This neglects Kant's own insistence that traditional logic does not exhaust logic as such, since it must be supplemented (...) by a transcendental logic that will in fact study nothing other than thought's content. Once this feature of Kant's views is brought to light, a much deeper accord emerges between the two thinkers than has hitherto been appreciated, on both the nature of the content that is at issue in logic and the sense of logic's generality and formality. (shrink)

In this article, firstly, I begin by articulating four logically different positions Kant has been argued to hold concerning the nature and meaning of ‘aesthetic judgement’ so that, secondly, I may endorse the alternative that has been almost entirely neglected: that is, aesthetic judgement should be understood to be both ‘internalist’ in that the pleasure of taste is a constitutive element of the judgement itself (rather than its external effect or prior referent) and ‘objective’ insofar as the pleasure of taste (...) not only reflects the mental state of the judging subject but discriminates features or properties of the object judged. Ultimately I believe that this ‘internal objectivism’ is a compelling meta-aesthetic position in its own right with interesting parallels to recent trends in aesthetic theory, but presently I am concerned to demonstrate that one way to get clear about how such judgements are possible and to become comfortable with their significance is to see how this position arises and is resisted in the Critique of Judgment and, accordingly, in the contemporary scholarship on Kantian aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper examines some of the central arguments of John McDowell's Mind and World, particularly his treatment of the Kantian themes of the spontaneity of thought and of the nature of self-consciousness. It is argued that in so far as McDowell departs from Kant, his position becomes less plausible in three respects. First, the space of reason is identified with the space of responsible and critical freedom in a way that runs together issues about synthesis below the level of concepts (...) and at the level of complete judgements. This leads to the unwarranted exclusion of animal minds from the space of reasons. Second, McDowell draws no essential distinction between apperception and inner sense, a distinction which is important to a defensible Kantian view and to the very idea of a sui generis transcendental knowledge of the mind that is consistent with Kant's critical principles. McDowell does not take into account some of Kant's developed arguments about the inherently reflective nature of consciousness which is interpreted as an adverbial theory of the nature of conscious experience, a mode of being in a mental state . Third, McDowell endorses a standard treatment of Kant's approach to the mind in which a merely formal account of mind needs to be anchored outside consciousness on the physical body. The arguments for this conclusion, both in Mind and World and in related work by Bermudez and Hurley, is shown to be very inconclusive as a criticism of Kant. The capacity to self-ascribe thoughts that are already conscious shows, but does not say, a truth about the unity of our conscious experience that does not require further anchoring on a physical body; at that stage of the Critique Kant is describing conditions for conscious experience in general, not the conscious experience of spatio-temporally located makers of judgements. The alleged lacuna in Kant's arguments is no lacuna at all. (shrink)