Hanna on Kant and analytic philosophy; Kant’s grave; and the seven bridges of Königsberg

Sorry to those who check in here: I’ve been busy settling in to my new home, preparing for my classes, and getting research done when I can. I haven’t had much time to update this blog. I’m currently reading Robert Hanna’s Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. As he emphasizes, he takes seriously that Kant has interests in semantics, not merely epistemology (“If I am correct, then the overarching purpose of the first Critique is to explain how a mental representation can refer to its object” (67)). I like that he gives so much emphasis (in §2.2) to those passages where Kant talks about “sense and significance” and the conditions on concepts having this property. This is an issue of some concern to me. I’m also sympathetic to his treatment of the problem affection (113-19; although I’m not yet sure I understand his interpretation of transcendental idealism). But this isn’t a review; and anyway, I’m not quite halfway through the book.

Since my attention is elsewhere these days, and thus since I feel that I have little of substance to say, I thought I’d just mention a web site that I came across recently. It’s called “Find a Grave.” Apparently one can upload to the site photos of the graves of famous individuals—including Kant’s. For those who aren’t going to Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) in the near future, this will have to do (I recall reading somewhere, however, that this grave site is not the original; that was destroyed in World War I or II). Be sure to click “view all images.”

Also, recently I was on Wikipedia, and I found an entry on the problem of the seven bridges of Königsberg. Perhaps those more educated than I am already knew what this problem was. But I have been wondering about it since I bought my copy of James Van Cleve’s Problems from Kant years ago. On the cover is an illustration of Königsberg, with its seven bridges. The note on Van Cleve’s book states that these bridges were “the subject of a famous problem in topology,” but did not note what the problem was. Well, now I know….