Advice on using Past Masters (with URL links)

I learned a small trick about Past Masters recently. For those of you who do not know, Past Masters is a terrific on-line collection of the work of past thinkers—including Kant (23 volumes of the Akademie Ausgabe). It is especially useful to me now since I am out of residence and lack access to hard copies of most of the original German of Kant’s work. Even if one does have access to hard copies of the Akadamie collection, however, Past Masters is useful because it is searchable.

The trick? Do not do a “simple” search. Do a “power” search. But more importantly, when entering the relevant data in your “power” search, make sure you check

Show only paragraphs with hits.

This will have the effect of putting all of the paragraphs containing your hits in the right-hand window. This is a lot easier than having to click each heading in the left-hand window to see your hits one-at-a-time on the right. And if you want to see the surrounding context for a given paragraph, you can click the cross icon next to the paragraph in the right-hand window.

The generic site for Past Masters is here. If you have Harvard privileges, click here. I doubt that you can use Past Masters unless your school/institution subscribes (if you are rich, you can purchase the collection on CD-ROM (the complete collection, as it is, seems to cost $1000)). Less user-friendly, and providing access to only the first nine volumes of the Akadamie Ausgabe, is this web site. But it is free and available to all (kudos to the Universität Bonn for making it available).

Soliciting recommendations for reading on the Transcendental Deduction

I wrote recently that one of the biggest difficulties in interpreting the Transcendental Deduction is figuring out what on earth it is trying to accomplish. But even once one has done that—or thinks that he has—one must still contend with how Kant’s argument works. That’s no easy task, either.

I am currently writing again on the Deduction, and I would be curious to know what essays, chapters, or books others have found helpful on this section of the Critique. There is a lot of good stuff out there, but I have found that work tends to be good only on particular aspects of the Deduction (e.g., so-and-so’s essay is excellent on the role of synthesis but has nothing to say about the structure of Kant’s argument; so-and-so offers a telling account of what the Deduction adds to Kant’s views on our representation of space and time but says nothing about apperception; etc.). This is understandable—there is a lot to be said about the Deduction, and whole books have been dedicated to the task. But this means that finding good material requires extensive fishing. Perhaps some of us can fish less with the suggestions of others.*

For those who care to respond, in addition to your recommended reading, it would be nice if you would also provide a short description of what is good about the reading.

* For students new to Kant looking for material on the Transcendental Deduction, probably the best overall treatment that I know of is Chapter 7 of Henry Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (2^nd edition, 2004). I say this not because I endorse everything that Allison says, but because this chapter (1) is reasonably sympathetic, (2) offers an appropriate level of detail, and (3) provides a more or less step-by-step analysis of Kant’s argument. Readers of German might look at Wolfgang Carl’s “Die transzendentale Deduktion in der zweiten Auflage” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Georg Mohr and Marcus Willaschek (Berlin: Academie Verlag, 1998), 189-216). Both deal primarily with the B-Deduction.

Two helpful (and short!) essays on Kant and apperception

There is no passage in Kant’s texts, or in the history of philosophy, for that matter, that has driven me madder than §16 of the B-Transcendental Deduction. Everything in this section is obscure: the claims, the inferences, the point of the section, and the vocabulary. It is in this section that Kant makes the famous claim, “The I think must be able to accompany all of my representations….” (B131; trans. Guyer and Wood).

The literature on Kant’s conception of apperception (and associated topics) is a mess. A lot of terminology is thrown around as if it were well-understood and unproblematic. Especially distressing is the number of commentators who suggest that the claims that Kant makes with this terminology are clear; it is worse when they suggest that these claims are clearly true.

I hope that within the next few years I’ll be in a position to publish something on this topic. For the time being, I’m happy to publicize articles that lend some clarity to it. I was recently directed¹ to one [written] by Udo Thiel entitled “Kant’s Notion of Self-Consciousness in Context.”² In this essay (which contains references to other work by Thiel that looks interesting), Thiel explains how consciousness, self-consciousness, and apperception were understood in the 18^th century—at least by such philosophers as G.W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Martin Knutzen, Michael Hißmann, Christoph Meiners, Johann Christian Lossius, Henry Home, Johann Bernhard Merian, and Kant (and some others). Thiel also distinguishes—a distinction that is too often overlooked—between two things that might be called “self-consciousness”: consciousness of oneself and consciousness of one’s own mental states or activity. Thiel explains that certain of the above thinkers took the former to depend on the latter (I would think that Hume could be counted among them, although Thiel does not mention Hume).

Thiel helpfully suggests what Kant took “original apperception” or “original self-consciousness” to mean and explains how the concept would have fit into his predecessors’ theories. Thiel also hints that Kant’s views on apperception respond to the disagreements among the above figures (Kant’s distinction between empirical and transcendental apperception seems designed to allow each of these parties to be at least partly right). The essay is short enough, however, that it would be silly for me to recapitulate this here.

This is a very nice article, and I have not mentioned everything that is nice about it. My only (minor) complaint concerns Thiel’s contention that “[i]t appears that transcendental apperception is prior to all other forms of consciousness” (475). My worry is not quite that Thiel is wrong about this but that “prior” is an insufficiently subtle word to use in this context. Indeed, Thiel concedes that “Kant insists that the act of [transcendental?] apperception depends on empirically given material” (475). I take the concession to be that some form of consciousness is required in order for there to be transcendental self-consciousness. Thiel nevertheless claims that the “faculty of apperception” (my emphasis) is independent of other forms of consciousness. But one is left to speculate about what remains of the claim that transcendental apperception is “prior” to all other forms of consciousness, a claim that was a little obscure to begin with.

I encountered another article on this subject a year or two ago by Gregory Klass entitled “A Framework for Reading Kant on Apperception: Seven Interpretive Questions.”³ Klass concerns himself with the principle of the transcendental unity of apperception, a portion of which I cited from B131 above. To get a sense of what he tries to do, I’ll simply cite a portion of his text:

There are at least seven interpretational decisions to be made when reading Kant on apperception. The first three have to do with the question: What is apperception itself—what is this relation to the “I think”? The next two have to do with the question: Just what does the principle require of apperception—what is the role of the “I think”? The last two involve the question: What is the logical status of the principle—why should we believe that the “I think” plays this role? (81)

I said above that the literature on how Kant understands apperception is a mess; Klass’s article makes this palpable. It is uncanny how diverse the readings of Kant’s principle of the transcendental unity of apperception can be. But I don’t suggest reading this essay to make one feel better about how difficult Kant’s text is; I recommend it because it will help one get a grip on what the feasible construals of Kant’s principle are. It is a thorough and useful essay. Included in it are numerous references to the relevant literature.

¹ Normally I would credit my source, but I’m no one important, and it would look like name-dropping; plus, I doubt the individual would care.

² Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung, Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, Band II: Sektionen I-V, Herausgegeben im Auftrag der Kant-Gesellschaft, von Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, und Ralph Schumacher (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 468-76.

³ Kant-Studien 94 (2003), 80-94. (Note: if your library subscribes to the on-line version of Kant-Studien, you can procure this essay on-line.)

UPDATE (3/15/06): Apparently, de Gruyter has made Klass's essay available on-line (good for de Gruyter!). I've added links to it.
UPDATE (3/21/06): I've made a minor gramatical edit; in brackets.

Cambridge's Kant and Modern Philosophy, and Hatfield's contribution

I recently turned in the initial five chapters of a second draft of my dissertation to my committee, so I have been taking a break from reading new material lately—and also from contributing entries to this blog. But today I thought I’d note that Cambridge University Press recently published Kant and Modern Philosophy (2006; ed. Paul Guyer). It looks like a very nice, full collection—far larger than the Cambridge Companion to Kant (1992; also Guyer).

I have not yet purchased a copy, but I’ve looked it over, and last week at the seminar that I’m attending at NYU, Gary Hatfield discussed his contribution to the book. The article is entitled “Kant on the perception of space (and time).” What I like most about it is Hatfield’s summary discussion of the theories of space held by Kant’s predecessors: Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Wolff, and Crusius. It also includes a short discussion of Tetens' views on the perception of space and a longer treatment of Kant’s pre-critical views. Thus, in the Critique, when Kant writes,

Now what are space and time? Are they actual entities? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet ones that would pertain to them even if they were not intuited, or are they relations that only attach to the form of intuition alone, and thus to the subjective constitution of the mind, without which these predicates could not be ascribed to any thing at all? (A23/B37-8; trans. Guyer and Wood)

Hatfield does not find merely the positions of Newton, Leibniz, and Kant expressed here, but those also of Crusius, Descartes, and Wolff (see 77-8; see also Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2^nd edition, 97-8, 465 n1).

For those interested, the essay includes, additionally, some discussion of Kant’s argument for the transcendental ideality of space found in the Transcendental Aesthetic (76-83), so it might also be useful to students new to the Critique. Hatfield briefly discusses how Kant’s claims in the Transcendental Deduction bear on the conclusions of the Aesthetic, too (83-6). But I think that the real value of this essay consists in Hatfield’s history of theories of space (and time) up to the critical Kant.

Translation of Beattie’s Essay into German

I was wondering if anyone knew on what edition of James Beattie’s An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism the German translation of it was based.

This is not a pressing question. But let me briefly explain why Beattie’s book is important to Kant studies. I can then return to my query, even if it is comparatively trivial.

Important sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason are often taken as responsive to claims made by Hume. Some of Hume’s best-known skeptical claims—best-known today, at least—are advanced in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). These include his skepticism about whether every event has a cause and about certain theses on the self. Notably, these discussions are absent from his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which was published into German in 1755.

Readers of Kant often want to interpret the Critique as responsive to these doctrines in particular. The trouble is that it seems that Kant did not read English, and no proper translation of the relevant sections of the Treatise was available to him in German prior to the publication of the Critique (1781). So how could he have been responding to Hume’s skepticism about the causal maxim and about the self in the Critique?

Of course, it is possible that Hume’s skepticism on these matters was “in the air” in Germany at the time. But an even better, more palpable source for Kant’s knowledge of Treatise positions was Beattie’s Essay, which was translated in German (1772) prior to the publication of the Critique. The Essay is highly critical of Hume’s Treatise and cites passages from it at length. Importantly, these include, to a significant extent, Hume’s discussion of the causal maxim and personal identity.

[UPDATE (5/15/06): At the NAKS conference that I attended a couple of weeks back, Rolf George presented a compelling case that the evidence for Kant's English illiteracy is feeble (which is not to say that there is good reason to think that Kant was English literate) and that the suggestion that Kant could not have had at least some knowledge of Hume's Treatise prior to the publication of the German translation of Beattie's Essay is quite unmotivated. I'm not certain whether George's talk was a draft of a work destined for publication.]

That’s my little history lesson. Now back to my question.

The first edition of Beattie’s Essay was published in 1770. The second in 1771. The third in 1773. So the translation of the Essay could be based only on the first or second edition (or some amalgam). I have copies of portions of the German edition of the Essay, but none of this explicitly indicates what English edition it is based on (or, for that matter, who translated the book!).

I was first introduced to Beattie’s Essay via Patricia Kitcher’s work. Curiously, there is a (minor) tension in her writing about what edition the German edition derives from. In Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (1990), she cites Robert Paul Wolff as claiming that the German was based on the first edition of the Essay.¹ While she corrects Wolff on some points, she lets this claim stand (98). In a later essay,² however, she says explicitly that the German translation was based on the second edition of the Essay.

I suspect that this latter remark reflects Kitcher’s considered opinion. Still, I would be interested to hear whether anyone knew—for sure—if this is correct. I suspect that knowing “for sure” would require going through both the first and second English edition and checking for differences that could be compared against the German. I know that I won’t be attempting this feat any time soon, but perhaps someone else has already exerted the energy….

¹ Wolff, “Kant’s Debt to Hume via Beattie,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1960), 121.

² “Kant’s Cognitive Self” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Kitcher (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 84 n1.

UPDATE (3/2/2006): I've included links to the Wolff essay on JSTOR. Obviously, you'll need access to JSTOR to access the article.