Kant Blog

Magnetic matter

2008-01-09T12:22:00.000-05:00

Kant writes the following:

Thus we cognize [erkennen] the existence of a magnetic matter [magnetischen Materie] penetrating all bodies [alle Körper] from the perception of attracted iron filings, although an immediate perception of this matter is impossible for us given the constitution of our organs (A226/B273; trans. Guyer/Wood).

I like this passage because it clarifies an important point: when Kant typically talks about what transcends “possible experience,” he does not have in mind what it is physically impossible for us to experience. Among the things that we cannot experience in the relevant sense of “cannot” include God and the soul—not, e.g., magnetic matter. If magnetic matter transcended experience the way that God and the soul do, then Kant would not say that we cognize its existence.

On the other hand, this passage is at least a little confusing. First, when Kant speaks of magnetic matter penetrating “all bodies,” does he mean that it penetrates all bodies or that it penetrates any body? The former suggests that what he has in mind is a very pervasive sort of material: there is nothing that is not penetrated by a magnetic field. The latter makes no such suggestion—it merely implies (although perhaps this is also a bold thesis!) that there is no kind of material that blocks a magnetic field.

If the latter is the right answer, we may run into a second puzzle. For if magnetic matter is just the sort of stuff that is on my refrigerator (or less anachronistically, material like the lodestone, which attracts iron filings), can we not perceive it? Why does Kant claim that we cannot?

I suspect that Kant’s point is that there are some minerals or elements that are responsible for magnetization and that they are scientific posits that we cannot perceive directly. Thus, there is no denial of the claim that we can see the lodestone. What we cannot see are the particular elements that are responsible for its attraction of iron filings.

Still, I really know nothing about the history of the science of magnetization or about Kant’s own beliefs about magnetization. Can anyone speak more authoritatively about any of this?

Kant: Wrong for America

2007-12-08T18:14:00.000-05:00

This video seems to be making its rounds around philosophy blogs. I saw it on Leiter Reports, who got it from Crooked Timber.... Funny.

Intuitions/objects being “subject” to the categories

2007-06-24T13:16:00.000-05:00

Apologies to those who check in here once in a while. I’ve been very busy over the past year, and this blog just could not be a priority (although there were a few discussions in comments to past posts).

Lately I have been struggling with the Transcendental Deduction again. One frustration that I have with commentary on the Deduction is the claim that Kant wants to show that intuitions or objects are (perhaps necessarily) “subject to the categories.” This horrible locution is quite ambiguous. It could mean that intuitions/objects are fit to be subjected to the categories (they are “subject” to the categories in a way similar to the way in which citizens are “subject” to the state’s laws). But it could also mean that intuitions/objects are simply subsumed under the categories, regardless of the appropriateness of this activity (intuitions/objects would be “subject” to the categories as a punching bag is “subject” to blows). These are very different claims, and there are passages suggesting that either goal is Kant’s.

James Van Cleve (Problems from Kant, 1999) makes a similar point, focusing the expressions “we must apply categories” and “categories must apply”:

Even if Kant could show that some of his categories must be employed in any judgment we make (and that all of them must be employed on some occasion or other), this would not be enough for his purposes. For that result in conjunction with the rest of the Transcendental Deduction would yield no conclusion stronger than this: all my representations are connected in judgments that use Kant’s categories. But Kant wants to show that the categories are objectively valid—that they actually apply to objects of experience. To reach this conclusion he needs the further premise that any categories used in judging are actually exemplified by the items judged about. …
I fear that some may have overlooked this obvious point because of the easy verbal slide from “we must apply categories” to “categories must apply.” One may slip without noticing it from one to the other, but between the two there is no small distance (89).

This seems to me to be exactly right. Writers on Kant ought to be careful about making this slide. They also ought to be more careful about saying that intuitions or objects are “subject” to the categories.

Making an object actual

2007-01-17T01:06:00.000-05:00

In the B-Preface to the first Critique, Kant writes the following:

Insofar as there is to be reason in these sciences [i.e., sciences generally], something in them must be cognized a priori, and this cognition can relate to its object in either of two ways, either merely determining the object and its concept (which must be given from elsewhere), or else also making the object actual. The former is theoretical, the latter practical cognition of reason (Bix-x; trans. Guyer and Wood).

I confess that this is one of those passages that I’ve always skimmed over, not worrying much about what it means. But now I’m curious about how to interpret the suggestion that in (a priori) practical cognition reason makes an object actual. The only thing that comes to mind is that in making an “object actual” reason makes something happen. But this doesn’t seem right. Do those more schooled in Kant’s practical philosophy have an opinion?

Kant and the formation of planets

2006-10-20T23:17:00.000-05:00

I hope within the next month or so to have one or two slightly substantive posts. Until then, I thought I’d point people to this article that notes that the Hubble telescope has allegedly confirmed one of Kant’s theories about the origin of planets.

Does anyone know where Kant says this? I confess that I do not know. And the article does not say.

My thanks to Chris Swoyer for pointing me to the URL.

Kant humor

2006-09-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

Darby Conley (“Get Fuzzy”) finds a secondary use for one’s copy of the Critique of Pure Reason. My thanks to June Kim for pointing me to it.

Guyer’s new book on Kant

2006-08-23T10:28:00.000-05:00

Brian Leiter has announced that Paul Guyer has written a Routledge Philosophers book on Kant (looks like it came out this past June). I’ll be curious to see how, if he does, he responds to the scholarship that has appeared on the first Critique since Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987).

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

2006-08-19T21:59:00.000-05:00

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….

Moving to Oklahoma; limited blogging

2006-07-22T07:11:00.000-05:00

For the next year, starting this fall, I shall be a visiting assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma. I’m really looking forward to the new position. Besides some sections of Introduction to Philosophy, I’m going to get to lead seminars on the British Empiricists and on Kant’s first Critique.

My upcoming move will mean that for the next few weeks or so, I will have limited access to Kant Blog. During longer periods in which I will have no access to the internet, I may turn off comment moderation so that others’ comments do not take too long to appear. I’ll delete any spam messages later. If I forget to do this, however, and you submit a comment, please be patient. It will eventually appear.

Kuehn and the reception of Kant’s critical philosophy

2006-07-06T11:08:00.000-05:00

I read Manfred Kuehn’s Kant: A Biography a number of years ago. For a few years I had posted on my office door a passage from this book in which Kuehn recounts how, in Kant’s day, a duel was fought over the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. Anyway, a couple of months back I met Kuehn for the first time (very briefly), and he told me that in his essay, “Kant’s critical philosophy and its reception—the first five years (1781-1786),” which is in the Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy (630-63, ed. Paul Guyer, 2006), he notes how a student at around the same time physically assaulted another in defense of Kantian philosophy and how the academic senate judging him over this incident questioned whether they needed to read the Critique in order to do so (659).

Well, Tuesday was a lazy July 4 for me, so rather than do research work, I decided finally to read Kuehn’s essay. It’s interesting and very readable. He (1) first describes the initial and immediate reviews of the Critique of Pure Reason, including the notorious Garve-Feder review, then (2) Kant’s response to this article. Kuehn suggests that the review’s impact on Kant’s later formulations of the critical philosophy deserves more attention than it has until now received. Kuehn next (3) briefly mentions Johannes Schulz’s slightly later exposition of the Critique. A longer section (4) is dedicated to how the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals arose initially as a response to work on Cicero by Christian Garve. Kuehn then (5) describes some essays that Kant wrote on the Enlightenment and history, which include negative reviews of work by his former student, Johann Gottfried Herder. There is (6) a very short section on Kant’s response to J.A.H. Ulrich (and Schulz) in a well-known footnote to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, (7) a longer section on Kant’s contribution to the “pantheism dispute,” and finally (8) a short section reflecting on how influential Kant had become in five years.

Among the things that I enjoyed about this essay is Kuehn’s recounting of Johann Georg Hamann’s initial review of the Critique, which was not actually published until 1800 (632-33). Hamann was both blunt and colorful about the obscurity of the Critique. Moreover, I did not know that J.G.H. Feder was perplexed by Kant’s disgruntlement at his comparisons of Kant to Berkeley (636). One gets throughout Kuehn’s article a sense of how important it was to Kant to make his ideas felt in Germany after the first publication of the Critique.

June wrap up

2006-06-30T09:35:00.000-05:00

· Looks like there isn’t much interest right now in an on-line study group of §16 of the B-Deduction. I consider my post on the first sentence of §16 active (indefinitely so), and perhaps in the future I’ll post the other passages for discussion. But for now I’ll hold off on posting those.

· Joel at Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism and Ralf Bader at Transcendental Idealism both note Thomas Vinci’s review of volume I of Wayne Waxman’s Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding at Notre Dame’s Philosophical Reviews.

Study Group of §16: Part I

2006-06-23T06:48:00.000-05:00

As per my previous post. The English translation is Guyer and Wood’s. I’m including the German, which is from the Timmermann edition of the Kritik. I’m using bold for Kant’s emphasis in the German as well, however, since I’m not sure how to do the kind of spacing that one finds in the German.

The I think must be able to accompany all of my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least nothing for me (B131-32)

Das: Ich denke, muß alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten können; denn sonst würde etwas in mir vorgestellt werden, was gar nicht gedacht werden könnte, welches eben so viel heißt, als die Vostellung würde entweder unmöglich, oder wenigstens für mich nichts sein (B131-32).

For those who have not previously posted a comment here: your comment won’t appear immediately, since I moderate comments. But I’ll post it as soon as I can.

On-line reading group for §16 of B-Deduction

2006-06-17T22:23:00.000-05:00

In an effort to make this blog more discussion-forum-like, and because more people seem to be visiting it these days, I am hoping that the time is ripe to propose an on-line reading group of §16 of the B-Deduction of the first Critique.

Here is what I propose (I’m moderately amenable to alternative suggestions). Starting, say, this Friday (6/23), I’ll post the opening lines of the §16. I’ll offer no commentary in the post, but I’ll add my two cents in a comment to start the ball rolling. Then a week or so later, I’ll post the next passage, according to the same drill. Then the following week…, etc.

I suggest breaking the passages down as follows:

(1) “The I think must … nothing for me” (B131-32).
(2) “That representation that can … much may be inferred” (B132-33).
(3) “Namely, this thoroughgoing … of human cognition” (B133-35).
(4) “The analytical unity of … is the understanding itself” (B133-34 n).

This proposal does not dictate that, say, in the discussion of (1), one may not speak about a passage from (4). Discussion can go wherever participants want it to. But I think that it makes sense to have some scope to the discussion, at least initially.

This proposal also omits the final paragraph of §16. But for one who felt that some passage in it was important to understanding some other part of §16, she could always bring that up. And I suppose that if there were the demand for it, I could post the paragraph after the others.

Well, we’ll see how this works. Could be fun: a chance to talk about a few important and influential passages in the history of philosophy without the fuss of coordinating a particular time in the day to have the discussion with others. Could also be a flop. But live and learn....

UPDATE (6/30/06): For now, I'm postponing further posts on §16, other than this one.

A problem for Kant’s conception of inner sense and perception?

2006-06-06T23:04:00.000-05:00

Kant thinks that all outer objects of experience appear in space, that all objects of experience whatever appear in time. This seems reasonable enough. My computer appears in both space and time; my thoughts about Kant appear in time alone (let’s waive examples of my “thoughts” that appear on paper—or on this blog).

It can therefore seem strange that Kant claims that space is the form of outer sense, time the form of inner sense. For this suggests that only one’s representations are in time and that outer objects (e.g., my computer) are in space alone, not time.

I am not sure whether Kant thought of this as a problem. But he does directly address how it is that outer objects are in, or at any rate appear to be in, time, despite that time is the form of inner sense:

Space, as the pure form of all outer intuitions, is limited as an a priori condition merely to outer intuitions. But since, on the contrary, all representations, whether or not they have outer things as their object, nevertheless as determinations of the mind themselves belong to the inner state, while this inner state belongs under the formal condition of inner intuition, and thus of time, so time is an a priori condition of all appearance in general, and indeed the immediate condition of the inner intuition (of our souls), and thereby also the mediate condition of outer appearances. If I can say a priori: all outer appearances are in space and determined a priori according to the relations of space, so from the principle of inner sense I can say entirely generally: all appearances in general, i.e., all objects of the senses, are in time, and necessarily stand in relations of time (A34/B50-1; trans. Guyer and Wood; my emphasis).

Kant seems to be arguing that since all of our representations are in (or appear to be in) time, all objects of experience appear in time.

I cannot understand this passage unless I take Kant to be a sense datum theorist. By a sense datum theorist, I mean someone who believes that the (direct) objects of perception are sense data, not mind-independent objects. It is consistent with this view that one infers mind-independent objects corresponding to one’s sense data—e.g., a computer corresponding to my computer sense datum. Kant’s suggestion, then, is as follows. Some of our sense data (sensible intuitions) are spatial. But all of them are temporal. So spatial “appearances” are also temporal.

It is important (I think) to see that this does not follow if Kant is an intentionalist about perception. By an intentionalist, I mean someone who believes that our access to the world is via representation but that these representations are “transparent”: the direct object of perception is distinct from one’s representation of it. To an intentionalist, Kant’s argument at A34/B50-1 should look like a non sequitur. It does not follow that the White House appears blue because “the White House” (which represents the White House) appears blue. So, too, it does not follow that objects of our representations appear in time just because these representations appear in time.

I want to note another difference between the sense datum theorist and the intentionalist. For the sense datum theorist, one must infer most claims about objects distinct from our sense data. If I am having a gray computer sense datum, then if I am to suppose non-arbitrarily that there is a gray computer before me, I must infer this from my gray computer sense datum (that such an inference is necessary leads to the charge that the sense datum theorist places a “veil of perception” between us and the world and thus also that her position leads to external world skepticism—more below). On the other hand, to know what the contents of one’s own mind are requires no inference at all: those contents are directly before one.

The situation is reversed for the intentionalist. For the intentionalist, directly before me are objects distinct from my representations of them. It requires no inference to know a lot of things about them—e.g., their color, shape, etc. On the other hand, we must, accordingly, infer the contents of our own minds. One reasons thus: “that’s a gray computer; (thus) I must be perceiving a gray computer.” Or something like that. One’s knowledge of the world is prior to one’s knowledge of the contents of one’s mind. By contrast, for the sense datum theorist, one’s knowledge of the content of one’s mind is prior to one’s knowledge of the world (where that world is independent of the mind).

(Note: when I speak of “priority” here, I mean temporal or logical priority. I do not mean that such-and-such is prior in the order of justification. That’s another matter.)

This said, compare the above passage to this from the Refutation of Idealism:

One will realize that in the preceding proof the game that idealism plays has with greater justice been turned against it. Idealism assumed that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that from that outer things could only be inferred…. Yet here it is proved that outer experience is really immediate,* that only by means of it is possible not, to be sure, the consciousness of our own existence, but its determination in time, i.e., inner experience (B276-77).

* [footnote omitted]

This passage seems to fault sense datum theorists: sense datum theory leads to skepticism (“idealism”); in fact, however, our experience of objects distinct from our minds is immediate. And Kant seems to go further: he appears to suggest not merely that outer experience is as immediate as inner experience, but that the former is actually more immediate than (prior to) inner experience. This accords neatly with understanding Kant to be an intentionalist (see also A193/B238).

Try as I might, I cannot see how to interpret A34/B50-1 such that it does not presuppose sense datum theory. But a sense datum interpretation is not merely in conflict with B276-77. Kant says in the Transcendental Aesthetic that when we represent objects as in space, we represent them as “outside of” us. But sense datum theory dictates—as does Kant’s argument at A34/B50-1—that we represent spatial appearances as “inside of” us.

Kant’s claims about inner sense, I think, have got to go. But I would be very interested to know if anyone thinks that there is a way out of this difficulty.

Away from blog

2006-06-01T07:27:00.000-05:00

I’ll be out of town from June 2-4. I should have some access to the internet, and I should be able to post comments in a reasonable amount of time, should there be any. But I won’t be able to contribute posts or comments of my own for a while.

May wrap up

2006-05-31T12:13:00.000-05:00

A few items I thought I’d gather together into one post:

· Ralf Bader notes a search engine (Suchmaschine für die elektronische Edition von Immanuel Kants Gesammelten Werken) of Kant’s corpus hosted by the Universität Bonn that I had not previously heard of—more extensive than another that I had heard of (see bottom of this URL). I’ve added it to the links on the right.

· My attempt back in February to poll people on what readings of transcendental idealism they favored was not especially successful qua poll. But it led to a good post by Ralf, which led to a post by Duck at DuckRabbit, which received mention in the Philosophers’ Carnival hosted by anniemiz and at Mormon Metaphysics (by Clark), and then there was another post on this subject by Brandon at Siris. The visit counter at Kant Blog jumped threefold last week as a result of the directed traffic.

· Finally, Joel at Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism notes an article by Patrick Frierson at Philosopher’s Imprint entitled “Kant’s Empirical Account of Human Action.” I won’t be able to read this article soon, but skimming it, it looks like a very thorough work on Kant’s moral psychology.

Judgments and objective validity

2006-05-23T18:48:00.000-05:00

Ralf Bader has a post on judgments and the objective validity of judgments at Transcendental Idealism, which may be of interest to people. I mention this also because I've participated in some of the commenting.

Transcendental idealism and freedom

2006-05-22T13:53:00.000-05:00

I prefer¹ a “two-aspect” interpretation to “two-world” interpretations of transcendental idealism—more generally, I prefer a two-aspect interpretation to understanding the appearance/thing in itself distinction as an ontological distinction.² Indeed, I embrace a rather strong version of a two-aspect view. Unlike, for instance, Henry Allison, who wants to retain in transcendental idealism some semblance of the subjectivity of space and time,³ I think that we should read away those passages that suggest this (in a principled way, of course) and take more seriously than is often done Kant’s claims to empirical realism.

This suggestion is highly contentious. I will not attempt to defend it in this post, except against a single, specific objection (below). But I think that this is the most natural result of accepting a two-aspect approach, at least as it is typically pitched. If I tell you that the appearance/thing in itself distinction is best understood not adjectivally (not as qualifying different sorts of things) but adverbially (as qualifying ways of considering things—as appearances or as things in themselves), then it becomes unclear what the motivation is to think that space and time are subjective. To say, e.g., that space and time are forms of appearances lacks the connotation of subjectivity that it might otherwise have, since appearances are just the objects of experience. Moreover, this tack would account for Kant’s balking at the suggestion that transcendental idealism is an idealism in any straightforward sense. “I would very much like to know how then my claims must be framed so as not to contain any idealism,” he writes (Prolegomena, 4:289; trans. Hatfield).

Anyway, this is simply to put my cards on the table, not to make anyone a believer. When I gave a talk elaborating on this thesis before my department last fall (my so-called “job talk”), the objection that everyone thought I needed to address was how such a reading accords with Kant’s views on freedom. I thought that I would say a few words on this here, since it has been on my mind lately. I should stress, however, that I come at this as someone who has been working primarily on the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique, not as someone who has devoted much attention to Kant’s ethical work. This will no doubt give my claims an air of naïveté.

To start defensively, it is worth asking how exactly an ontological construal of transcendental idealism fares better at accounting for Kant’s claims about freedom in the first Critique. One might understand transcendental idealism as the position that phenomena or appearances are illusions and that, by contrast, things in themselves constitute reality. Corresponding to this ontological construal of transcendental idealism is the following analysis of Kant’s remarks on freedom and determinism. Space, time, and the causal order of phenomena are illusory; our actions, really, are not causally determined. They can, therefore, be free.

I find this tack highly unlikely. Kant’s avowals of determinism belie the contention that he regards it as an illusion. And he is quite explicit that transcendental idealism does not entail that appearances, space, or time are illusory (e.g., B69-71).

Still assuming that one understands the appearance/thing in itself distinction as ontological, one might instead suggest that Kant’s recommendation is that we (and our actions) are partly phenomenal, thus partly determined; but also that we (and our actions) are partly noumenal, and thus in this respect free of the causal order—which may allow for our actions to be free in the relevant sense. Indeed, at one point Kant says roughly this (A546-47/B574-75). Thus, in short: because we participate in the noumenal realm (in addition to the phenomenal realm), to this extent we may be free.

But this explanation is prima facie hard to understand. Obviously, no spatio-temporal part-whole analogy (e.g., a newspaper is partly white, partly black) will explain we can be partly noumenal while also being partly phenomenal. But surely we are owed some analogy that helps explain how we may participate in two different realms of being when one, though not the other, lacks spatio-temporal properties. In particular, we need some explanation for how that determined part of us manages not to determine the rest of us.

Perhaps others can do more justice to the opposing position than I can.⁴ Indeed, I invite people to do so by way of comment. But at this juncture I would like to consider what exactly the problem is for the two-aspect reading and how the advocate of this position (e.g., me) could respond.

Terence Irwin⁵ and Derk Pereboom⁶ each raise roughly the following worry. If A or A's actions are causally determined, then this is so regardless of the perspective that one adopts on A or A’s actions. Thus, if from another perspective one fails to consider (e.g., abstracts from) the determinism of A’s actions, this is quite irrelevant for explaining how A might be free. It seems to ignore, not solve, the problem.

I agree.⁷ And this leads me to wonder whether commentators tend to overestimate how ambitious Kant is in his remarks on the Third Antinomy. Perhaps Kant is not attempting to make theoretical space for freedom, as I think is often assumed. Perhaps instead Kant is trying to make us see how to find incompatibilism less gripping than it prima facie is. When we consider things—including agents and their actions—as they appear, freedom is not salient. Consequently, from this perspective, there can seem to be an incompatibility between freedom and determinism. But (I would like to suggest) Kant is trying to help us see that the incompatibilism is illusory, a consequence of trying to find freedom only after having taken on a framework that makes no room for it. For freedom to be salient, one must adopt a different, practical perspective.

This is sketchy and debatable. But I hope it is clear how this proposal differs from how many understand Kant’s remarks on the Third Antinomy. Most, or at least many, take Kant to be an incompatibilist in some important way. Their task is then to reconcile this with Kant’s compatibilism.⁸ Prima facie, this task is incoherent. I propose, instead, that Kant is an “incompatibilist” in only a funny sense: he thinks that the framework in which we operate practically is inimical to the framework in which we operate theoretically. Freedom is salient in the former but not in the latter (and this can lead us to think that there really is an incompatibility between freedom and determinism).⁹ But this is the extent of Kant’s “incompatibilism.” It is obviously not the thesis that there is an incompatibility between freedom and determinism. Indeed, I see Kant’s task as making us comfortable with compatibilism.

¹ “Prefer” is a weasel word. One might ask: but is this the correct understanding of transcendental idealism. In saying that I “prefer” a two-aspect approach, I’m dodging that question. The trouble is that whatever transcendental idealism is, the doctrine pervades Kant’s work, and I hesitate right now to make bold claims about what all of that amounts to. I will commit to this, however: I think that Kant’s thought in the first Critique is best captured, and that work most interesting, under a two-aspect interpretation.

² For more on this subject, visit here and here.

³ E.g., Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2^nd edition, 118.

⁴ Derk Pereboom uses an analogy to dreaming to help explain this (“Kant on Transcendental Freedom,” manuscript, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 27 ff). I won’t consider this strategy. My thanks to Ralph Bader for pointing me to this essay.

⁵ “Morality and Personality: Kant and Green” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, edited by Allen W. Wood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 38.

⁶ “Kant on Transcendental Freedom,” 23-4.

⁷ Allison addresses this concern in Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 43-6. Either I do not understand his response or I disagree with it. Probably a little bit of both. See here also James Van Cleve, Problems from Kant, 316 n74; and 252-53.

⁸ Thus, Allen Wood: “When we consider Kant’s views together, it is temping to say that he wants to show not only the compatibility of freedom and determinism, but also the compatibility of compatibilism and incompatibilism” (“Kant’s Compatibilism” in Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy, 74).

⁹ Think here of the Necker cube diagram, which can look like it is being viewed from above or below, but not like both at the same time; or think of the duck-rabbit diagram, which can look like a duck or a rabbit, but not like both at the same time. There are other such examples. I think that, for Kant, the theoretical and the practical perspectives are incompatible in a similar way. If one wanted a clear articulation of how this is supposed to go, the most I could do presently is gesture at theses advanced by P.F. Strawson in his “Freedom and Resentment” (in Free Will, edited by Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), Ch. 5), with his distinction between the “objective” attitude and “participant reactive attitudes.” Roughly, my suggestion is that, according to Kant, philosophers become incompatibilists by conducting their reflection on human agency solely with an objective attitude.

On-Line Philosophy Conference

2006-05-03T08:47:00.000-05:00

This is not Kant-related, but it is philosophical-web-log-related, so I thought I’d note it. There is an on-line philosophy conference currently taking place here. I gather that each paper remains up for a week, during which time those with access to the internet may post comments either on it or on the accompanying commentary. Authors, commentators, and many of the participants are professional philosophers, so it’s an opportunity to engage with folks at a high level. I’m swamped right now, but I hope I can participate at some point. I think that there will be multiple papers posted over the course of a few weeks.

Kant on the imagination

2006-04-27T11:58:00.000-05:00

A number of people who wind up at this blog do so by way of some form of Google search on Kant. I’m not sure how helpful those individuals have found the blog, but in case someone is looking for good reading on Kant’s theory of the imagination, and since it’s been on my mind lately, I thought I would post what is really no more than a selected bibliography on the subject. Please feel free to add to the list by way of comment. I would be interested to know what others have found helpful.

For reading in book form, what comes to my mind is Béatrice Longuenesse’s Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998), especially Part III. This material is difficult, however. Henry Allison devotes a subsection to the imagination in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (2^nd edition, 2004), 189-93 and discusses some of the sources that I mention below. One day soon I hope to return to Rudolph Makkreel’s Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (1990), but I confess that I have only begun to read it.

I have found the following articles quite useful and interesting—especially Wilfred Sellars’ essay. His illustrations, which as far as I can tell he drew himself, are worth a look by themselves. But his essay also paints a very rich picture (in rather little space) of what the imagination is and how it functions in perception.

Anyway, here are the articles:

P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and Perception” in Kant on Pure Reason, edited by Ralph C. S. Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 82-99 (first published in 1971).

Wilfred Sellars, “The Role of the Imagination in Kant’s Theory of Experience” in Categories: A Colloquium, edited by Henry W. Johnstone, Jr. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University, 1978), 231-45.

J. Michael Young, “Kant’s View of Imagination,” Kant-Studien 79, No. 2 (1988): 140-164.

Hannah Ginsborg, “Lawfulness without a Law: Kant on the Free Play of Imagination and Understanding,” Philosophical Topics 25, No. 1 (Spring 1997): 37-81.

A bad criticism of Henrich’s analysis of B-Deduction’s proof structure?

2006-04-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

Dieter Henrich has the distinction of having written two classic essays on Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. The first was published in 1969 and is entitled, “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction.”¹ The second was published in a 1989 collection and is entitled “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the first Critique.”² I suspect that the reason these essays have their canonical status is that the main points they set out to establish have more or less become accepted as fact. In the former, Henrich claims that the two halves of the B-Deduction (§§15-20, §§21-26) constitute one argument where these halves serve as its main steps; they are not distinct arguments for the same conclusion. In the second essay, Henrich argues that the word “deduction” in “Transcendental Deduction” has a sense borrowed from the name of a kind of legal document widely used during the Holy Roman Empire and that this is relevant for understanding Kant’s argument.

But if the main lines of these papers have largely been accepted, the details have not. And here I want to focus on one way in which Henrich’s “Proof-Structure” paper has been challenged. Whatever problems Henrich’s proposal faces, it seems to me that this objection rests on a misunderstanding—due in part, however, to the way Henrich states his case.

Henrich presents his sketch of the B-Deduction’s argument in fewer than three pages (645-47). Consequently, one can imagine that a lot of important detail is missing. He argues that the result in §20 of the B-Deduction “contains a restriction: [Kant] established that intuitions are subject to the categories insofar as they, as intuitions, already possess unity (B143).” This conclusion leaves open, however, “the range within which unitary intuitions can be found” (emphasis Henrich’s). Henrich maintains that the “restriction” of §20 will be “overcome” by §26, employing the following strategy:

[W]herever we find unity, this unity is itself made possible by the categories and determined in relation to them. In our representations of space and time, however, we have intuitions which contain unity and which at the same time include everything that can be present to our senses. For indeed the representations of space and time have their origin in the forms of our sensibility, outside of which no representations can be given to us. We can therefore be sure that every given manifold without exception is subject to the categories.

Now, I wonder whether Henrich does himself a disservice by saying that §20 contains a restriction and that this restriction is overcome by §26. This most naturally suggests that Henrich thinks (that Kant thinks) that there are intuitions that (1) are “unitary” and those that (2) are not and that by §26, Kant concludes that not only the unitary intuitions, but also the non-unitary ones, are “subject to the categories” (by dint of having spatio-temporal form).

Unfortunately, I see little in Henrich’s essay to correct this impression, except some remarks made a few passages after the above citation. Picking up on A90-1/B123, Henrich seems to claim that the possibility that appearances and the understanding might be out of synch—that there might be a “disproportion between consciousness and givenness”—is not real. These remarks suggest that the above summary of Henrich’s analysis of the proof structure of the B-Deduction is wrong. It is not that Kant wants to show that those intuitions that lack unity are also subject to the categories; it is rather that such intuitions do not exist—at least, not for, or in, us. Thus, since only unitary intuitions exist, and since these are subject to the categories, the categories are valid “without restriction.”

This strikes me as ultimately the most natural way to read Henrich’s proposal. The results in §20 are conditional; it is misleading to say that they are restricted, unless one qualifies what one means by this.

With this in mind, I turn to a complaint that has been leveled against Henrich’s analysis by Hoke Robinson³ and Henry Allison.⁴ Here is Robinson:

To hold that the first step [of the B-Deduction] introduces a restriction which is removed by the second step is to hold that the a priori applicability of the categories is in principle narrower after the first step and broader after the second. In the text, however, it is just the reverse.

For in §20 Kant concludes that his results apply to intuitions in general, whereas in §26 Kant claims that the categories apply to intuitions of which we are capable, given our forms of intuition.

I have difficulty understanding this objection unless I take it to presuppose what I have suggested is a wrong understanding of Henrich. On this reading, Kant claims that unitary intuitions are subject to the categories in §20; by §26, he concludes that all intuitions, including the non-unitary ones, are. Thus the demonstrated applicability of the categories in §20 would be narrower than it is by §26. Hence the objection.

But it is hard to know what to make of this objection on what I have suggested is the correct understanding of Henrich’s proposal. For if the result in §20 is taken to be conditional, rather than restricted, then the applicability of the categories in §20 is neither narrower nor broader than it is in §26. The range of their applicability remains constant: to unitary intuitions. But Kant must show that there are no non-unitary intuitions to worry about in the second half of the B-Deduction.

This is not to say that Robinson and Allison have not raised important issues surrounding Henrich’s proposal (and indeed, I think that each has). It is to say only that I do not believe that this is one of them.

¹ Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969): 640-59.

² In Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: the Three “Critiques” and the “Opus postumum,” edited by Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 29-46.

³ “Intuition and Manifold in the Transcendental Deduction,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 22 (1984): 404.

⁴ Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2^nd edition, 161; see also 1^st edition, 351-52 n6.

Adding categories to Kant Blog

2006-04-17T12:03:00.000-05:00

Over the next few days, I am going to attempt to add faux categories to this blog. Blogger does not currently support categories, but there are ways to get around this. I’ll be trying to employ a method using del.icio.us, which is described at phydeaux3. This may affect the site for a time (e.g., links that go nowhere).

UPDATE (4/18/06): I should note my gratitude to phydeaux3 for helping me get it to work!

Kant, the unity of consciousness, and the genitive

2006-04-15T01:41:00.000-05:00

A number of months ago, one of my committee members (I won’t mention who, since he or she may not care to be mentioned here) urged me to be careful about my use of the expression, “representation of” and “idea of.” And a few years back, I was criticized by a professor—rightly, I see in hindsight—for not understanding how Hume used the genitive in the expressions “idea of” and “impression of.” So, for instance, if I say that I have a

(1) (mental) representation of a tree,

I may well mean by this that I have a mental state and that it picks out something distinct from it, viz., some tree, or perhaps trees in general. If it is some particular tree, it does not matter whether this tree exists. The point is that the representation is directed at something other than itself. But a sense datum theorist—like Hume—might employ a similar expression, e.g.,

(2) idea of a tree.

And by this Hume does not mean that the idea represents something else (as above). Rather, he means that one has a particular tree-ish idea, or tree-idea. The expression, “idea of x” functions as “feeling of shame” does. One does not mean by “feeling of shame” that one feels some shame; rather, one means that one has a shame-feeling (that one is in a state of shame). A sense datum theorist might infer from his tree-idea that he is in the presence of something else, viz., a tree. Such a sense datum theorist subscribes to what Hume calls the theory of “double existence” (e.g., there is a tree-idea and a tree corresponding to it). But that doesn’t make the idea of a tree about some tree any more than the puddles of water, which are evidence of rain, are about rain.¹

This is a long-winded way of saying that one must be careful about the use of the genitive case. Said committee member directed me to an essay by Thomas Lennon (on Locke’s theory of ideas) in which, building on the Port-Royal Grammar (1660), he distinguishes more than seven kinds of genitive case.² Wikipedia also has a list of different kinds of genitives.

This leads me to ask: what exactly is the nature of the genitive in Kant’s “unity of consciousness” (often: “unity of apperception”) [Einheit des Bewußtseins/der Apperzeption]? Here are some possibilities, none of which strike me as absurd (I concocted some of the genitive names):

(a) Possessive genitive: the unity belonging to (self-) consciousness.

(b) Objective genitive: the unity that is the object of (self-) consciousness.

(c) Compositional/material genitive: the unity constituted by or made up out of (self-) consciousness.

(d) Sufficiency genitive: the unity brought about by (self-) consciousness (analogy: “damage of the hurricane”).

(e) Make-possible genitive: the unity made possible by (self-) consciousness (analogy: “the grant of the NIH” (one made possible by funds from the NIH, but not created by or fully funded by the NIH, thus distinguishing this genitive from the sufficiency genitive)).

There may be some more that I haven’t thought of. And these options are not necessarily exclusive. I suppose that I have always assumed that (a) is correct. Note, though, that if one takes seriously that at issue is self-consciousness, then if (a) this unity belongs to self-consciousness it might also, in part at least, (b) be the object of self-consciousness. At the end of the day, I think that this is roughly what Kant thought.

But it is also possible that the foregoing distinctions are beside the point. One might argue that the expression, “unity of consciousness,” in Kant’s hands, is idiomatic or elliptical, referring simply to a single subject who is often, or perhaps essentially, conscious. Either way, the expression would then seem to pick out the unity possessed by a subject (or mind) that is conscious. Accordingly, the relation between unity and consciousness is mediated by a subject, in contrast to (a)-(e), where the relationship is in each case immediate. In short, one might contend that (a)-(e) take the expression “unity of consciousness” too literally: in employing it, Kant is simply indicating a conscious subject.

One might also suggest that “unity of consciousness” is elliptical for “unity of conscious representations.” This actually differs from what I had in mind with (a)-(e). But now I am getting away from talking about the genitive….³

Those interested in the unity of consciousness might look at Andrew Brook’s article, “The Unity of Consciousness,” on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He talks a little about Kant, there, too.

¹ I think that the distinction between (1) and (2) is typically said to be the distinction between the objective and subjective genitive, respectively.

² “Locke and the Logic of Ideas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 18, No. 2 (April 2001), 158-59.

³ But I think this distinction is relevant to Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic unities of consciousness. I discuss this in my dissertation.

Brief break from bloggin‘

2006-04-03T19:15:00.000-05:00

I’ll be out of town from Tuesday until Sunday night (4/4-4/9), so I won’t be updating this blog during that period. I don’t advertise this under the illusion that I have a large audience that will be disappointed by my absence; I advertise this on the remote chance that someone will comment on one of these posts and be disappointed that it does not appear soon thereafter. I’ll post comments, should there be any, when I return.

Kitcher on Kant and apperception

2006-04-03T19:07:00.000-05:00

Lately I have been reading a lot about Kant and apperception. What apperception is for Kant isn’t transparent, and commentators have diverse opinions on this subject, as I remarked in a previous post. One distinction to which one ought to be sensitive is that between what Kant calls “empirical” and “pure” apperception. Kant also calls the latter “a priori” and “transcendental” apperception. Perhaps one can say that there are two (very) broad schools of thought on how to understand pure apperception. On one, it is a sui generis kind of (reflective) consciousness, to be distinguished from (but nevertheless probably closely related to) other forms of consciousness; on another, pure apperception is to be understood as something more homely and less spooky-sounding. Some have claimed that “pure apperception” is, for Kant, just synonymous with “consciousness.” Others have wanted to read instances of the expression as elliptical for Kant’s principle of the transcendental unity of apperception or as elliptical for one’s belief in this principle. Perhaps there are other ways to make this notion homely, too.

By contrast, I favor the first approach. Many philosophers prior to Kant and many since have believed that consciousness is inherently reflective. One way one might try to pitch this belief is as follows. If one is conscious of, e.g., the tree, then one must also be, but in a different way from the way one is conscious of the tree, conscious of oneself (perhaps conscious of oneself perceiving the tree). I think that Kant was trying to capture something like this in his notion of pure apperception.

I billed this post as about Patricia Kitcher’s work on Kant, and so it is. She has written extensively on Kant’s philosophy of mind, but it seems to me that until relatively recently, she was pessimistic about the intelligibility of Kant’s notion of pure apperception. Here she is in Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (1990):

“A priori consciousness” suggests a special type of consciousness. It is hard to see what this could be, however. The only awareness that we have of our states [according to Kant?] is through inner sense (104-05).

In a more recent essay, however—“Kant on Self-Consciousness”¹—she seems far more sympathetic:

I believe that Kantian Self-Consciousness [i.e., transcendental self-consciousness] involves a necessary consciousness of mental activities that are required for cognition, but a consciousness that does not enable the subject clearly to see these activities for what they are (346).

I quite like this essay, and I largely agree with this more recent analysis of what transcendental self-consciousness is. But two things about Kitcher’s article struck me as curious. Perhaps they are related. First, while Kitcher does note that this essay constitutes a modification of views she has presented in the past, she does not include among these presentations, e.g., her book. But surely she would retract the first remark that I cited above. If not, I’d be interested to know how the latter remark is continuous with the first.

This is a minor point. More noteworthy is how she goes on to describe transcendental self-consciousness.² I have in mind in particular such claims as that it is “an obscure consciousness of [one’s] own creative acts.”³ What does it mean to say that this self-consciousness is “obscure”? Interestingly, she appeals to Leibniz to clarify—e.g., his petites perceptions. These representations are supposed to be obscurely conscious states (of, e.g., the noise of a single wave among thousands). And in Kant’s Anthropology, Kant also endorses what are, in effect, petites perceptions.

I find this appeal to Leibniz both interesting and curious. I would have thought that Leibniz with petites perceptions and Kant with his remarks on this matter in the Anthropology were making room not for obscurely conscious representations but for non-conscious representations. Part of Leibniz’s contribution to philosophy of mind, long before Freud was born, was his opposition to Descartes and Locke’s position that mentality is essentially conscious.⁴ His petites perceptions are his chief examples. If they are conscious, even obscurely so, then this is quite compatible with the position that consciousness is the mark of the mental.

My questions, then, are as follows. If the foregoing is right, does it amount merely to a terminological quibble? If so—if “obscure consciousness” is just non-conscious representation—then it seems that Kitcher is actually committed to the position that transcendental apperception is non-conscious representation of one’s mental activity (something similar is the position of certain higher-order theorists of consciousness). But then this phenomenon would no longer be well described as a kind of self-consciousness (although it would be a kind of self-representation). On the other hand, perhaps my remarks constitute more than a terminological quibble. But then, I wonder whether the passages to which Kitcher turns to support her analysis of “obscure consciousness” are truly appropriate to pick out the kind of phenomenon (obscure consciousness—in particular, obscure self-consciousness) that she wants to explain.

¹ The Philosophical Review 108, No. 3 (July 1999): 345-386. Links to this essay are to its location on JSTOR. You’ll need access to JSTOR to access this article.

² At the end of her paper, Kitcher argues that this kind of consciousness is genuinely a form of consciousness of the self.

³ 375. This claim in particular should be contrasted to Kitcher’s earlier contentions that Kant retracts as quickly as he endorses “synthesis watching.”

⁴ E.g., see Alison Simmons, “Changing the Cartesian Mind: Leibniz on Sensation, Representation and Consciousness,” The Philosophical Review 110, No. 1 (Jan. 2001): 31-75. The link is to this essay’s location on JSTOR.

Advice on using Past Masters (with URL links)

2006-03-28T11:12:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-21T12:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-13T14:23:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-01T09:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Hatfield on Kant's Aims in the Deduction

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I just finished rereading Gary Hatfield’s “What Were Kant’s Aims in the Deduction?”* I think that anyone who is wrestling with this topic (as I certainly have over the years) should read this essay. In my opinion, the great difficulty of the Transcendental Deduction is not working out the details of its argument—although this is certainly a big difficulty—but determining what on earth Kant is trying to establish (to get a sense of the variety of opinions, see Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, 73-88).

Hatfield devotes his essay entirely to this topic, definitely keeping the “big picture” front and center. He also provides useful, short background on various readings of the Deduction. And his paper has an interesting thesis.

I think it is pretty uncontroversial that in the Deduction, Kant wants to establish both a positive claim (though perhaps more than one) and a negative claim. Slightly more controversially, let me make this slightly more concrete. The positive claim is that

(+) The application of the categories is objectively valid.

The negative claim is that

(-) The application of the categories is not valid beyond the bounds of possible experience.

But while commentators grant that Kant concludes with both (+) and (-) (or claims close to them), they tend to emphasize (+) to the neglect of (-). Hatfield challenges the appropriateness of this emphasis. Instead, he argues that Kant’s main concern in the Transcendental Deduction is to establish (-); (+) is secondary. Thus Hatfield writes (toward the end of his paper):

I am proceeding on the assumption that the primary aim of the Deduction is to preclude objective a priori use of the categories to cognize objects beyond any possible experience. The secondary aim is to explain how the categories can and do legitimately stand in an a priori relation to objects (184).

As Hatfield sees it, the Deduction’s main purpose is to help advance Kant’s case against dogmatic metaphysics; the Deduction (thus) also comes out far friendlier to Hume than is typically acknowledged (especially by those who take the Deduction to refute or dissolve some form of Humean skepticism).

Personally, I’m not quite convinced that the main purpose of the Deduction is negative, although Hatfield produces a wealth of textual evidence for his proposal. But since some of my reasons for disagreement are a little fuzzy, and since this may well one day be a talk or paper subject for me, I will not try to elaborate here.

* “What Were Kant’s Aims in the Deduction?”, Philosophical Topics 31, Nos. 1 & 2, (Spring and Fall 2003): 165-98.

Upcoming Kant-Related Conferences

2006-02-20T22:30:00.000-05:00

I am too lazy to publish every Kant conference that I hear about. But here are two that I am going to try to attend:

NAKS Eastern Study Group: Third Annual Meeting
April 28-29, Boston University
Keynote Speaker: Christine Korsgaard, “Natural Motives and the Motive of Duty: Hume and Kant on Our Duties to Others”

New England Colloquium in Early Modern Philosophy
June 2-4, Harvard University (link here)

UPDATE (4/15/06): One can see the schedule here. Look carefully to see the room assignments.

Poll: Transcendental Idealism: Two-World or Two-Aspect?

2006-02-18T16:07:00.000-05:00

Aren’t polls fun? Here is another.

Commentators often divide themselves on interpreting transcendental idealism as follows: they endorse either a two-world or a two-aspect reading. Speaking roughly, according to two-world readings, the distinction between appearances and things in themselves (phenomena and noumena) is ontological. This might be the position that there are two realms of objects over and above our representations; or the position might be a radicalization of the more familiar distinction between our representations and mind-independent objects (when people attribute the latter to Kant, they often also claim that transcendental idealism is “inconsistent Berkeleyanism,” since it seems like Berkeleyan idealism + un-Berkeleyan things in themselves).

On two-aspect readings, the appearance/thing in itself distinction is not ontological but rather epistemological or perspectival. There is only one set of objects (distinct from our representations), and these may be regarded either as appearances or as things in themselves.

Again, this is rough, and it may be misleading to bill this distinction as exhaustive. Still, I think that a number of interpretations of Kant’s idealism fall squarely under one or the other reading.

And once again, I am curious to know where people stand on this matter. Unlike the “non sequitur of numbing grossness” charge, I am rather unclear about the opinion of the Kant community at large here. It seems to me that many who have written extensively on Kant’s theoretical philosophy try to remain neutral on how to understand transcendental idealism (although, to be sure, there are notable advocates of either position). Putting my own cards on the table, I certainly prefer the two-aspect reading. In fact, I am in the middle of arguing that this is truer to Kant’s project in the first Critique. But there is plenty of evidence suggesting the more traditional two-world reading, and this does leave me uneasy.

Poll: Strawson’s Non Sequitur Charge

2006-02-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

Recently, I have been writing on the Second Analogy of the first Critique, and I was briefly convinced that Strawson was not only right that Kant commits a non sequitur in his argument but also that Strawson was more or less correct in his diagnosis: viz., that Kant conflates one kind of necessity with another.* This surprised me because for years I had thought otherwise. It is interesting that most commentators on the Second Analogy that I have read think that Strawson misunderstands Kant’s argument and defend Kant against the charge.

Although my confidence is not 100%, I have returned to what seems to be the majority opinion: whatever other problems the Second Analogy argument faces, it is not subject to this objection. But I am curious to know what others think about this perennial topic.

One need not go into detail. Indeed, this topic is often an essay assignment in undergraduate courses on the Critique of Pure Reason, so perhaps one should not say too much. I would be interested just to know what people’s positions are, even without knowing what motivates them.

* The Bounds of Sense (1966), 137-38. For Arthur Lovejoy’s earlier non sequitur charge (1906), see “On Kant’s Reply to Hume” in Kant: Disputed Questions, edited by Moltke S. Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 303.

Inquiry: Kant to Hegel (February 2006)

2006-02-16T11:04:00.000-05:00

The February 2006 issue of Inquiry is now out. It is a special issue that seems to derive from last year's Kant bis Hegel conference at the University of Pittsburgh. I have not yet had a chance to read the articles, but the collection looks excellent. Contributors include Stephen Engstrom, Michael Friedman, Barbara Herman, Allen Wood, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann. Thanks to Jason Pannone to alerting me to the issue.

P.F. Strawson, 1919-2006

2006-02-16T02:40:00.000-05:00

P.F. Strawson died on February 13, 2006. His Times obituary is here. His Guardian obituary is here.

Strawson was a major figure in 20th-century philosophy of language and metaphysics. I know of his work almost exclusively, however, through his publications on Kant: in particular, The Bounds of Sense (few books on Kant have such good titles!).

It is typical to cite 1966--the year that The Bounds of Sense, along with Jonathan Bennett's Kant's Analytic, was published--as a watershed year in Kant scholarship. After this date Kant's work was a legitimate subject for analytic philosophy. On the back of Bennett's book, Strawson claims that "Bennett's Kant is not a giant immersed, or frozen, in time. He is a great contemporary...." Strawson's work was even more instrumental in making Kant as relevant as he is today to contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Welcome (first message)

2006-02-16T02:04:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Kant Blog. This is my first blog, so please pardon its rudimentary appearance.

I am a graduate student working on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I know relatively few people who work on Kant's theoretical philosophy, and as it happens, I am currently out of residence. I thought that a blog might help me connect with individuals with similar interests.

My work on Kant is very internal to the Critique. I am attempting to illuminate the relationship between its so-called "Transcendental Deduction" and the "Principles of Pure Understanding." Once my dissertation is finished, I hope to focus more on philosophy of mind. Thus, I plan to write on Kant's understanding of consciousness and apperception and also Kant's views on perceptual content. I also have an amateur interest in Kant's ethical philosophy.

This blog is an experiment. It is quite possible I will delete it in a few months. Naively or not, I envision this as a forum to exchange ideas. I won't now prejudge how that should pan out. But I reserve the right to edit or delete comments made here (not because I like to censor people, but because I don't want this blog full of spam or vulgarity).

Thanks for reading!

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