Der Reinen Research Articles

La noción de “esquema” en el pensamiento de Michel Foucault. Hacia una ontología de la imaginación

El término “esquema” aparece trece veces en el capítulo “Le panoptisme” de Surveiller et punir. Consideramos que se trata de un término técnico del pensamiento foucaultiano cuyo sentido remite a la filosofía kantiana. Gilles Deleuze es uno de los pocos pensadores que parece haber notado la relación entre la problemática del poder (en especial la noción de “diagrama”) y el esquematismo kantiano. Si el diagrama es análogo al esquema kantiano, y si el esquema, en la Kritik der reinen Vernunft, es producido por la imaginación, ¿cuál es el término que se corresponde, en Foucault, con la imaginación? Esta pregunta apunta ya a una ontología. El objetivo de este artículo consiste en mostrar que la arqueología y la genealogía de Foucault requieren una ontología política e histórica de la imaginación, en parte esbozada por Deleuze, aunque nunca pensada en relación a la imaginación.

Über drei Deduktionen in Kants Moralphilosophie - und über eine vierte, die man dort vergeblich sucht. Zur Rehabilitierung von Grundlegung III

Abstract: Since H. J. Paton’s famous commentary from 1947, Kant’s interpreters have considered a ‘deduction of the categorical imperative’ a challenge. This is quite puzzling since Kant himself never talks about such a deduction - and the famous ‘deduction’ he does mention in Groundwork III.4 is, as a close reading shows, not at all the deduction of a law but the deduction of a concept, of the idea of a pure lawgiving will: Only the reality of this idea can explain the possibility of - prima facie impossible - categorical imperatives and thus of morality as autonomy. The presupposition of the validity of the moral law, however, was already a cornerstone of Kant’s critical metaphysics in 1781: Moral theology (which replaces all speculative proofs of immortality and of God’s existence) depends on the moral law’s being an undisputed datum without any need for philosophical justification (‘deduction’). While in the Groundwork (1785) Kant tried to show the practical reality of the idea of a pure will with the help of a speculative deduction of freedom (which a reviewer described as being ‘uncritical’ in May 1786), in the second Critique (1787/88) the reality of that very idea, and with it the idea of freedom, depends (as did immortality and God’s existence in 1781) on the aforementioned practical datum, which, from that point on, Kant called a “Factum der reinen Vernunft” [fact of pure reason].

How Kant Justifies Freedom of Agency (without Transcendental Idealism)

AbstractThis paper argues that the problem of the apparent conflict between freedom of action and natural causal determinism has not been properly framed, because the key premiss—the thesis of universal causal determinism—is, in the domain of human behaviour, an unjustified conjecture based on over‐simplified, under‐informed explanatory models. Kant's semantics of singular cognitive reference (explained herein), which stands independently of his Transcendental Idealism, justifies and emphasises a quadruple distinction between causal description, causal ascription (predication), (approximately) true causal ascription (accurate predication) and cognitively justified causal ascription. Contemporary causal theories of mind, of action or of meaning do not suffice for causal ascription, and so cannot suffice for causal predication, and hence cannot justify causal determinism about human behaviour. More generally, the principle of universal causal determinism is a regulative principle governing causal inquiry and was so formulated by LaPlace. Only successful, sufficient causal explanation of particular events provides for causal knowledge of those events. Such knowledge we lack in the domain of human behaviour. Rational belief, including scientific belief, requires apportioning belief to justifying evidence; all else is conjecture or speculation, which do not justify premises of sound proofs. Causal determinism about human behaviour remains unjustified speculation, for sound Critical reasons Kant provided us in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In these regards, contemporary debates about these issues remain decidedly pre‐Critical.

"Homo capax Dei". La posibilidad del conocimiento teórico de Dios según Leonardo Polo

The inquiry about the existence and essence of God has been a philosophical question since the origins of Philosophy. Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft gave a Copernican Turn to this issue; according to him, we cannot demonstrate the existence of God by means of the theoretical reason. In contemporary philosophy this question about God has been, by different traditions, revisited. The philosophical proposal of L. Polo –especially his contribution in theory of knowledge– could help to reconsider this topic with new tools and arguments. According to Polo the human intellect (inteligencia) in his theoretical dimension is essentiallycapax Dei. This article tries to summarize the arguments of Polo in order to support his thesis about the possibility of theoretical knowledge of God.

Conceptos trascendentales, reflexión y juicio. Sobre el § 12 de la Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

<p class="p1">El presente trabajo ofrece una reconstrucción de la posición que Kant elabora en el § 12 de la Kritik der reinen Vernunft, con el objetivo de incorporar en su propia concepción la temática nuclear propia de la doctrina de los atributos trascendentales del ser elaborada por la tradición metafísica. El alcance sistemático de la recontextualización llevada a cabo por Kant se comprende cuando se pone en conexión la temática del § 12 con la concepción kantiana relativa a los presupuestos reflexivos del juicio, tal como ésta aparece desarrollada en el texto de la “Anfibología de los conceptos de reflexión”. En tal sentido, el este artículo constituye la continuación natural de uno anterior en el cual se discute la concepción que Kant elabora en la “Anfibología”. La interpretación ofrecida aquí apunta, entre otras cosas, a poner de relieve que los criterios lógicos que Kant tematiza en el § 12 cumplen funciones regulativas que orientan procesos de tipo reflexivo, entre los cuales destacan particularmente aquellos que subyacen a la formación originaria de conceptos empíricos.</p>

Spontaneity before the Critical Turn: The Spontaneity of the Mind in Crusius, the Pre-Critical Kant, and Tetens

The introduction of a spontaneity proper to the understanding in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft is often thought to be one of the central innovations of Kant’s Critical philosophy. Yet a number of thinkers within the eighteenth-century German tradition in the time before the KrV had already developed a robust conception of the spontaneity of the mind. In this paper, I consider three influential accounts of the spontaneity of the mind—those of Crusius, the pre-Critical Kant, and Tetens—which, while distinct, nonetheless relate to and explicitly draw upon one another in important ways, forming the interconnected and, thus far, largely overlooked pre-Critical context for Kant’s discussion of the spontaneity of the understanding.

Rehabilitating the regulative use of reason: Kant on empirical and chemical laws

In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant asserts that laws of nature “carry with them an expression of necessity” (A159/B198). There is, however, widespread interpretive disagreement regarding the nature and source of the necessity of empirical laws of natural sciences in Kant's system. It is especially unclear how chemistry—a science without a clear, straightforward connection to the a priori principles of the understanding—could contain such genuine, empirical laws. Existing accounts of the necessity of causal laws unfortunately fail to illuminate the possibility of non-physical laws. In this paper, I develop an alternative, ‘ideational’ account of natural laws, according to which ideas of reason necessitate the laws of some non-physical sciences. Chemical laws, for instance, are grounded on ideas of the elements, and the chemist aims to reduce her phenomena to these elements via experimentation. Although such ideas are beyond the possibility of experience, their postulation is necessary for the achievement of reason's theoretical ends: the unification and explanation of the cognitions of science.

- Den teologiske modtagelse af Verdenskrøniken 1812

Den teologiske modtagelse af Verdenskrøniken 1812[The Theological Reception of Grundtvig’s World Chronicle 1812]By Kim Arne PedersenTaking as its starting point William Michelsen’s characterization of the Danish literary and artistic Golden Age and of Grundtvig’s position in Danish intellectual life after the publication in 1812 of Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike i Sammenhæng (A Brief View of the World Chronicle in Context, VK 1812), this paper analyses Grundtvig’s ensuing discussions with theologians up until 1815. Grundtvig’s antagonists all bore the mark of Enlightenment theology while at the same time each taking up a different position, and the analysis shows the need to rework Michelsen’s stylization of Grundtvig’s isolation after 1812 as a result predominantly of his antagonism to German idealistic philosophy.Grundtvig’s dispute with the vicar Johan Harder (1768-1831) is the first to be considered. Harder was characterized by a Kantian rationalism from which Grundtvig had dissociated himself after having read Kant’s treatise Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. In his correspondence with the curate Andreas Krag Holm (1767-1851), Grundtvig encountered a defence of the theological principle of accommodation, i.e. the idea that Christ in his earthly life had adapted himself to the notions of his contemporaries, originally forwarded by J. G. Zollikofer (1730-88).The most important discussion caused by VK 1812 is the one between Grundtvig and professor of Divinity Jens Møller (1779-1833), who stood for an early supranaturalistic theology of a Wolffian stamp combined with respect for the historical revelation. Grundtvig’s own historically based theology of revelation would seem to make a mutual approach possible, but Møller’s publishing of an article in his periodical Theologisk Bibliothek (Theological Library) by the Kantian-rationalistic supranaturalist H. G. Tzschirner (1778-1828) was cause for controversy. The fact that Møller admitted historical-critical reason to play an essential part in theology and did not assume reason to be determined exclusively by faith caused Grundtvig to criticize him, even though he acknowledged Møller as a fellow Christian. Thus, Grundtvig’s evaluation of Møller is reminiscent of his characterization in VK 1812 of the German supranaturalist F. V. Reinhard (1753- 1812).Grundtvig’s discussions with contemporary theologians place his controversies with writers influenced by idealism such as the natural scientist H. C. Ørsted (1777-1851) and the historian Christian Molbech (1783-1857) in a largercontext; in particular this is true in relation to Ørsted.Grundtvig was positive yet still guarded in his stimation of Kant’s setting a limit to human knowledge in Kritik der reinen Vernunft, but he rejected the concept of faith as based on the autonomy of reason as it had been proposed by Kant in his works on religion. Grundtvig’s sympathy for Kant’s assertion of the limits of reason might seem to bring him close to a Kantian supranaturalism, however, Grundtvig’s emphasis on the unconditional dependence of reason on faith separates him from the thinking of all other contemporary academic theologians. In his periodical Danne-Virke, Grundtvig stuck to this evaluation of Kant in an argumentation for reason as ruled by faith.

“God … has sent me to Germany”: Salomon Maimon, Friedrich Jacobi, and the Spinoza Quarrel

AbstractSalomon Maimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie [Essay in Transcendental Philosophy] (1790) challenges and reworks Kant's arguments in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] (1785, 2nd ed. 1787) about the foundations of natural science and of Newtonian physics in particular. Kant himself was impressed both with Maimon's grasp of his critical project and also with the force of his challenge to it. While Maimon's significance on the later development of German Idealism is now widely acknowledged, another aspect of Maimon's Versuch has not been fully appreciated, namely, its engagement with the central questions of the Spinozastreit [Spinoza Quarrel] that erupted in 1785 with the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn]. The Spinoza Quarrel centered on whether and to what extent philosophy's rational understanding of God needs to be grounded in an unmediated and suprarational revelatory experience. This paper is the first extended effort at placing Maimon's Versuch into the context of the Spinoza Quarrel. I argue that the Spinoza Quarrel and Maimon's self‐proclaimed philosophical mission in response to it—the replacement of revealed faith by reason—deeply inform the goals he pursues in his Versuch. I show how Maimon's Versuch can be read as not only a response to Kant, but also to Jacobi's defense of the revelatory nature of sense experience in David Hume über den Glauben (1787), the book in which Jacobi offers his own skeptical challenge to Kant's Kritik. Situating Maimon's Versuch as a response to Friedrich Jacobi's David Hume allows us to understand how one of Maimon's objectives in his Versuch is to keep Jacobian Glaube [faith] at bay by demonstrating, using a revised Kantian framework, the conditions of the impossibility of experiencing miracles.

The semiotic articulation of the concept, symbol and metaphor in §59 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft

The current paper has the pretension to show the articulation between concept (Begriff), symbol (Symbol) and metaphor (Metapher) in the kantian works, from the symbolic hipotiposis problem mainly shown in §59 in the Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft), retaking the subsumption approach shown in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft), from a linguistic and semiologic perspective. Also, this work seeks to stablish how concept, symbol and metaphor can be considered as different modalities of linguistic sign, articulated from the stability and sense given by the use inside of a speaking community, and therefore, they can be considerated as different but complementary cognitive ambitsRealidad: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades No.140, 2014: 321-337

Two Traditions of Idealism

Nowadays our concept of German Idealism is firm and fixed. We seem to know very well who the German Idealists were, and when their movement began and ended. Almost all of us would say that the movement lasted some fifty years, spanning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It begins in 1781 with the publication of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, and it ends in 1831 with Hegel’s death. The grand thinkers in this tradition are, most everyone would agree, Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It is a controversial question whether we include the Romantics in this tradition; but even if we do so, it only slightly alters the dramatis personae. Kant, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel remain the major players, while the Romantics are merely “transitional figures” or “minor players.”

Fra Hamann til Fasc. 209.10. Om Grundtvigs forhold til Johann Georg Hamann og dennes samtidige

Fra Hamann til Fasc. 209.10. Om Grundtvigs forhold til Johann Georg Hamann og dennes samtidige[From Hamann to Fascicle 209.10. On Grundtvig's relation to Johann Georg Hamann and his contemporaries]By Bent ChristensenThe German critic and Enlightenment philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) can be seen as a German forerunner of Grundtvig who according to a few places in his Verdenskrøniken (World Chronicle), 1817, has known about his writings and perhaps felt a spiritual kinship to him. By all accounts, the only other mention of him at all by Grundtvig occurs in a brief and somewhat enigmatic manuscript entitled “Synchronismer” (synchronisms) (The Grundtvig Archive, Fascicle 209 nr 10). It lists names of 24 German authors supplied with dates marking periods in their careers between the years 1741 and 1781 and has been regarded as a preliminary study for the World Chronicle 1817. But it can also be seen as a view of these authors from a specific “synchronistic” angle, resulting in a particular profile of these 40 years. The list also reflects Grundtvig’s detailed knowledge of German literary history.After a presentation of Hamann, Grundtvig’s evaluation of him in the World Chronicle of 1817 is quoted and commented upon, followed by a an examination of the manuscript list author by author, inclusive of references to treatments in the World Chronicle.The list begins with “Rabener 1741-57” and finishes with “Bürger 1769- 78”; the latest year brought up, however, is “1781” (under the names of Kant and Hamann). In his World Chronicle, Grundtvig states that the period he wants to depict, covers the reign of the Prussian king Frederick the Great (1740-86). The list corresponds almost exactly to this ambition. Hamann’s first year, 1759, is the year in which Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten appeared, his first work addressing a general public. Hamann’s last year, 1781, indicates that he at that time started to write a critical review of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, having read the proofs of it, as a personal friend of the philosopher, before its publication that same year. At first, however, Hamann did not print his text but only communicated it to Herder in a personal letter. The Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft was finished in 1784 but not published until 1800. When Kant in his work asks for a foundation of cognition prior to and independent of experience, Hamann accuses him of aiming at constituting a new kind of metaphysics. Two later works published by Hamann (1784 and 1786) are of a retrospective and summary nature.Concerning the other authors listed, the “first year” in most cases presents the very first step in their literary careers, and the “last year” marks the ending of their initial period. This applies, for example, to Rabener’s “last year”, 1757, when his satires had started already to appear in book form. In Lessing’s case, 1761 is the year in which he accepted a position as secretary for the governor of Breslau. Wieland was appointed town clerk in Biberach in 1760, but in the World Chronicle Grundtvig emphasizes the importance of his Shakespeare translations which did not begin to appear until 1762, though it is likely that Wieland had been encouraged to take up this project as early as 1759. Herder’s “last year” is 1767, the date of publication featured on the title page of Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur—a date often considered to be the prime year of the “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Stress”) movement. Goethe’s “last year” is 1774 due to the publication of his best-seller novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers.In several cases the often paired dates of Grundtvig’s list differ from those found in ordinary histories of literature as well as in the World Chronicle of 1817. A closer study of them—and a study of Grundtvig as compared to Hamann—might cause important contributions to Grundtvig research and to the study of German intellectual and literary history.

Goethe and Spinoza: A Reconsideration

Goethe and Spinoza: A Reconsideration Horst Lange I No investigation into the origins of German Idealism can ignore the importance of Spinoza. To get an understanding of this, we only have to remember that, as convincing as many contemporaries found Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason to be, there were certain problems associated with them that begged for a solution. There was, for example, the problem of the Ding an sich, which seemed to be, as Jacobi observed, an essential precondition of Kant’s system, but the assumption of which seemed to introduce fatal contradictions into precisely this system. There was the problem of the status of Kant’s own philosophy: since Kant strictly limited the possibility of synthetic propositions a priori, it could be argued that his own statements, presumably themselves synthetic a priori, were excluded by his own criteria. There was the problem of how the transcendental principles established in the first critique (space, time, and the twelve categories, and in particular the three analogies of experience) could be used to deduct a priori principles of physics. (Kant tried to give such an account in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, but he himself appears to have grown suspicious of his answer.) And there was the problem that although there were clear connections between the two critiques, they appeared to be haphazard, and as a consequence Kant’s system had to be viewed as unfinished insofar as there was no satisfying explanation of the unity of reason in its theoretical and practical modes. (Kant attempted to tackle this issue in his Critique of Judgment, but few people found the answer satisfying.) Difficulties like these drove the development of ever-new systems of transcendental philosophy that we now group together under the label of German Idealism. And curiously, quite often the name of Spinoza came up whenever people thought they were moving a step forward. Interestingly, Kant himself toyed with the idea that Spinoza was someone he should be thinking about. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for example, he was still rather dismissive of Spinoza and talked of the “Ungereimtheit seiner Grundidee” (see A 182–83). But after having realized that his transcendental foundation of physics might be wanting, he tried to think through the matter anew in the manuscript collection of notes and reflections we now [End Page 11] call the opus postumum. And in one of his attempts to properly define his philosophical system he says the following: Der transzendentale Idealismus ist der Spinosism in dem Inbegriff seiner eigenen Vorstellungen das Object zu setzen. [S]pinozens Idee alle Gegenstände in Gott anschauen heißt so viel als alle Begriffe welche das Formale der Erkenntnis in einem System d.i. die Elementarbegriffe ausmachen unter Einem Princip fassen.1 In addition, he starts to refer approvingly to Schelling, whose early publications he apparently read, and in doing so, he is clearly aware of the connection of Schelling’s philosophy to that of Spinoza: Spinozens Gott, in welchem wir Gott in der reinen Anschauung vorstellen. NB. der Raum ist auch Object der reinen Anschauung, aber keine Idee. System des transc. Idealisms durch Schelling, Spinoza, Lichtenberg etc. gleichsam 3 Dimensionen: Die Gegenwart, Vergangenheit u. Zukunft.2 It is not the point here to try to understand what Kant could have meant by these cryptic statements,3 but it is instructive to realize that here already Kant, thinking through the foundations of his philosophy, had begun to see Spinoza in a more positive light. The opposite intellectual impulse can be seen in Fichte. In the introduction to what is commonly known as the Wissenschaftslehre von 1794, i.e., his first full-fledged attempt at presenting what he considered to be his major philosophical insight, he tries to defend what he considered to be the highest principle of philosophy (“Ich bin”) by discussing Spinoza. “Ueber unseren Satz, in dem angezeigten Sinne, hinausgegangen ist Spinoza,” he says,4 and he basically argues that whereas Spinoza must conceive of consciousness as being produced by Nature, his system conceives of nature as being produced by consciousness. In effect, Spinozism emerges as the only other philosophical system that could be...

The Near and Distant God: Poetry; Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot by Ian Cooper

512 Reviews The book is rounded offwith an attractive selection of contemporary illustrations, mainly from almanacs, and a clear index. University of Exeter W. E. Yates The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Holderlin toEliot. By Ian Cooper. London: Legenda. 2008. 184 pp. ?45- ISBN 978 1-906540-00-5. This philosophical and theological investigation ofmodern poetry identifies post Enlightenment German thought as the defining forebear ofmodern religion. This is a religion thatoscillates between thepossibilities of divine presence and absence, epitomized in the opening line of Holderlin's 'Patmos' that provides the title for thisbook. Cooper begins his account with the tension between the epistemological revolution enacted by Kant inKritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) and Kant's own philosophy of religion. Kantian idealism deems a perfect being unknowable to the human subject. The idea of such a being remains sufficient to orient the subject towards the summum bonum, possible only at the noumenal level. Yet what if this summum bonum has been achieved within the limits of phenomena, in the historical person of the incarnate God? Kant neither resolves nor resists this ten sion, towhich Hegel's hermeneutic of Spirit provides a dynamic response. Once Christ departs from his disciples at his Ascension?the near God thus becoming the distant God?Spirit is realized in the self-consciousness of the community and religious faith reaches its zenith. Cooper sees this response as fundamentally sacramental and reaching itspoetic epitome inHolderlin's verse: ifhistory can be the site of theWord made flesh experienced as sacrament?not just representing butmanifesting and enacting what itrepresents?then so too can the poetic word. When Holderlin's poetry resists itsown elegiac bent, it is 'thrown beyond itself (a process Holderlin terms 'hyperbole') with 'an emphatic propulsion into the space after the poem; that space grounds the hermeneutic of redemption' (p. 34). Yet is this propulsion, with itspotentially transformative, sacramental efficacy,a sufficient response towhat Cooper terms themodern 'crisis of redemption'? Not for the next group of thinkers identified in Cooper's lineage. D. F. Strauss's Das Leben Jesudeconstructs the historicity ofHegel's religion of Spirit; theNietzschean promise of eternal recurrence rejects the trajectory ofKantian and Hegelian ideal ism towards a reality beyond history; F. H. Bradley's idealism limits the realm of subjective experience to 'finitecentres', whose reality can be guaranteed only by an Absolute thatparadoxically can have no existence beyond the realm of particularity. Cooper's book ismost compelling as he demonstrates how two pairs of poets? Morike and Hopkins, Rilke and Eliot?deal with this ultimately theological issue. The study's intricate philosophical framework is fleshed out as Cooper describes ideas echoing and enriching one another inverse. Morike emerges as thatunlikely being, the Biedermeier mystagogue, who draws readers through theminutiae of botanical observation and interior decor into themystery of Incarnation and of Spirit. Hopkins gambles all on his hope that poetry can eschew 'endless, unre MLR, 105.2, 2010 513 deemable metaphoricity' (p. 111), the spectre raised byNietzsche that overshadows twentieth-century aesthetics, by instead revealing an inherently sacramental view of word and world. The 'tallnun' of'The Wreck of theDeutschland', who prays aloud to God as her ship founders, proves capable of the propulsion?'heart-throe'? that characterizes Holderlin's optative poetics. In Rilke and Eliot the post-Kantian burden pushes poetry to the precipice where life confronts death with dizzying urgency. As the resolute non-Christian among these four poets, Rilke allows the poetic persona of the tenth of his Duineser Elegien to walk towards death as if towards eternal nothingness, but Cooper argues that the poetry leaves room for the possibility that both words and lifemight refer to something beyond themselves. The deflating ending of the cycle?'wenn ein Gluckliches fallt'?hardly resembles Holderlin's propulsion beyond poetry, but this concluding sag 'gives up language so as not to give up on language, and [thus] gets back the thought of redemption' (p. 144). Cooper early on establishes this as a study in neither influence nor reception. Instead the thinkers he assembles here are protagonists in an episodic theological drama forwhich post-Kantian thought provides the script.Cooper's staging of this drama would have been enhanced...

Kant, Rabe e la logica aristotelica

- This article shows the influence of the Aristotelian Paul Rabe on Immanuel Kant's philosophy. In the first part, I reconstruct the status quaestions regarding Rabe in Aristotelian studies and in Kantforschung. The second part looks at Rabe's life and works. It is demonstrated in the third part that Kant's definition of dialectic as Logik des Scheins comes from Rabe's definition of dialectic as logica ex apparentibus. The fourth part shows the Aristotelian origin of Kant's doctrine of categories and schema and the fifth analyses the meaning of Rabe's Analytica and its legacy in Kant. In the sixth section, the Aristotelian distinction kat'anthropon-kat'aletheian is examined in Rabe and Kant. The conclusion suggests that the chapter "Idee einer transzendentalen Logik" in Kritik der reinen Vernunft is an Einladungsschrift and that Kant became acquainted with Aristotle's writings mainly between 1766 and 1772 when he was librarian at the Schlossbibliothek in Königsberg.

Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (review)

Reviewed by: Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Eric Entrican Wilson Jay F. Rosenberg. Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 312. Paper, $29.95. In the Preface to his impressive and engaging new commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason, Jay Rosenberg informs us that the book is both a product of his own lectures and a “direct descendent of Wilfrid Sellars’ legendary introduction to Kant” (vi). Its origins in the classroom give Accessing Kant a refreshingly pedagogical tone. Throughout, Rosen-berg—who was a student of Sellars’ at the University of Pittsburgh—makes felicitous use of clear examples, familiar problems and authors, and visual aids to clarify “the Big Picture” operating in the first Critique. Mercifully, however, his style owes little to Sellars’ own brutally opaque prose. Rosenberg also shares his teacher’s enthusiasm for the history of philosophy. The reader will not find Rosenberg sloughing off Kant’s “lesser predecessors” in the manner of P. F. Strawson. However, the history on display in Accessing Kant has more to do with the curricular demands of English-speaking philosophy departments than with Kant’s own intellectual and cultural context. This means that his Kant argues across the ages with giants rather than with his peers in Halle and Berlin. Nor, despite the occasional reference to Kant’s handwritten marginalia, does Rosenberg devote any effort to tracing the internal development of Kant’s thought. He does not consider whether insight might be gained from looking at particular problems in the light of the Dissertation (1770), for example, or of Kant’s polemics against Eberhard in On a Discovery (1790). The Prolegomena gets described as “not particularly helpful for understanding the First Critique, especially the difficult bits” (3n). Yet Rosenberg’s “whirlwind tour of the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Hume” (10) is sophisticated and compelling, despite its brevity and “relaxed” style. Tough-minded historicists may resist the idea that Kant’s question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” is just another version of the “Pythagorean puzzle” regarding the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world. But if one grants the reasonable assumption that important philosophical work often transcends the context of its production, one will appreciate the concision of his historical discussions as well as the lack of clutter. The substantive claims Rosenberg makes about the first Critique register his Sellarsian heritage as well. He finds Kant responding most directly to the problems of Hume’s “Concept Empiricism,” rather than, say, his skepticism. Kant is concerned to show that empiricist theories cannot explain either the coherence of perceptual experience (our ability to perceive particulars as instances of universals) or the legitimacy of the synthetic a priori judgments (which Rosenberg calls “every-must judgments”) that underwrite our cognitive practices. According to Rosenberg, Kant’s solution to the problems of Concept Empiricism stems from the commitments expressed in his claim that “the same function that gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B104–05). Particularly important here are two main ideas. One is that possession of a concept amounts to possession of the ability to apply it in a judgment. Concepts “rest on” those functions of the understanding that supply propositional form. The other is that the ability to intuit particular items in space (and time) requires the ability to draw on concepts. Thus, to perceive something as an instance of a general concept (as a chair, for example) is to have an experience whose content can be articulated in the form of a judgment. This reading implies that the distinction between spontaneity and receptivity does not neatly parallel the distinction between understanding and sensibility. It is not merely that concepts must combine with intuitions in order to yield cognition, but that the capacity to intuit must already involve the understanding (qua “faculty of rules”). Properly understood, these ideas provide the key to understanding the central claims of the Transcendental Analytic. Rosenberg’s admirable reconstruction of this difficult line of thought is the heart of...

De la possibilité à l'existence, Kant critique de Leibniz

ABSTRACTThis article offers a contribution to the study of Leibniz's thought on possibility and existence based on a reconstruction of the evolution of Kant's thought on these notions in Nova dilucidatio (1755), Beweisgrund (1763) and Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781–1787). Its aim is to shed light on Kant's debt to Leibniz and to show that only the critical turn could make them diverge on this question through a twofold opposition on epistemology (the role of experience) and ontology (the eclipse of God).

How Compatibilists Can Account for the Moral Motive: Autonomy and Metaphysical Internalism

In Groundwork III and in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant famously asserted that “Freiheit und unbedingtes praktisches Gesetz weisen […] wechselsweise auf einander zurück.” Kant's thesis of the analyticity of freedom and practical reason was rejected by his prominent early readers. In the eighth of his influential Letters on Kant's Philosophy of 1786–1787, Karl Leonhard Reinhold argued that the identification of the will with practical reason excluded the possibility of ascribing freedom to immoral and amoral actions. Reinhold proposed that free will consequently be defined in libertarian terms, as the free capacity to satisfy one of two fundamental drives at the expense of the other: either ‘den uneigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Triebfeder der reinen praktischen Vernunft’, or ‘den eigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Begierde und Neigungen’ or ‘Eigenliebe’. Most first-generation commentators followed Reinhold in rejecting Kant's assertion of an analytical relationship between freedom and practical reason, but several came out on the other side, denying freedom in order to secure the identity of will and practical reason. Leonhard Creuzer thus concurred with Reinhold that immoral conduct could not be imputed to the causality of pure reason, or by extension, to the rational agent, but then developed a theory of “transcendental fatalism” according to which immoral actions were the effects of forces from the realm of nature intervening upon, and outweighing, the force of the intelligible ground. Nearly a century later, Hermann Cohen dismissed libertarian freedom as incoherent in itself and as incompatible with autonomy. Across the channel Henry Sidgwick withheld judgment on the coherence of libertarian freedom, but he, too, claimed that such freedom is, at all events, incompatible with the causality of practical reason. More recently, Gerold Prauss has suggested that the perennial difficulties posed by Kant's account of the relationship between freedom and practical reason might be resolved by construing the relationship as a synthetic rather than analytic one. This view has found supporters across the Atlantic.

Incongruent Counterparts and Causality

Two puzzles with regard to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV) are incongruent counterparts and causality. In De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (MSI), Kant indicates that the experience of things like left and right hands, so-called incongruent counterparts, involve certain pure intuitions, and hence constitute one line of evidence for the claim that the concept of space itself is a pure intuition. In KrV, Kant again argues that the concept of space itself is a pure intuition, but does not cite the experience of incongruent counterparts as evidence for this claim. Since there is ostensibly nothing in KrV which tells against the existence of the experiences of incongruent counterparts, the natural question is: “Why, in KrV, does Kant not cite the experience of incongruent counterparts as evidence for the claim that the concept of space is a pure intuition?” The problem with causality is as follows. One of the most primary and basic claims of KrV is that empirical experience is structured by non-empirical concepts, such as substantiality and causality. In a portion of KrV entitled the Transcendental Deduction, Kant gives section 20 the heading “All sensible intuitions stand under the categories, as conditions under which alone their the manifold can come together in one consciousness”. Since categories are those concepts which structure empirical experience, section 20 has demonstrated that all sensible intuitions are subject to substantiality and causality. However, there is a later portion of KrV entitled the Second Analogy with the heading “Principle of temporal sequence according to the law of causality: All alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect”. Thus, the natural question is: “What does the Second Analogy demonstrate about causality which the Transcendental Deduction did not already demonstrate about causality?”

Prejudices and Horizons: G. F. Meier's Vernunftlehre and its Relation to Kant

The object of G. F. Meier's Vernunftlehre and its abridgement for courses, the Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre , does not consist exclusively in the elaboration of the formal aspects of logic, but rather in the individuation of the elements of thought and language, which make human understanding possible. Instead of limiting himself to formal truth, Meier investigates the realms of epistemic, aesthetic, and historic truths, of horizons, and prejudices. Kant used both Meier's Vernunftlehre and its Auszug for about forty years in his logic-lectures. Kant's Logik , and also his Kritik der reinen Vernunft , were thus strongly influenced by Meier.