Kant Calls Research Articles

How to solve the knowability paradox with transcendental epistemology

A novel solution to the knowability paradox is proposed based on Kant’s transcendental epistemology. The ‘paradox’ refers to a simple argument from the moderate claim that all truths are knowable to the extreme claim that all truths are known. It is significant because anti-realists have wanted to maintain knowability but reject omniscience. The core of the proposed solution is to concede realism about epistemic statements while maintaining anti-realism about non-epistemic statements. Transcendental epistemology supports such a view by providing for a sharp distinction between how we come to understand and apply epistemic versus non-epistemic concepts, the former through our capacity for a special kind of reflective self-knowledge Kant calls ‘transcendental apperception’. The proposal is a version of restriction strategy: it solves the paradox by restricting the anti-realist’s knowability principle. Restriction strategies have been a common response to the paradox but previous versions face serious difficulties: either they result in a knowability principle too weak to do the work anti-realists want it to, or they succumb to modified forms of the paradox, or they are ad hoc. It is argued that restricting knowability to non-epistemic statements by conceding realism about epistemic statements avoids all versions of the paradox, leaves enough for the anti-realist attack on classical logic, and, with the help of transcendental epistemology, is principled in a way that remains compatible with a thoroughly anti-realist outlook.

PROBLEMATIC MOMENTS OF PRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION ABILITY APPROACH IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF IMMANUEL KANT

The article provides a sketch of Kant’s cognition theory focusing on the analysis of imagination ability as its fundamental and inseparable component. That was Kant who firstly designed this ability in a separate category, and who examined it in different spheres of life (ontological, gnoseological, aesthetic, etc.). Providing thus, this philosopher gave the impetus to further study of imagination ability in various testing in subsequent scientific views. Attention is paid to the problematic aspects of Kantʼs imagination theory in his various works.In our opinion, a major, but hidden, intonation of all Kant’s imagination studies the search of basic root, from which sensuality and reason grow. The imagination itself could be this root. The first person, who came to this conclusion, was Heidegger. In the first edition of «Critique of Pure Reason» imagination has a clear role and performs a separate, valuable function. However, in the second edition of «Critique of Pure Reason» imagination already loses its ground, becomes a secondary ability, all its functions and features Kant somehow passes to the reason. The results of the transcendental imagination ability are an image and a scheme. An image is the empirical productive ability of imagination. A scheme is the pure ability of imagination. And we think not according to our images and schemes. Transcendental product of imagination is a pure reason concept scheme, the nature of which Kant calls the great mystery.Imagination is present both insensuality and reason. In the former it appears as an act of gripping images, in the latter – as an act of understanding concepts. Imagination is standing between them, it is a synthesizing ability that not just reconciles the data, but also exposes it to other forms of thinking. It combines the universal and the individual, the being and the thinking, the chaos and the order. Reason is possible to effect on sensibility only through the intermediation of imagination. Imagination, though belonging to sensuality, is by nature free and spontaneous action that means it is «subordinate» to reason. Imagination is a transcendental ability, and somehow a transcendence of apperception. Productive imagination is considered to be both ontological and gnoseological component, it is an expression of cognition dialectical nature. Imagination can be elevated to the level of the mind, as it is the driving force of the idea, and it can use the simplest form of knowledge to create the image, to give the impetus to the whole knowledge. Thus, this phenomenon has not been studied in its entirety yet, as well as all the interlacing, connections with the cognition and human natures, laid down by Kant have not been revealed yet.

What Descartes Doubted, Berkeley Denied, and Kant Endorsed

According to Kant, there is some doctrine, which he sometimes calls ‘empirical realism,’ such that it was doubted by Descartes, denied by Berkeley, and endorsed by Kant himself. The primary aim of this paper will be to reconstruct Kant’s own narrative of the historical relationship between Descartes, Berkeley, and himself, in order to identify the doctrine Kant calls ‘empirical realism.’ I argue that the empirical realism that Descartes doubted, Berkeley denied, and Kant endorsed is the doctrine that the concept of extended substance has legitimate application.

The Natural, the Pragmatic and the Moral in Kant’s Anthropology: The Case of Temperaments

This paper explores the interconnections between the normative and the descriptive dimensions of Kant’s anthropology. It suggests that, far from being independent of each other or even excluding each other, as is often presupposed, the normative standpoint necessitates the explanatory one. To support this claim, I discuss the case of human temperaments and show in what sense a necessary component of pragmatic anthropology consists in the naturalistic study of human nature – what Kant calls “what nature makes of the human being.”1

Recovering the ‘True Meaning’ of the Pre-Established Harmony: On a Neglected Key to Kant’s Theory of Intuition

Abstract:The paper discusses Kant’s enigmatic claim that his critical philosophy succeeds in articulating a philosophical insight at which Leibniz’s pre-established harmony was ‘truly’ aimed. Kant makes the claim in response to Salomon Maimon’s (mis)reading of his Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, which involves, in Kant’s words, the untenable assumption of a capacity of divine (intuitive) understanding in humans. The paper argues that Maimon’s misreading of Kant’s account of human intuition has found influential followers in contemporary Kant scholarship and that it is based on a failure to distinguish between what Kant calls “mere sensible appearances” and real phenomena of nature. While the former are entirely sensible singularities without unity, the latter are units composed of infinitely many sensible appearances, and their unity requires understanding. Kant thus appeals to a refurbished version of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony of mind and world, which takes the form of an immanent, indubitable, but ultimately inexplicable harmony of the faculties of sensibility and understanding. The paper includes a reconstruction of both the B-Deduction’s argument and the role of transcendental imagination in the proof.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Ontological Argument and the Is/Ought Distinction

AbstractKant's attack on metaphysics consists in large part in his attack on a principle that he names the Supreme Principle of Pure Reason. This principle, it is not often noticed, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason [PSR]. In interpreting this principle as such, I argue that Kant's attack on the PSR (and thereby his attack on dogmatic metaphysics as a whole) depends on Kant's claim that existence is not a first‐order predicate. If existence isn't what Kant calls a real predicate, the PSR is false. While this constitutes a powerful Kantian argument against dogmatic rationalism, it also poses a problem for Kant. For, as I argue, if the PSR is true, Kant's argument that existence isn't a first‐order predicate is false. In this sense, Kant's attack on the PSR is begging the question vis‐á‐vis radical metaphysicians (e.g. Spinoza). Concluding the paper I suggest relying on Kant's 'is'/'ought' distinction in avoiding this circularity, thereby reinforcing the Kantian critique.

A Capacity to Resist: Kant’s Aesthetics and the Right of Revolution

ABSTRACT Taking Kant’s well-known refusal of the “right of resistance” as a point of departure, this paper outlines an alternative approach to the Kantian theory of revolution by investigating the aesthetic dimension of his reception of global insurrectionary movements, particularly his interest in the world spectator’s “enthusiasm” for the French Revolution. Like the experience of the sublime, where the subject confronts instances of nature’s immensity and power that exceed the imagination’s capacity for presentation, revolution confronts us with formless events of human history. The sublime, however, occasions a second moment of recovery. Following the painful experience of the imagination’s impotence, the judging subject is enlivened by the discovery of what Kant calls “a capacity for resistance,” that is, our ability to transcend forces that produce feelings of futility and powerlessness. This paper argues that Kant’s sublime right to resist not only anticipates the revolutionary imperative of Romanticism, but also foregrounds the way in which aesthetics defies the law’s efforts to prohibit disobedience and dissent. But it concludes with a note of caution towards the sublime’s tendency to suppress the rights of nature, a suppression that could be overturned by what Kant calls “a second epoch of natural revolution” that pushes aside the human species altogether.

Implications of Kant’s Theories of Art for Developing Creative Identity in Students

Abstract In light of the enduring question of whether student creativity and artistic talent are inborn traits versus learnable skills, this paper presents an exploration of these tensions outlined in an interpretation of philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, in which Kant outlines his theories of "fine art," "genius," and taste." This paper builds upon past explorations of Kant’s relevance to art appreciation and production to reveal how the intrinsic purpose of making fine art is the primary way that humans can expand their imaginative and reflective capacities and, hence, their phenomenological experiences. Three areas of teaching for developing creative identity are discussed in light of Kant’s theories: First, it is important to help art students transition from other academic norms and learn to immerse themselves in the artistic process without fear of peer- or instructor-based judgment. Second, encouraging students to explore art media freely is essential for strengthening their abilities to take risks, even when that means defying conventional behavior expectations in mainstream academic disciplines. Finally, expanding what Kant calls "reflective judgment" can help make the "crit," or critique format, a positive learning experience to help students’ better manage their apprehension about their artistic abilities.

Tragedy, History, and the Form of Philosophy in Either/Or

Kierkegaard’s essay “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” makes two basic claims of far-reaching consequences for the theory of the tragedy and for philosophy more generally. The first is the claim that the essence of tragedy in all its historical manifestations consists in the representation of an irreducible contradiction between two qualitatively distinct principles: substantial determinants and individual agency. The second is Kierkegaard’s contention that, within this essence, the difference between the genre’s ancient and its modern forms rests on the different relations to that contradiction, on whether it is accepted as an objective fact or as a reflexive possibility. In the present article I elucidate Kierkegaard’s argument in terms of these two claims and point to some of their larger implications. With respect to the first, I show that it introduces a significant challenge to the conception of historical time on which our category of modernity depends. As concerns the second, I argue that it constitutes an engagement with what Kant calls as the modality of judgments (whether an object is possible, actual, or necessary), which Kierkegaard here attacks in the version given to it by the young F.W.J. Schelling. Kierkegaard’s rejection of Schelling’s argument on this point goes to the heart of the idealist project and ultimately questions what the form of philosophy should be.

Hegel's critique of Kant

In this paper we present a reconstruction of Hegel's critique of Kant. We try to show the congruence of that critique in both theoretical and practical philosophy. We argue that this congruence is to be found in Hegel's criticism of Kant's hylemorphism in his theoretical and practical philosophy. Hegel is much more sympathetic to Kant's response to the distinction between matter and form in his theoretical philosophy and he credits Kant with ‘discovering’ here that thinking is an activity that always takes place within a greater whole. He, however, argues that the consequences of this are much more significant than Kant suspects and that, most importantly, the model of cognition in which thought (form) confronts something non-thought (matter) is unsustainable. This leads to Hegel's appropriation of Kantian reflective judgements, arguing that the greater whole in which thinking takes place is a socially shared set of meanings, something resembling what Kant calls a sensus communis. From here, it is not far to Hegel's Geist, which eventually gains self-consciousness in Sittlichkeit, a whole of social practices of mutual recognition. In practical philosophy, Hegel argues for the importance of situating oneself within such a whole in order to attain the self-knowledge required for autonomous, or ethically required, action. For this to happen, he claims, it is necessary to recognise the status of Kantian Moralität as a form of Sittlichkeit or social practice. This would justify our practices without an appeal to a ‘fact of reason’ and also allow a wider range of actions that could count as autonomous.

Oaths, Promises, and Compulsory Duties: Kant's Response to Mendelssohn's Jerusalem.

This article argues that Kant's essay on enlightenment responds to Moses Mendelssohn's defense of the freedom of conscience in Jerusalem. While Mendelssohn holds that the freedom of conscience as an inalienable right, Kant argues that the use of one's reason may be constrained by oaths. Kant calls such a constrained use of reason the private use of reason. While he also defends the unconditional freedom of the public use of reason, Kant believes that one makes oneself a part of the machinery of the church or state by swearing an oath to and assuming a position within those institutions.

Kant and the Aesthetic Norms of Political Persuasion

In this presentation I want to explore the possibility that there is a worthwhile model of political judgment in Kant’s account of the ways we talk — or better, “quarrel” — about beauty. While a coupling of political and aesthetic theory initially appears as rather odd bedfellows, a line of thinkers including Hannah Arendt has found the intellectual resources and reflective framework or the political philosophy which Kant never wrote in the aesthetics of the Critique of Judgment. In an overlooked passaged of that “third Critique”, Kant suggests that there is a specifiable domain of rational discourse appropriate for aesthetic judgments. Kant calls this particular kind of communicative act “streiten”, which is fairly translated as “quarreling”; but the words “streiten” and “Streit” also connote a fight in the sense of a heated argument or even a brawl — the kind of thing to which one resorts when rational, discursive, and diplomatic procedures to resolve a dispute come up short but when the issue at hand is too important to remain unsettled. Unlike the anomie of a free-for-all, however, Kant clearly wants to distinguish streiten from the brute imposition of superior force. In other words, Kant intends the Streit to operate within a distinctively normative arena. The question is whether marking out the normative space in which aesthetic quarrels take place provides any insight into the conditions and possibilities of political discourse.

Grace and favor in Kant’s ethical explication of religion

This paper discusses Kant’s assessment of the religious idea of grace in relation to autonomous ethical practice. Following Kant’s own explanation of his methods and goals in interpreting religious ideas, my focus is on the ethical import of inherited religious concepts for human beings, rather than on literal theological dogmas concerning supernatural matters. I focus on how Kant’s inquiry into the ethical significance of the idea of grace is intertwined with another less recognized concept, that of favor (Gunst). The latter concept plays a crucial role in understanding Kant’s analyses, because it establishes a criterion by which to adjudicate historically-formed ideas of grace. Insofar as grace is understood in ways that assimilate it to endeavors to win favor, it works against our capacity to follow the moral law. On the constructive side, insofar as the concept of grace is understood to support ethical practice based on the moral law, it can be a vehicle for what Kant calls rational religion. This two-sided analysis of grace is a key component of the project of the Religion and other related writings, wherein Kant offers both critical and constructive investigations of historically-formed religious ideas found in scripture, ecclesiastical institutions and other sources.

O projeto kantiano de valores: moral, política e direito

This article analyzes Kant’s theoretical foundations, which represent his moral theory, in order to understand concepts and aspects that are determining for the realms of politics and law. Freedom, autonomy and practical reason are categories that make it possible to grasp the influence of morals on legal and political phenomena. The role of moral principles is to provide universal action rules for all rational individuals regardless of their particular inclinations in the realms of what Kant calls “external” freedom.Keywords: moral theory, freedom, practical reason, law, politics.

The Idea of an Ethical Community

“Ethical life” is Hegel’s term for the actuality of what Kant calls an “ethical community.” As members of the same ethical community, human beings are related to one another as persons in and only in acting from nothing but respect for the same practical law. Kant and Hegel both take ethical life to be a necessary, nay, the highest, end of pure reason. I argue that this is correct. And I identify the idea of ethical life with the idea of a peculiar form of love. Kant and Hegel disagree—in a curiously reciprocal fashion—about the reach of ethical life and about our capacity to know it to reside within our power: while Kant identifies ethical life with the actuality of the ethical community of all possible human (or rational) beings, Hegel holds that it is necessarily limited to some particular body politic; and while Hegel thinks that to be a human being is to self-knowingly co-constitute an ethical community, Kant believes that it is to be unable to know oneself to even be apt for this. With Hegel and against Kant, I argue that the only way to have the idea of ethical life is to live it. But with Kant and against a naive form of Hegelianism, I argue that to be conscious of oneself as a human being, a practically rational animal, is to be conscious of oneself as morally evil, i.e. as actively prone to deeming one’s own particularity the supreme law. I show that this entails Hegelian particularism. And I end by noting that this saddles the Hegelian with the task of demonstrating that ethical particularization belongs to the very idea of pure reason itself, objectively conceived.

Manifold, Intuition, and Synthesis in Kant and Husserl

The problem of ‘collective unity’ in the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Husserl is investigated on the basis of number’s exemplary ‘collective unity’. To this end, the investigation reconstructs the historical context of the conceptuality of the mathematics that informs Kant’s and Husserl’s accounts of manifold, intuition, and synthesis. On the basis of this reconstruction, the argument is advanced that the unity of number – not the unity of the ‘concept’ of number – is presupposed by each transcendental philosopher in their accounts of the transcendental foundation of manifold, intuition, and synthesis. This presupposition is ultimately traced to Kant’s and Husserl’s responses to Hume’s philosophy of human understanding and the critical limits of what Kant calls the ‘qualitative’ unity of transcendental consciousness. These critical limits are exposed in both philosophers’ attempts to account for that ‘qualitative’ unity on the basis of the ‘quantitative’ unity of number.

Duty, Kant, and Deontology

Kant, like Bentham, was an Enlightenment man. Morals must come not from authority or tradition, not from religious commands, but from reason. Kant also thought he had it sorted. The funny thing is that his answers were almost the opposite of Bentham’s. Kant started not with pain and pleasure but rather with the fact that mankind’s distinguishing feature is our possession of reason. Therefore, it follows that all humans have universal rational duties to one another, centring on their duty to respect the other’s humanity. To Kant, all humans must be seen as inherently worthy of respect and dignity. He argued that all morality must stem from such duties: a duty based on a deontological ethic. Consequences such as pain or pleasure are irrelevant. (Well, he was German). To Kant some duties are absolute. These are the obligations to do certain types of actions. Kant calls this general type of obligation a categorical imperative, that …

A DAOIST MODEL FOR A KANTIAN CHURCH

Although significant differences undoubtedly exist between Daoism and Kant’s philosophy, the two systems also have some noteworthy similarities. After calling attention to a few such parallels and sketching the outlines of Kant’s philosophy of religion, this article focuses on an often-neglected feature of the latter: the four guiding principles of what Kant calls an “invisible church” (universality, purity, freedom, and unchangeableness). Numerous passages from Lao Zi’s classic text, Dao-De-Jing, seem to uphold these same principles, thus suggesting that they can also be interpreted as core features of a Daoist philosophy of life. A crucial difference, however, is that members of a Daoist church would focus on contentment, whereas Kantian churches modeled on Christianity (the religious tradition Kant favored) would strive for perfection. The article therefore concludes by considering what a synthesis might look like, if a Kantian church were to be based on a Daoist interpretation of these four fundamental principles.

Duties of Love and Self-Perfection: Moses Mendelssohn's Theory of Contract

In his Doctrine of Right, Immanuel Kant calls Moses Mendelssohn, the towering figure of the German and the Jewish Enlightenment, a ‘Rechtsforscher’ – a legal scholar. Yet not only Kant, but numerous scholars of natural law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, refer to and reflect on the juridical aspects of Mendelssohn’s work, in particular his thoughts on the law of contract. In this paper, I hope to shed some light on this hitherto rather unexplored facet of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre. Mendelssohn develops his theory of contract from the starting point of the officium amoris: the unenforceable ‘duty of love’ to exercise beneficence. Mendelssohn’s theory knows nothing yet of the modern contrast between altruism, distributive justice, and ‘freedom of contract'. By exploring Mendelssohn’s theory, we will, thus, be able to catch a glimpse of the birth pangs of the modern Western discourse on the ‘freedom of contract', which formed the backdrop, as well as the jumping-off point, of the development of a ‘liberal’ will theory of contract. Since this ‘liberal’ model is still the paradigm of how contract is mostly perceived today, Mendelssohn’s theory also exemplifies the possibility of an alternative to our own conceptualizations of contract that inescapably shape the way we think.

Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy Mark Kingwell (bio) Arthur Ripstein. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Harvard University Press. 2009. xiii, 399. $49.95 Immanuel Kant did not hold with giving money to beggars on the street but not because, like some of us, he resented the intrusion on his sidewalk reverie or the random claim on his wallet. It was, instead, for reasons that lie at the heart of his complex and fascinating political theory, the subject of Ripstein’s fine new book. The panhandler, Kant argued, is attempting to annex a bit of public space – the rightful passageway of the street – for his private purposes. (Try using that reasoning the next time you feel uncomfortable digging for a dollar as a scrawny tattooed tramp applies his squeegee to your windshield.) Kant also believed, however, that the state has a rightful duty to alleviate the suffering of the poor, since poverty as such is a threat to their freedom and dignity. On these issues Kant thus emerges as a figure not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge; or rather, Scrooge shows himself an untutored Kantian. When Scrooge demands, in the face of importunate pleas for individual charity, ‘Are there no workhouses?,’ Scrooge is making a version of just this distinction between public and private right. Private charity saddles the poor with a dependent condition that is not far from slavery, since it relies upon the variable interests of other individuals and so robs the receiver of independence. Scrooge’s parallel query, meanwhile – ‘Are there no prisons?’ – pulls in a different direction. In Kant’s view, prisons are retributive and deterrent mechanisms for restoring the primacy of right when it has been breached. A crime is wrong not because it causes damage – something which may or may not be true – but because it stands as a private exemption from the authority of public law. Ripstein does not mention Scrooge in his elegant and persuasive account, and if you count that a flaw – I don’t, since it means I can do the mentioning here – then it is one of the few scuffs on an otherwise unblemished book. Ripstein’s aim in this study is twofold: (a) to set out Kant’s legal and political theory in a way that demonstrates its unity; and (b) to bring this theory into contact with contemporary debates among political theorists. The second aim may seem without motive to those who recall only Rawls’s or Habermas’s ‘Kantian’ influence, but Ripstein demonstrates that the richness – and sometimes peculiarity – of Kant’s actual views is not always evident in these influential descendants. He shows that Kant’s political thinking is not, as many suppose, a derivation or simple application at the social level of his moral theory. [End Page 668] The social order is not an elaboration or extension of the familiar categorical imperative, even in its ‘kingdom of ends’ version; instead, the social order is grounded in what Kant calls the ‘universal doctrine of right,’ namely that no person shall be rightfully dominated by another. The freedom of persons, not their wealth or well-being or desires or interests, is the mark of the rightful order. This is why, for example, slavery is always wrong even if the slaves are treated well and why one cannot enter into slavery rightfully. It is also why the demand at the heart of Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy – ‘Let right be done!,’ indicating the state’s consent to a legitimate citizen claim against it – is precisely in the Kantian spirit. Showing the private and public rights that in turn can be derived from the universal doctrine of right is the main business of the book’s central chapters. Along the way, Ripstein illuminates not only Kant’s distinctive views but also his enduring relevance to current discourse. Consider private property. On one standard view, John Locke’s (more or less), something becomes property when I ‘mix my labour’ with the natural world and leave ‘enough and as good’ for others. Kant notes that this mysterious change in the matter of the world is incoherent. Property is partly based on a...