Kant Calls Research Articles

POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE: UNDERSTANDING KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the Critique advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it transcendental and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation. Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses the themes and passages in the Critique that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit refutations of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the Critique changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first.

Kant's Cosmopolitan Law: World Citizenship for a Global Order

In debates over the conditions for a just world order, one hears frequent appeals to Kant's call for states to unite in a federation. Given the force of Kant's arguments and their influence on the shape of such institutions as the League of Nations and the United Nations, this is certainly justified. But an essential part of what Kant saw as necessary for a global legal order is usually neglected. What is overlooked is Kant's emphasis on the status of individuals under what he calls ‘cosmopolitan law’. Cosmopolitan law is concerned not with the interaction between states, but with the status of individuals in their dealings with states of which they are not citizens. Moreover, it is concerned with the status of individuals as human beings, rather than as citizens of states. In Kant's political theory, cosmopolitan law (Weltbürgerrecht) is the third category of public law, in addition to constitutional law and international law. Its core is what Kant calls a right to hospitality. He argues that states and individuals have the right to attempt to establish relations with other states and their citizens, but not a right to enter foreign territory. States have the right to refuse visitors, but not violently, and not if it leads to their destruction. This implies an obligation to refrain from imperialist intrusions and to provide safe haven for refugees.

Pleasure and Fit in Kant's Aesthetics

In the third Critique Kant shifts the focus in his enquiry from the status of factual statements in the Critique of Pure Reason and the grounding of moral imperatives in the Critique of Practical Reason to investigating two methods of considering the world which go beyond the strictly verifiable. This is a move from evaluating the interplay of a ‘determinate’ set of facts and intellectual preconditions to forming what Kant calls ‘reflective’ judgements on these facts. There are two major questions which the Critique of Judgement tackles. On the one hand Kant ambitiously considers how we might properly interpret a set of facts as comprising a larger teleological system and, on the other hand, he is interested in the seemingly quite separate issue of the appreciation of objects as beautiful. It is this latter issue which shall concern us here. Consistent with the reflective stand in the third Critique, Kant argues from the very outset that beauty is not an empirical concept with which we might describe the world. Beauty is not objective in the sense that size, colour or weight might be. Objective properties of this kind belong to the world of scientific understanding. Instead, he holds that judgements of aesthetic merit should be based upon the subjective pleasure we take in experiencing works of art and natural objects.

The Obligation of Judgment

According to Kant, the practical employment of reason shares with its speculative employment the characteristic feature that in using it we orient ourselves by an idea that lies beyond the conditions of experience. It is an idea of something unconditioned that transcends the conditions of knowledge in general. Rightly considered, however, only in the practical employment of reason does the use of an idea that brings us "to tear down" the boundaries of experience assume its real "importance."' The reason for this, according to Kant, is that only practical reason has an "unconditional" need for such an idea, whereas speculative reason does not.2 Kant calls the need for such an idea "unconditional" because a practical judgment is understood to be one that reason does not merely wish to pass, but must pass. Whether to pass this sort of judgment is not up to us to determine; we are, rather, obliged to do so. My essay deals with this necessity of passing practical judgments, which I will try to clarify. To begin, I will distinguish two different interpretations of this necessity: a metaphysical interpretation formulated by Kant, and a performative interpretation that Derrida, in particular, develops in his critical reading of Kant. I will defend Derrida's performative interpretation by showing that the metaphysical interpretation of the necessity in question attempts to establish it in an unsatisfactory manner, and actually cannot establish it at all. Reason, according to Kant, is similar to the understanding in being a power of synthesis; though whereas the understanding synthesizes intuitions under concepts, reason brings all our knowledge into a systematic unity. Reason effects this unity when it is guided by principles which Kant calls "transcendental ideas," ideas projected by reason so that it may fulfill its function of performing the synthesis. Transcendental ideas are principles by whose application we move beyond the limits of possible experience, and which "incite us to tear down all those boundary-fences,"3 They are ideas that reason "needs" in order to do its job, because it is solely by means of them that reason can obtain the possibility of orienting itself whenever it seeks to expand its sphere beyond the limits of experience, and tries to move within a space wherein sensible objects are no longer to be found, a space emptied of them.4 Yet the reality of these ideas can never be recognized by finite beings like ourselves, as "they are in no wise intended for use in experience."5 It is inconceivable, therefore, that within the bounds of our experience there could ever be a sensible object that would be "adequate," that is, would correspond to an idea of reason. In consequence, transcendental ideas never allow of any constitutive employment as supplying concepts of empirical objects, but have merely "an excellent, and indeed indispensably necessary, regulative employment, namely, that of directing the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection."6 Kant identifies precisely two kinds of judgment in which we use a transcendental idea: theoretical-speculative judgments and practical judgments. In the judgments they make, both speculative and practical reason require transcendental ideas. However, since they differ in their manner of employing such ideas, according to Kant, they are not entitled to defend in the same way their assertions of the reality of the transcendental ideas they each employ. With regard to disputes arising in the theoretical-speculative domain, writes Kant, reason's right to defend the claim of the reality of a transcendental idea is a limited one, permissible only when such a defense is required to fulfill a polemical purpose. Defense of the claim in polemical fashion (as distinguished from a dogmatic defense) aims to show that an opponent who denies the reality of the idea in question, and attempts to render the denial convincing and certain, fails to do so--and to show that his failure is at least as great as one's own when one asserts the contrary. …

Kant and the Problem of Simultaneous Causation

The argument of Kant's Second Analogy provides only for causal connections between successive appearances, but, as Kant himself immediately notes, in many cases cause and effect are simultaneous. This essay examines Kant's solution to the resulting problem of simultaneous causation. I argue that there are, in fact, at least two distinct problems falling together under the rubric 'simultaneous causation', both reflecting significant features of paradigmatic causal-explanatory scenarios within Newtonian mechanics - a problem about the 'persisting simultaneity' of a continuous or sustaining cause with its effect, and a problem about the 'instantaneous simultaneity' of what Kant calls the causality of a cause with the onset of its effect. An exploration of the ingenious conceptual resources which Kant brings to bear on these problems turns out to yield interesting and important insights regarding his philosophy of mathematics as well.

A Short Story About Reason

What follows is an attempt to narrate a story that might help put . . . [a] criticism of philosophy in perspective... Jurgen Habermas We have put her living in the tomb! . . . yet I dared not-I dared not speak! Edgar Allan Poe This is a story that emerges from the space between two other stories, one by Jurgen Habermas, the other by Edgar Allan Poe. In a certain sense it is a story concerned with identifying the dangers of a rationality that goes beyond its rightful place. By seeking to explore the limits of reason, it positions itself alongside contemporary end-of-philosophy debates.1 Within these debates there are voices claiming that there is something not quite right with philosophy. That it is moribund, dying. Perhaps that it is dead. The great totalizing philosophers of the past have gone and with them, presumably, any chance to philosophize in the traditional mode. Something stinks and it is left to us, they say, to discover the cause. While these voices attempt to diagnose and ultimately treat the feeble condition of philosophy in the modern world it is more than curious, at least to me, that they leave certain things unsaid. Philosophers, whether they paradoxically denounce the possibility of continuing their trade, or more modestly suggest alternative ways of proceeding, seem to share a common inability to diagnose a silence that lies at the center of the philosophical process. It is toward this silence, this unvoiced disquiet that troubles the very philosophy that attempts nonetheless to conceal it, that my own story eventually gestures. And I believe that it is of no small consequence that in the process of so doing I discover literature as the place where philosophy's silence is momentarily, if somewhat enigmatically, spoken. Part One: In Which the Anxieties are Phrased In Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter, Habermas sets the scene with his discussion of the contemporary state of philosophical reasoning. Here he contends that to understand either the present or future possibilities of philosophy we must first grasp the significance of the decline of the Kantian edifice. But what does this mean? Kant, he argues, sets philosophy the wholly undesirable role as the highest arbiter of culture. In so doing he creates what Habermas identifies as two problems for philosophy. Firstly, Kant's foundationalism positions philosophy prior to the sciences by insisting on a cognition that precedes cognition. The effect of this is to have philosophy lord it over the sciences by staking claim to a domain that is seen to be exclusively its own. Historically, Kantian philosophy marks the birth of a new mode of justification... What Kant calls transcendental is an inquiry into the a priori conditions of what makes experience possible... The first job for the philosopher, then, is to analyze the concepts of objects as we always already intuitively use them.... In so doing he redefined the task, or vocation if you like, of philosophy in a more demanding way... Kantian philosophy sets up a domain between itself and the sciences, arrogating authority to itself. It wants to clarify the foundations of the sciences once and for all, defining the limits of what can and cannot be experienced. This is tantamount to an act of ushering the sciences to their proper place.2 Here Habermas identifies Kant's desire to position philosophy as usher, as the one who rightfully indicates the positions and possibilities the sciences might hold. The metaphor of the usher is a pervasive and somewhat intriguing one in Kant's writing, and one that I shall return to time and time again in the space of this essay. For the moment, though, let us turn to the second of the problems Habermas comments upon. Kant's refusal to confine his insights to the domain of epistemology is demonstrated in the division or differentiation that his notion of reason undergoes. Against the more substantive reason of traditional metaphysics he offers a structure that is differentiated into the three moments of practical reason, judgment, and theoretical cognition. …

Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Material Conditions of Possible Experience

For both methodological and substantive reasons Hegel owes us a thorough internal critique of Kant's transcendental idealism. He did not, however, set one out. I have become convinced, however, that Hegel's reading and re-thinking of Kant during his years in Jena is far more thorough and insightful than has generally been recognized, and that he was clearly aware of some very important main lines of internal criticism to which Kant's philosophy is subject.Here I want to develop one case of an obliquely indicated but nevertheless sound objection Hegel makes to Kant's transcendental idealism. The issue concerns what Kant calls the “transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition.” This phrase denotes the necessary degree of regularity among the content of empirical intuitions such that we are both able and stimulated to comprehend that content under our general concepts and categories in empirical judgments. Kant is quite clear that this is a transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. It is also a formal condition, since it concerns the ordering of something, in this case, of the contents of empirical intuitions. Kant contends that transcendental idealism, and it alone, can account for the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. Against Kant, I shall contend that transcendental idealism cannot account at all for the occurrence of the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. Before turning to some of the details of Kant's views, I shall show that this problem is very much on Hegel's mind in Jena. Afterward I shall show that understanding Hegel's concern about Kant's views on the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition sheds light on some of Hegel's otherwise rather puzzling claims and aims.

Interface: Modernity and Post-Modernity

Both Immanuel Kant and Jean-Francois Lyotard explore the nature of enthusiasm and provide diverse interpretations as to its political relevance. Kant offers his readers modernist view confirming the possibility of genuinely moral human tendency towards improvement as concretized in the external, objective, and disinterested sign of the French Revolution- political enthusiasm. Lyotard, on the other hand, presents postmodernist view negating the possibility of any objective proof of such human tendency, thereby relegating enthusiasm to an irrational enterprise inspired by merely subjective sentimentality or affect-ed dementia. Enthusiasm is passively amoral, as it can be affected by wide array of emotions ultimately resulting, in some cases, in the eruption of violence and hatred. This essay will have as its focus critical reading of both philosophers' positions, and will endeavor to show that Lyotard's rereading of Kant eschews the distinction between aesthetics and politics by collapsing the analogous relation between aesthetics and politics into one of identity, thereby rendering Kant's vision of genuine political enthusiasm too sentimental and too affected. In his The Contest of the Faculties, Immanuel Kant examines the question of the human race, as whole, is continually (1) In order to answer his question, Kant realizes that he must posit certain proof for his assertion. He dismisses the appeal to the prophets or predictors of the future as guaranteeing the future continued improvement of the human race (non singulorum sed universorum ). Kant hypothesizes and says that we can appeal to predictions and prophets; however such an enterprise can never guarantee positive answer to the question of whether the human race is improving: We can obtain prophetic historical narrative of things to come by depicting those events whose priori possibility suggests that they will in fact happen. But how is it possible to have priori? The answer is that it is possible if the prophet himself occasions and produces the events he predicts.(2) The only way we can plausibly believe the prophets and their a priori history is if the prophets themselves author and concretely realize their own self-made predictions in which case the predictions become limited in scope, contrived, and therefore hardly predictions of future events. If everything is predicted, and therefore pre-ordained, then there is no possibility for the exercise of human freedom, which is essentially what characterizes the human subject as human. Extending his notion of the prophet to both politicians and divines, Kant severely reprimands the practices of both groups accusing them of making such self-fulfilling prophecies, thereby reducing their respective followers to mediocre and limited state.(3) In sum, the prophets are limited at best and, hence, not reliable source upon which we can base any possible future evidence that might confirm our original hypothesis concerning the progress of the human race. Kant goes on to list three possible modes in which we can view human First, we can view it as constantly declining and regressing. Kant calls this view the terrorist conception of human history. Such view is not tenable for Kant, as a process of deterioration cannot go on indefinitely, for mankind would wear itself out after certain point had been reached.(4) Second, there is the eudaimonistic view of human In this view, mankind is constantly progressing and improving. Here Kant's realism is striking, for he recognizes the limited capacities of mankind and that to speak of constant improvement without some setbacks is idealistic and simply not in accord with the concrete experience of the human person as finitude capable of good and evil: After all, no effects can exceed the capacity of their effective cause; and the quantity of goodness in man must therefore remain below certain level in proportion to the amount of evil with which it is intermixed, so that man cannot work his way beyond given limit and go on improving further. …

Kant's Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 145 Salim Kemal. Kant's Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 197. Cloth, NP. In this relatively short book Kemal provides a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to Kant's aesthetic theory. The topics discussed include Kant's rejection of empiricist and rationalist theories, the four moments of the "Analytic of the Beautiful," the deduction or justification of judgments of taste, and the context of Kant's aesthetic theory. FoLlowing his account of Kant's deduction, Kemal provides a survey of other commentaries. A bibliographical note refers to more extensive bibliographies. The striking contrast between the tightly structured "Analytic of the Beautiful" and the rest of the "Critique of AestheticJudgment" virtuallydetermines the course of a commentary . It must give an account of Kant's deduction ofjudgments of taste and of the relevance to Kant's theory of a number of topics subsequendy introduced, e.g., the relation of natural beauty and fine art and the interest attached tojudgments of taste. The problem of the deduction is pervasive. Since Kant there relies upon two logical peculiarities ofjudgments of taste disclosed by his analysis, a commentator's handling of it will be reflected in his interpretation of the "Analytic." His decision as to where the deduction ends will influence the relevance he finds in the various topics later introduced. Given the single-minded thrust of Kemars commentary, the reader is well prepared for his handling of the deduction and for his treatment of natural beauty and fine art. Kemars position is that in Section 3o, "Deduction of Judgments of Taste," Kant is concerned only with the transcendental possibility of such judgments. In apparently reopening the question of their justification, his concern is, instead, with successfully making actual judgments of taste. Kemal's position is reflected in his treatment of two crucial issues. As for the sensu~ communis on which judgments of taste are based, he finds Kant progressing through three senses of the term, ending with that of an ideal norm. As for the question of whether pleasure precedes the activity of judging or the reverse, the answer to which Kant calls "the key" to the critique of taste, Kemal maintains that the activity of judging involves a double process of reflection, the first estimating an object that occasions pleasure, the second estimating that one's state of mind is communicable. This second reflection, on the origin of one's pleasure, is fallible and can only be confirmed by the agreement of others. In anticipation, Kemal maintains that the "disinterest" of the first moment does not exclude all concepts, but only the determinate concepts that would serve to identify objects. Kant, admittedly, reserves his discussion of the expressiveness of beautiful objects (or aesthetic ideas), but formalists and New Critics have distorted his position. Although the expressiveness of beautiful natural objects is said to parallel that of fine art, the only idea expressed there is, apparently, that of "the finality of nature." Kemars interest is primarily in art and the sort of communication made possible by it. Throughout the first three moments, his stress on the activity of judging and its putative communicability is intended to make the object peripheral. The objectjudged beautiful comes into play in the fourth moment, having to do with the necessity of judgments of taste. Here Kemal distinguishes between a postulated and fallible "subjective necessity" or universalizability and the "objective necessity" of actual judgments of ~46 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:1 JANUARY 199 4 taste, in which the subject goes beyond expecting the agreement of others and, knowing that he has made a judgment of taste, demands their agreement. Since judgments of taste lack logical or evidential necessity one subject can confirm that he has in fact made such ajudgment only by getting another to feel the pleasure he has experienced, and this he can do by pointing to features of the work. In order to provide a noncircular account of the demand for agreement, Kant looks to the necessity of making judgments of taste. He needs a reason, extrinsic to taste itself, for the importance of making such judgments, which he finds in their relation to...

The Nature of the Subject: "Judgment" and the Law of Specification in Kant's "Critique of Judgment"

KANT'S Critique of Judgment is not about objects?beautiful or other wise?but about the judging subject. I would like to make two points about the reflexive relation between nature and the subject ?that is, the judging subject?based on paragraphs six and seven of Section V from the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment. The first point concerns Kant's use of the term Urteil, or and related terms. The sec ond point concerns the law of specification, and what Kant calls the gl?ck licher Zufall, or fortunate coincidence, between nature and the subject. One way to investigate the relation between nature and the subject is to look closely at the term since judgment is the activity that brings nature and the subject together. As someone from one of the philo logical disciplines, I tend to answer the question, What is judgment? by asking, What does the word 'judgment' mean? ?more precisely, what might we learn by examining the German word Urteilskraft? I'm not suggesting that German words have a mystical quality that makes Kant's meaning clear to anyone who reads the German original. But there does seem to me to be a danger in the increasingly common practice of reading texts only in translation, or in summaries of translations. The word Urteilskraft, or judgment, is itself very important. It marks the transition between Kant's first two Critiques of the human faculties, namely the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason, and the third Critique, that of Judgment. It is important to understand all we can about the difference between reason and judgment ?beginning with the words themselves. The philological inquiry that follows examines how Kant's words are bound up with Kant's argument; and for such a project, we must briefly return to the German. The word Urteil has the same legal connotations as the English word judgment; and I am not the first to remark that an entire juridical vocabulary is here employed by Kant: words like law, domain,

Autonomy and Integrity in Kant’s Aesthetics

That the imagination should be both free and yet of itself conformable to law, that is, that it should carry autonomy with it, is a contradiction.1 So Kant writes to express as a paradox the epistemological problem that the feel ing on which an aesthetic judgment is based must be free of the constraint provided by determinate concepts, for otherwise there will be no reason why it should be pleasurable, yet must also be subject to some kind of rule, for otherwise the claim of universal validity which this judgment asserts will be irrational. And so understood, the remark is entirely rhetorical, for it is the express purpose of Kant's main argument in the Critique of Aesthetic Judg ment to show that this conception of the judgment of taste is coherent rather than contradictory. But taken from its intended context, the remark need not be rhetorical, for it can be seen as an expression of competing demands for aesthetic integrity, or demands for individual freedom and social agreement in the creation and reception of art which, unlike the two epistemological constraints on aesthetic judgment, cannot be simultaneously satisfied but which instead introduce a permanent source of instability into the history of art and taste. Indeed, it is even fitting that Kant's remark has to be taken out of context to be given this interpretation, for although Kant lays the theoretical basis for such a picture of art history he also tries to suppress its consequence and to avert the destruction of the eighteenth-century ideal of aesthetic stability which is its inevitable outcome. The tension which must arise on Kant's theory of taste may be seen as one between two competing demands for aesthetic integrity precisely because the concept of integrity has two distinct senses. On the one hand, it connotes a property of individual action or character: individual agency possesses in tegrity when it is determined independently of anything except principles free ly chosen by the agent but steadfastly by those principles. In a word, integrity in this sense is what Kant calls autonomy. On the other hand, the concept of integrity also has a sense in which it connotes not so much the autonomy of individual agency as the unity, coherence, or completeness of a whole such as an organism or an organization. It is in this sense of the term that a bridge, for instance, might be said to possess structural integrity.2 Kant has included in his theory of taste demands for integrity in each of these senses. In his ac

The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy

"The great merit of Paton's book is that it sets aside altogether the conventional criticisms of Kant's ethics and calls upon the reader to study Kant's own statements."--H. Barker, Mind "A memorable volume, which comes as near a classical exposit

Causality and retribution

F WE are to accept the results of modern physics and the significance ascribed to them by eminent / _-i xexponents of this most exact of all natural sciences, we are in the midst of an important transformation of our conception of the universe. The notion that the law of causality absolutely determines all events has been shaken, and if this law is not to be entirely eliminated from scientific thinking, its formulation must at least be essentially modified. In the course of this controversy the question arises as to the source of the belief that events are determined by an absolute law, that is, the origin of the assumption, which we take for granted, that each event must be the necessary effect of a cause according to an inviolable law. We must try to show how the belief in causality has arisen in the evolution of human thought. We are here assuming that causality is not a form of thought with which human consciousness is endowed by natural necessity, what Kant calls an innate notion, but that there were periods in the history of human thought when men did not think causally. We are also assuming that the law of causality as a principle of scientific thought first appears at a relatively high level of mental development. Indeed, the conception of causality is thoroughly foreign to the thinking of contemporary primitive peoples who interpret nature according to social categories rather than causality. For primitive man there is no such thing as "nature" in