Kant's Thinking Research Articles

The Ambiguous Revolution: Kant on the Nature of Faith

Kant, it has been said, brought a ‘Copernican Revolution’ to religion and theology no less so than he did to physics. According to Karl Barth, for example, Kant's theology diverges radically from tradition. While rejecting the traditional proofs as foundation for a knowledge of God (his existence, etc.) as wholly inadequate, he, nevertheless, remained a theist. Unwilling to believe in God in the absence of good reasons for doing so, however, he offered an alternative justification for such belief. Religious belief, he insists, is based on practical considerations rather than on theoretical ones. Kant, therefore, did not consider it as necessarily irrational to hold a thing as true even though it be a theoretically insufficient holding to be true. According to him it is simply that in such a case the belief that ‘something’ is true does not constitute knowledge. And it is this displacement of knowledge in the religious sphere by faith that essentially constitutes the revolutionary change in theology.Contrary to this generally accepted view of Kant's thought, I shall in this paper argue the essentially unrevolutionary character of his understanding of theology. There is, I shall maintain, a basic continuity in Kant's thoughts on religion with the theologies of the past. The faith of which Kant speaks, I shall attempt to show, is a cognitive faith—a source of beliefs that can quite legitimately, even if only in a weak sense, be referred to as religious knowledge. His theology, therefore, is, like the theology of his predecessors, ultimately an inferential knowledge of the divine.

Three Christian Transcendentalists: James Marsh, Caleb Sprague Henry, Frederic Henry Hedge (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 561 Proceedings el the Third International Kant Congress. Edited by Lewis White Beck. (New York: The Humanities Press, 1972. Pp. xi + 718. $50) The Origins o! Kant's Arguments in the Antinomies. By Sadik J. AI-Azm. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972. Pp. 156. $9.50) The Beck-edited Proceedings contain all the papers read at the Kant Congress held at the University of Rochester, March 30-April 4, 1970, and brief abstracts of papers read at concurrent sessions as well. An Index of names and of subject matter completes the whole. The papers cover a variety of subiects, ranging, for example, from a "Kant-Bibliographic " of almost 500 titles of books and articles published during the five-year period 1965-1969, to "B 132 Revisited" which deals with the problem of Kant's statement that "it must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my presentations"; from "Kant and Anglo-Saxon Criticism" to "The Meaning of 'Space' in Kant"; from "Nietzsches Kantkritik" to "Kant and Hobbes Concerning the Foundations of Political Philosophy"; from "Statement and Argument in Kant's Language" to " 'Intuition' in the Pre-Critical Writings of Kant"; from "Noumenal Causality" to "'The Copernican Revolution in Hume and Kant"; from "La 'Position' Structurale d'Existence" to "Non-Pure Synthetic A Priori Judgments in the 'Critique of Pure Reason'." It is, of course, impossible to give here the titles of all 75 papers. The few given at random suffice, I am sure, to convey at least some idea of the great variety of topics covered. As is inevitable, the papers presented at the Congress vary in quality and/or in general interest. However, Kant scholars will find here suggestive new approaches to old problems as well as stimulating new perspectives on the whole of Kant's thinking. A1-Azm's slender volume serves well as a corrective to some of Norman Kemp Smith's frequently misleading views concerning crucial aspects of Kant's first Critique. The author shows convincingly that all four antinomies reflect Kant's response to the arguments and positions taken by Leibniz and Clarke in their famous exchange of letters relative to the meaning and the justification of Newtonian mechanics. Seen in this perspective, the antinomies--and especially the first two---constitute a bridge that leads from Kant's essay of 1768: "On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space" (in which the Sage of K~Snigsberg completely accepted Newtonian atomism) to Chapter II of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations o/ Natural Science of 1786 (in which Kant abandons atomism and gives a radically non-Newtonian interpretation of what it means to occupy space). Although A1-Azm does not make this point, his clear and convincing interpretation of the Kantian antinomies implicitly establishes it. W. H. WERK~EISTER Florida State University Three Christian Transcendentalists: James Marsh, Caleb Sprague Henry, Frederic Henry Hedge. By Ronald Vale Wells. (New York: Octagon Books, 1972. Pp. xxxiv + 290. $13.50) An extension of a volume first published by the Columbia University Press in 1943. This volume is much more than a new edition of a 1943 publication. It embodies a substantial amount of new, unpublished material on Marsh and C. S. Henry. It now explains dearly the philosophical and religious differences between the "Boston" transcendentalism of Hedge (and the romantic Unitarians around Emerson) and the "Vermont " spiritualism of Marsh. Marsh emerges in this history by Ronald Wells as a leader of the philosophical 562 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Edwardians or New Lights. The long Preliminary Essay in his edition (1829) of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection was a challenge to what he called the reigning metaphysics of Locke and Brown--to the "natural" religion of the Unitarians as well as to the "Common Sense" of the Old Side, Calvinist theologians at Andover Seminary. The "higher principles" of Coleridge's radical distinction between the "spiritual life" and the "natural life" in man, between the intuitive reason and the discursive understanding, was accepted as a philosophical theology for "experimental or spiritual" evangelical Christianity. Marsh wanted to add to his edition of Coleridge a translation of the writings of his favorite German philosopher, F. G. Tholuck, the leader...

Internal Structure in Kant's Thought

Internal Structure in Kant's Thought

Lectures on the Essence of Religion, and: The Essence of Faith According to Luther (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 101 the elements of all our cognition," and, "though all our knowledge begins with experience , it does not follow that it all arises out of experience." The senses contribute the "matter" of experience, but it is the understanding that makes "the representation of an object possible at all." Kant speaks vaguely of experience as "a synthetic combination of intuitions." The thrust of his argument is that "experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions." It is "constitutive," however, only when "informed" through sense perceptions. So far Kant has identified experience with the particulars of sense perception. But there is another interpretation in the first Critique. As Kant puts it, there is "only one experience in which all perceptions are represented as in one thorough-going context according to law." In this sense, the term 'experience' can be used only in the singular: No matter how many perceptions may be "given," their interconnections occur only in one and the same experience. But this thesis of the singularity of experience is rather strange in light of Kant's initial position. Still, he explains it as the "totality concept" and the "context" of all perceptions. Kant's favorite expression is "field of experience" (CPR, B 13); and in this sense experience is the ground which supports the progress in human cognition. He who proceeds on this basis is "in the world." Kant himself formulates the principle of the unity of experience as the exclusion of everything that destroys the unity of the form of experience. The context of the perceptual objects is complete, thanks to the principle of causality; and this principle is constitutive of nature. Kant thus states that "nature is the one and only all-inclusive experience taken as the totality and the context of appearances." Nature is thus conceived as nothing other than the all-inclusive concept and context of a singular experience. It follows that a sphere beyond experience in this sense is conceivable but not knowable. The idea of an absolute whole of appearances is inherently contradictory; for the whole itself is not given, but given as a task. That is to say, it is a regulative idea of experience. Part IV of Holzhey's book is concerned primarily with problems of a philosophical anthropology and adds nothing of significance to the arguments already presented. The author does not take into consideration the arguments of the Opus postumum. But it is clear from what has been presented that the development of Kant's thinking, as related to the problem of experience, moves from an essentially Humean position to something radically different. The book under review gives us a step by step progression of this development and thus places our interpretation of Kant's transcendentalism in a new light. We now see the progression of Kant's thoughts as a progressive coming to terms with the problem of what experience really is. For the students of Kant's philosophy, neglect of this book would therefore be a serious blunder. W. H. WERKMEISTER Florida State University Lectures on the Essence of Religion. By Ludwig Feuerbach. Trans. by Ralph Manheim. (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1967. Pp. xv+ 359. $9.50) The Essence of Faith According to Luther. By Ludwig Feuerbach. Trans. by Melvin Cherno. (New York, Evanston, and London: Harper and Row, 1967. Pp. 127. $4.50) In these two translations readers of English now have, respectively, the richest overview of his thinking about religion that Ludwig Feuerbach wrote and the only 102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY essay that he devoted to interpreting a particular theologian. There is more to these volumes than this, as I hope to show. First, though, I wish to note a Gestalt in which they seem to be involved. Suddenly, in the late 1960s, more writings by Feuerbach have appeared in English than appeared in over a century after Marian Evans published her rendering of Das Wesen des Christenturns in 1854. A translation of Das Wesen der Religion appeared in 1873, the year after Feuerbach died. (That brief essay of 1845 is the basis from which he developed the above Lectures.) It was not until 1966...

The Development of Kantian Thought: The History of a Doctrine.

The Development of Kantian Thought: The History of a Doctrine.

The Development of Kantian Thought.

The Development of Kantian Thought.

The Development of Kantian Thought.

Book Reviews The Development of Kantian Thought. By H.-J. de Vleeschauwer Translated by A. R. C. Duncan (London : Nelson. 1962. Pp. xvi + 200. Price 21s). Graham Bird Graham Bird Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 13, Issue 53, October 1963, Pages 370–371, https://doi.org/10.2307/2955535 Published: 01 October 1963

The Development of Kantian Thought

The Development of Kantian Thought