Kantian Transcendentalism Research Articles

La filosofía trascendental y la interpretación de Bohr de la teoría cuántica

Kant's transcendental philosophy makes a distinction between the conditions of objectivity of knowledge and those of its systematic unity. In this article we aim to show that these two moments of scientific knowledge articulate Bohr´s interpretation of quantum theory. We shall see that the demand of objectivity of knowledge grounds the classical character of the description of quantum phenomena, while the demand of their systematic unity grounds the objectivity of quantum objects.

The Social Study of Human Rights.A Review Essay

It is noteworthy—and at the same time a bit disappointing in a what-took-so-long sort of way—that a recent innovation in the study of human rights should involve a focus on the lives of the people directly affected by them. To explain this delay of the obvious would probably call for a review of the persistent influence of Kantian transcendentalism, the quasi-utopian search for ideal justice, and the inherently abstract nature of law in its quest for impartiality. A similar effort could be applied toward fully understanding the changed circumstances that encouraged the shift toward practical realism. It would have to take into account the surprisingly late elaboration and popularization of human rights instruments, the proliferation of transnational NGOs that act on new opportunities to exercise moral and political influence, and the growing reach of new technologies of information and communication (necessary tools for the emergence of transnational NGOs). All of these developments have raised the prominence of legal issues and strategies among those once considered isolated and, in varying degrees, uncivilized. But whatever the dominant trends might once have been, and whatever new, enabling circumstances have recently emerged, there can be little doubt that over the last several decades a shift has taken place in the study of human rights toward practical or applied realism, with a focus on ordinary actors.

Transformations of Transcendental Philosophy: Wolff, Kant, and Hegel

Kant's philosophy is generally known as transcendental philosophy or transcendental idealism, terms often thought to describe the inquiry into the subjective conditions of empirical knowledge carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason. On this conception of transcendental philosophy Kant is seen to pursue a project very different from both Wolffian metaphysics and Hegelian speculative science. This view is confirmed by scholars who compare Kant's conception of transcendental philosophy to the Scholastics' conception of ‘transcendentals’ such as unity, truth, and perfection. On their account, there remains a puzzling gap between, on the one hand, the scholastic conception of the most general determinations of all beings and, on the other hand, Kant's investigation into the conditions of possibility of experience.In this article I want to challenge this common view of Kant's transcendental philosophy for two reasons. The first reason concerns the question of how the Critique of Pure Reason itself should be read. I take the view that in the first Critique Kant's primary aim is to determine the conditions of synthetic a priori knowledge rather than to identify the a priori conditions of empirical knowledge. Since metaphysics was traditionally considered to be the discipline that possessed a priori knowledge of things, this view makes good sense of Kant's presentation of the Critique of Pure Reason as a work intended to transform metaphysics into a science. In this article I hope to clarify the nature of this transformation by determining the elements which Kant's transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolff's ontology, as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. I thus hope to solve some of the riddles posed by Kant's use of the term ‘transcendental philosophy’ in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Hegel on Space: A Critique of Kant's Transcendental Philosophy

This paper considers Hegel's views on space and his account of Kant's theory of space. I show that Hegel's discussions of space exhibit a deep understanding of Kant's apriority argument in the first Critique , commit him to the central premise of that argument, and separate his concerns from the familiar problem of the neglected alternative. Nevertheless, Hegel makes two objections to Kant's theory of space. First, he argues that the theory is internally inconsistent insofar as Kant's identification of space with an a priori intuition is incompatible with the doctrine of productive imagination in the transcendental deduction of the categories. Second, Hegel argues that the apriority argument is insufficiently critical insofar as it relies upon an unexamined theory of subjectivity as a set of representational capacities. I conclude by outlining Hegel's strategy for undermining the assumptions concerning subjectivity that give form to Kant's transcendental philosophy. Because Hegel's positive views on space depend upon his articulation of an alternate notion of subjectivity, the account of Hegel's position on space offered here remains incomplete. On the other hand, considering Hegel's discussions of space demonstrates both the nature and the importance of his examination of subjectivity in the Phenomenology.

‘Infinity, Intuition, and the Relativity Of Knowledge: Bergson, Carrau, and the Hamiltonians’

This paper presents a discussion of William Hamilton's thesis of the relativity of knowledge and of its reception in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French philosophy. Scholars usually claim that Kant's transcendental philosophy is the main target of Bergson's rejection of the relativity of knowledge. In contrast, Bergson's plea for ‘intuition' as absolute knowledge should be replaced within the context of the long-lasting debates between French spiritualists and the Hamiltonians about the relations of metaphysics with psychology. In the service of this discussion the author locates an important anticipation of Bergson's philosophy of intuition in the forgotten figure of Ludovic Carrau.

O CURSO DE GEOGRAFIA FÍSICA DE IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804): COSMOLOGIA E ESTÉTICA NA CONSTRUÇÃO EPISTEMOLÓGICA DA CIÊNCIA GEOGRÁFICA

Há um relativo depauperamento no tocante ao nosso conhecimento a respeito da relação entre a filosofia kantiana e a constituição da geografia moderna e, conseqüentemente, científica. Esta relação, quando abordada, o é - vezes sem conta - de modo oblíquo ou tangencial, isto é, ela resta quase que exclusivamente confinada ao ato de noticiar que Kant ofereceu, por aproximadamente quatro décadas, cursos de “Geografia Física” em Königsberg, ou, que ele foi o primeiro filósofo a inserir esta disciplina na Universidade, antes mesmo da criação da cátedra de Geografia em Berlim, em 1820, por Karl Ritter. Não ultrapassar a pueril divulgação deste ato em si mesma só nos faz jogar uma cortina sobre a ausência de um discernimento maior acerca do tributo de Kant à fundamentação epistêmica da geografia moderna e científica. Abrir uma frincha nesta cortina denota, necessariamente, elucidar o papel e o lugar do “Curso de Geografia Física” no corpus da filosofia transcendental kantiana. Assim sendo, partimos da conjectura de que a “Geografia Física” continuamente se mostrou, a Kant, como um conhecimento portador de um desmedido sentido filosófico, já que ela lhe denotava a própria possibilidade de empiricização de sua filosofia. Logo, a “Geografia Física” seria, para Kant, o embasamento empírico de suas reflexões filosóficas, pois ela lhe comunicava a empiricidade da invenção do mundo; ela lhe outorgava a construção metafísica da “superfície da Terra”. Destarte, da mesma maneira que a Geografia, em sua superfície geral, conferiu uma espécie de atributo científico à validação do empírico da Modernidade (desde os idos do século XVI), a “Geografia Física” apresentou-se como o sustentáculo empírico da reflexão filosófica kantiana acerca da “metafísica da natureza” e da “metafísica do mundo”.

Kant's Aesthetics: Overview and Recent Literature

AbstractIn 1764, Kant published his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and in 1790 his influential third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. The latter contains two parts, the ‘Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment’ and the ‘Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment’. They reveal a new principle, namely the a priori principle of purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit) of our power of judgment, and thereby offer new a priori grounds for beauty and biology within the framework of Kant's transcendental philosophy. They also unite the previous two Critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Besides contributing to general and systematic aspects within his transcendental philosophy, Kant's aesthetics also offers new insights into old problems. It deals with feeling versus experience, subjectivity versus objectivity, disinterested pleasure, aesthetic universality, free and adherent beauty, the sensus communis, genius, aesthetic ideas, beauty as the symbol of morality, beauty of nature versus beauty of art, the sublime, and the supersensible. In this article I will limit myself to this critical aesthetics of Kant. But I will also discuss the ugly and the possibility of beauty in mathematics and see whether Kant's theory can successfully explain or deal with them. I will also compare his theory with philosophical ideas from a very different tradition, namely from Confucius, not only as a challenge to Kant's theory, but also because there is a growing interest from the Chinese side in combining ideas from Confucius and Kant, an interest that might well become influential in both East and West during the 21st century.

All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (review)

All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism Daniel Breazeale Paul W. Franks . All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 440. Cloth, $49.95. Paul Franks' All or Nothing is in no sense an introduction to or history of German idealism, but an immensely sophisticated philosophical engagement with a specific complex of problems that occupied Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others—problems they believed themselves to have inherited from Kant's transcendental philosophy, as well as from its criticism by Jacobi, Maimon, Schulze, and others. According to Franks, these thinkers were involved in a common systematic project of "ultimate" or "absolute" grounding, while adopting various strategies to avoid "the Agrippan Trilemma," according to which any effort to justify an ultimate first principle must involve either (1) the purely arbitrary assertion or stipulation of the principle in question, (2) an infinite regress of explanatory principles, or (3) a viciously circular justification of the principle in question. Franks interprets the German idealists as engaged in a still vital effort to discover a form of philosophical grounding that does not fall victim to this skeptical trilemma. Their strategy for satisfying this demand for absolute grounding involved a distinction between the kind of reality enjoyed by the ground and that of the phenomenal world of experience, a distinction that would allow them to escape the Trilemma in the realm of transcendental philosophy while simultaneously demonstrating its inescapability in the realm of physical explanation. Perhaps the most original aspect of Franks' interpretation is his recognition of a dualism implicit in their proposed strategy, even when combined with what he describes as their [End Page 665] commitment to "Holistic Monism," in contrast with Kant's own "Monadic Individualism" with respect to things in themselves. Whereas Kant remained committed to a "two essences" view of the relationship between phenomenal reality and things in themselves, the German idealists adopted a "two aspects" view according to which "the empirical aspect of a thing corresponds to the way in which a thing's being as it is, is grounded in its relations to other things within the totality; the transcendental aspect of a thing corresponds to the way in which a thing's being as it is, is grounded in its relation to the totality and ultimately to the totality's absolute first principle" (145). Rather than identifying the ens realissimum or absolute directly with its appearance (in the manner of Spinozistic monism) or arguing that the latter is in principle, but not in fact derivable from the former (in the manner of Leibniz), they instead undertook the ambitious project of actually deriving the latter from the former ("Derivation Monism"). A philosophical system of this type (of which Fichte's second Jena system, as expounded in his 1796–99 lectures on Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo is perhaps the best and most representative example, or, in any case, is the one most fully analyzed by Franks) is characterized by its insistence upon the differences between the transcendental (or philosophical) and the ordinary (or empirical) standpoints, and thus upon the differences between the kind of grounding appropriate to each The model for such a system of grounding is provided by geometrical construction. But the method of transcendental deduction employed by Fichte and his fellow German idealists bears little resemblance to the kind of analytic, regressive (or "inferential") method that has been the topic of recent discussions of "transcendental arguments" by Strawson, Stroud, and others. Instead, the German idealists employ a synthetic, progressive method of proof, one which starts with an absolute that is different in kind from what is derived therefrom. In contrast, regressive transcendental arguments must always arrive at a ground that is homogenous with what is grounded and are therefore unable to escape the Agrippan Trilemma. Notoriously, such a method also requires a robust notion of the cognitive space within which such a priori construction is possible and of the distinctive method of the same: hence the importance within this tradition of the notion of "intellectual intuition"—a frequently misunderstood topic, of which Frank provides a sober and illuminating discussion. Indeed, this book contains the best...

The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium

One of Gilles Deleuze's major ontological categories is that of a virtual continuum which, much like Spinoza's substance, presents two sides-pure extension and thought-or, rather, two powers: the power of being and the power of thinking. This virtual continuum receives a variety of designations throughout Deleuze's corpus: "intensive spatium" in Difference and Repetition,1 "ideal or metaphysical surface" in The Logic of Sense,2 "plane of consistency" in A Thousand Plateaus (written with Felix Guattari)3 and "plane of immanence" in What is Philosophy? (equally coauthored with Guattari).4 While these diverse terms may be argued to accentuate different aspects of the continuum so designated, Deleuze's characterization of the latter remains, nevertheless, fundamentally constant-such that, as one commentator puts it, the various "objects" in question (spatium, surface, plane of immanence or, again, hyperspace) are all rigorously homothetic.5 Such a continuum is, accordingly, consistently described as a pre-extensive, non-qualified "milieu" or "space-stratum" enveloping complexes of differential relations, pure intensities and singularities, with Deleuze seeking to determine in this way an impersonal and pre-individual transcendental field that, assembling the conditions of real-and not merely possible-experience, would neither resemble the corresponding empirical fields (with their correlation of a consciousness and its objects) nor amount to an undifferentiated "depth" or groundlessness (sans-fond indifferencie) identified as pure chaos. Aiming in this way to escape the ultimatum, laid down by both metaphysics and Kant's transcendental philosophy, which claims the transcendental field must be defined in terms of a supremely individuated Being or an intensely personalized Form if it is not to end up inevitably confounded with an undifferentiated abyss or pure chaos, Deleuze consistently mobilizes what we might call a "topological model" in order to describe the properties of this real transcendental field. Along lines similar to Michel Serres' positioning of topology as the first objective elaboration of a transcendental field ("field of invariants") or, indeed, to Merleau-Ponty's exhortation to "take topological space as the model of being"-Deleuze views the topological "categories" of position, junction, and connection as the best able to explain the way in which the transcendental plane gives consistency to the elements (multiplicities, pure intensities or singularities) that populate it. One of the most rigorous statements of the "topological" nature of the transcendental field is found in Deleuze's early article on structuralism where, after defining structuralism's "scientific ambition" as being "topological and relational," he notes that, for this reason, "structuralism is inseparable from a new transcendental philosophy where places are more important than what fills them."6 In short, "what is structural is space, but a non-extensive, pre-extensive, pure spatium."7 Such a space is a space of co-existence, articulated by a system of differences that, far from being external relations defined with regard to pre-existing entities, are, on the contrary, relations constitutive of the "reciprocal determination" of the singularities which occur in the space "like topological events" and which compose multiplicities. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition: "These elements must, in effect, be determined, but reciprocally, by reciprocal relations which allow no independence whatsoever to subsist. Such relations are precisely non-localizable ideal connections, whether they characterize the multiplicity globally or proceed by the juxtaposition of neighboring regions. In all cases, the multiplicity is intrinsically defined, without external reference or recourse to a uniform space in which it would be submerged."8 In sum, it is, above all, the category of connection that Deleuze takes from topology in order to determine his transcendental plane in terms of a structurally stable (or better, "metastable") system auto-regulated by a relational and dynamic, non-quantitative, organization of potential values. …

Desde el ser a lo dado y desde lo dado al ser : algunos comentarios sobre el significado del trascendentalismo ideal en Kant y Husserl

This paper takes a fresh look at a classical theme in philosophical scholarship, the meaning of transcendental idealism, by contrasting Kant's and Husserl's versions thereof. I present Kant's transcendental idealism as a theory distinguishing between the world as in-itself and as given to the experiencing human being. This reconstruction provides the backdrop for Husserl's transcendental phenomenology as a brand of transcendental idealism expanding on Kant: Through the phenomenological reduction Husserl universalizes Kant's transcendental philosophy to an eidetic science of subjectivity. He thereby furnishes a new sense of transcendental philosophy, rephrases the 'quid iuris?,' and provides a new conception of the thing-in-itself. What needs to be clarified is not exclusively the possibility of a priori cognition, but instead, starting much lower, the validity of objects that give themselves in experience. The thing-in-itself is not an unknowable object, but the idea of the object in all possible appearances experienced at once. In all these innovations Husserl remains committed to the basic sense of Kant’s Copernican Turn. I end with some comments on how both Kant and Husserl view the relation between theoretical and moral philosophy

Jena Romanticism and Zen

Jena Romanticism and Zen Dennis McCort (bio) But what drew him with all its power was a tall, light blue flower that stood beside the stream and touched him with its broad, glittering petals. Surrounding it were countless flowers of all colors, and the rare fragrance filled the air. He saw nothing but the blue flower and regarded it for a long while with indescribable tenderness. Finally he made as if to approach it when it suddenly stirred and began to change. The petals became even more brilliant and pressed themselves against the growing stem. The flower inclined towards him, its petals forming a broad blue collar in which a tender face hovered. —Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen1 All at once, his biographer relates, Bassui felt as though he had "lost his life root, like a barrel whose bottom had been smashed open." Sweat began to pour from every pore of his body, and when he left Koho's room he was in such a daze that he bumped his head several times along the walls trying to find the outer gate of the temple. Upon reaching his hut he wept for hours from his very depths. The tears overflowed, "pouring [End Page 98] down his face like rain." In the intense combustion of this overwhelming experience Bassui's previously held conceptions and beliefs, we are told, were utterly annihilated. —Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen Introduction Two scenarios above: the first presents the climax of a lucid dream in which Heinrich, the poet-hero of Novalis' signature novel of German romanticism, experiences an apotheosis of nature centering on the mystical Blue Flower, a mandala whose dynamic perfection of rounded form reveals to him the ecstatic unity of all being. In the second, the medieval Rinzai Zen monk Bassui undergoes the near-violent collapse of an ego-based personality-structure eroded by years of meditation and the consequent influx of an all-pervasive radiance. Though different in particulars (including the difference between fiction and biography), both texts convey the same apocalyptic, life-transforming event, known to Zen as satori and to German romanticism, variously, as die Erleuchtung, romantisieren, or das goldene Zeitalter. This is the summum bonum sought by both these spiritual movements, the goal of all spiritual practice, intellectual inquiry and emotional struggle, the pearl of great price worthy of any sacrifice. It brings with it an absolute freedom empowering one to see anything in one's field of consciousness exactly as it is in itself. It reveals nothing less than the noumenal Ding an sich of Kantian transcendentalism, or, as Zen puts it, things in their exquisite "suchness" (Skt., tathatã). Let us refer to this event in the ensuing discussion as "enlightenment," the term generally used by Westerners to signify the supreme goal of Hindu and Buddhist spiritual practice. It is an apt term inasmuch as many, if not most, such experiences are characterized by those who have them as suffused with a profound sense of light or radiance, albeit a radiance in no way oppressive to one's physical vision. Philip Kapleau, an American Zen master, equates enlightenment with "Self-realization," probably both in Jung's sense of individuation (the maturation and harmonization of psychic forces) and in that of the early Chinese master Hui-neng who characterized the event as "seeing into one's own True Nature." Kapleau goes on to describe enlightenment as "opening the Mind's eye, awakening to one's True-nature and hence of [sic] the nature of all existence" (377). [End Page 99] This much description should be sufficient to convey a sense of enlightenment as it is understood by its devotees, that is, as the ultimate emancipation of human consciousness from the prison of separateness and the pressure of any and all constraint, internal or external. This makes both Jena romanticism and Zen an "argument" in favor of the possibility of "pure" or "direct" experience, of consciousness unfettered by the barest taint of cultural conditioning. Both Novalis and Hui-neng insist that there is such a thing as transcendence and that it is "there for the taking," given the requisite surrender of narrow self-interest. The above snippet of Bassui...

Immanuel Kant and the Anthropological Enlightenment

Karl Ameriks, ed. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. 306. $60.00 cloth. Ian Hunter. Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pp. 398. $70.00 cloth. Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals . Mary Gregor, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pp. 76. $13.00 paper. Jane Kneller and Sidney Axinn, eds. Autonomy and Community: Readings in Contemporary Kantian Social Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). Pp. 334. $22.95 paper. John Zammito. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Pp. 576. $29.00 paper. German eighteenth-century studies have shown an increasing interest in anthropological accounts of human reason and civilization. Interpretations of Enlightenment philosophers increasingly emphasize the historically contingent character of cultural development not only as a means of explaining the eighteenth century, but also as a distinct concern of its thinkers. Two of the works under review here, John Zammito's Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology and Ian Hunter's Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, both major intellectual histories of the Enlightenment, seek to re-establish the importance of those pragmatic philosophies of culture and politics that preceded the transcendental Critiques of Immanuel Kant. These superior works of scholarship approach earlier phases of the enlightenment while simultaneously engaging in a re-interpretation of Immanuel Kant's long career. Both Zammito and Hunter reconsider the history of the German enlightenment by questioning the long-standing tendency to read eighteenth-century German philosophy as leading up to the critical philosophy of the mature Kant. The primacy of this teleological account of philosophical history has cast many who differed with Kant into a shadowy, secondary position. Most notably Gottfried Herder's anthropological writings have long been interpreted as having failed to satisfy the transcendental demands of Kantian thought. The rivalry between the two has been judged largely in Kant's favor. Zammito tries to undo this presumption by demonstrating that during the 1760s Kant was strongly drawn to writing in the essayistic manner of popular philosophers, and that he entertained a strong interest in anthropological forms of argumentation. The later, critical Kant may have eschewed Herder's Sturm und Drang engagement with moral and aesthetic culture, but Zammito shows that for a crucial period in the middle of his career, before he formulated the transcendental psychology of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant pursued the alternative path that anthropologically grounded philosophy offered. The anthropological side of the Enlightenment arose at mid century as a result of several different discourses, such as medical psychology, biological accounts [End Page 329] of the soul, psychological novels, and ethnographic travelogues, converging in an eclectic and unsystematic manner. Zammito divides his book between Kant and Herder, yet his real interest lies in demonstrating how close Kant's early thinking was to these anthropological discourses. Having shown that Kant shared many of the pragmatic goals of popular philosophy, Zammito then seeks to resurrect scholarly interest in such writers, particularly Herder. Whereas Zammito actively re-interprets the early Kant, his chapters on Herder serve as sweeping summaries of Herder's many essays. Given the neglect of Herder in English language scholarship, no doubt aggravated by the fact that some of his key essays remain untranslated, Zammito's account of Herder will serve as an invaluable overview. Ian Hunter shifts attention even earlier in the history of German philosophy but with a similar aim of escaping the gravitational pull of Kant's transcendental philosophy. Hunter objects to the tendency to read Kant as having overcome the failures of earlier metaphysical philosophy by combining its best features with the skepticism of English empiricism. Kantian historians have for too long, Hunter argues, dismissed Enlightenment thinkers such as Christian Thomasius and Samuel Pufendorf as mere forerunners to Kant's great synthesis of metaphysical rationality with empiricism. Hunter argues for the existence of two...

Critical Notices

Critical Notices

Through the prism of the metaphor: A reflection of the actuality of Kant's philosophy

This essay examines the significance of Kant's transcendental philosophy by focusing on the central metaphors used in his works. The four metaphors singled out here are those of (a) the Copernican turn, (b) the land of truth and the ocean of illusion, (c) the starry heavens and the moral law, and (d) of perpetual peace. The author emphasizes the strong and the weak points of Kant's philosophy that these metaphors reveals, and argues that these central metaphors work together and point toward the two essential concerns of Kant's entire philosophical opus: (1) an active role of the creative subject in all forms of human experience, and (2) the boundaries of the subject's creativity. Further reflection should not only reveal some other metaphors and their role in Kant's philosophy, but also clarify how he himself understand the nature of metaphors: Are metaphors the expression of our creativity, or of the limitations of our creativity?.

Integrity and Realism: Assessing John Milbank's Theology

On the acknowledgements page of Theology and Social Theory John Milbank thanks, rather abruptly, ‘Rowan Williams, who taught me theology’. No other teacher is recognised. The formal teaching was at Westcott House, Cambridge, in the mid-70s; but there is evidence enough that the current Archbishop of Canterbury has been an abiding influence on the whole of John Milbank’s theological career. In the crowded Metro of Milbank’s footnotes, it is rare to see a face more than once; but Williams appears five times in The Word Made Strange, speaking variously of Barth, Arius, Lossky and Gregory of Nyssa. And often, Milbank’s ideas seem closely related to those of his teacher. The concept of poesis in Milbank’s ‘A Critique of the Theology of Right’ (1989) - ‘the ceaseless re-narrating and ‘explaining’ of human history’, a self-exceeding act — is clearly the twin of Williams’ ‘generative revelation’ — ‘events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life’ — in his essay ‘Trinity and Revelation’ (1986). But this example serves not just as a demonstration of Williams’ influence on Milbank; it also shows how Milbank overtakes his teacher, tackling on a grand scale ideas that are in Williams rather tentative. For Milbank, the idea that somehow Christian experience generates its own momentum of truth contributes to the overthrow of Kantian transcendentalism; for Williams, the same sort of idea provides ‘a way of thinking’ about the Spirit’s work in the church. Milbank’s theological ambition seems much greater than Williams’.

Solomon Maimon: monism, skepticism, and mathematics

The philosophy of Solomon Maimon (1753-1800) is usually considered an important link between Kant's transcendental philosophy and German Idealism. Highly praised during his lifetime, over the past two centuries Maimon's genius has been poorly understood and often ignored. Meir Buzaglo offers a reconstruction of Maimon's philosophy, revealing that its true nature becomes apparent only when viewed in light of his philosophy of mathematics. This provides the key to understanding Maimon's solution to Kant's quid juris question concerning the connection between intuition and concept in mathematics. Maimon's original approach avoids dispensing with intuition (as in some versions of logicism and formalism) while reducing the reliance on intuition in its Kantian sense. As Buzaglo demonstrates, this led Maimon to question Kant's ultimate rejection of the possibility of metaphysics and, simultaneously, to suggest a unique type of skepticism.

De Quincey's Crazy Body

De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater evaluates life from the perspective of digestion instead of cognition. The text mounts a critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy that tests the freedom of reason against the fate of eating. De Quincey's “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant” relates details of the philosopher's life and diet that corroborate this critique. Opium becomes the hero of the Confessions because eating it changes De Quincey physiologically, forcing him to confront the body's materiality. From the opium eater's perspective, the beautiful and the sublime occur as effects, not of representation, but of incorporation, giving rise to the possibility of material thought. A specialized diet also challenges the norms of public medicine, such as those expressed in Thomas Beddoes's Hygiea, which grounds public health in private reflection and responsibility. De Quincey's Confessions affirms a subjectivity that is the effect of daily dosing.

Kant's Psychologism, Part I

In this paper, I shall argue that the most moderate and balanced way to view Kant's transcendental philosophy is as a species of psychological investigation analogous to Hume's, but refounded on a doctrine of pure (a priori) sensibility, such as Hume never allowed himself (and may never even have thought of). This might seem to fly in the face of what many interpreters of Kant deem conventional wisdom: that the burden of proof is on one who claims that psychology is essential to transcendental philosophy. On this view, there is to be found in Kant ‘a more austere strictly transcendental philosophy’, which needs to be carefully distinguished from the psychological doctrines in which it is enmeshed; and they would insist on being convinced of the contrary before abandoning a position that, in their eyes, is the most moderate and balanced an interpreter of Kant can adopt. My purpose in this two-part essay is to urge them to think again. For while there can be no question of Kant's opposition to empiricism, it is equally certain that his praise for Hume was never freer or more unreserved than in respect of the latter's psycho-genetic approach to cognition. So, rather than supposing that Kant ipso facto rejected solutions to philosophical problems grounded on psychology when he rejected Hume's empiricism, it seems to me that the more moderate and balanced interpretive approach is to begin by supposing that Kant's transcendental philosophy is a species of philosophical psychology in the same mould as Hume's, differing from it only by virtue of involving a priori syntheses of a manifold of a priori intuition.

The Prospects of Transcendental Pragmatism

American pragmatist William James admired spirit in philosophy, but he did not much admire greatest critical successor of British empiricists, namely, Immanuel Kant. There are occasional references to Kant in James's major writings, but brief treatment of Kant as an intellectualist or rationalist in Some Problems of Philosophy (1911) is perhaps James's most sustained published-albeit posthumous attempt to refute Kantian idealism (see e.g. pp. 24, 48). Alternatively, we might take a look at his 1898 paper The Pragmatic Method,1 in which he describes spirit as both intellectually, practically, and morally saner, sounder, and truer than Kant's and regards Kant's mind as the rarest and most intricate of all possible antique bric-a-brac museums (James 1978, p. 138). He goes on: true line of philosophic progress lies, in short, it seems to me, not so much through Kant as round him to point where now we stand. Philosophy can perfectly well outflank him, and build herself up into adequate fulness by prolonging more directly older English lines. (Ibid., p. 139.) Hence, even though annotations in James's copies of Kant's work show that James seriously and extensively studied Kant's philosophy,2 it is impossible to deny that his basic attitude to Kant was largely negative. He worked hard with Kant's views in order to be able to refute them. Moreover, James's own pragmatism, with its evident opposition to all strict transcendental principles, was in many important respects in sharp opposition to Kant's transcendental philosophy. This is not completely true of pragmatism in general, of course: it is well known that Peirce set out to modify Kantian picture ofthe categories in terms of which we structure reality, even claiming that Kant was nothing but a somewhat confused pragmatist.3 gap between pragmatism and Kantianism seems much wider, however, if one considers James's pragmatism instead of Peirce's (as I shall do), and especially if one stresses practical side of Kant's philosophy, namely, his ethical thought. In what follows, I shall make a modest attempt to bridge this gap-recognizing, though, both that James was somewhat unfair to Kant and that Kant's view as such is hopelessly outdated (i.e., that James is, to some extent, right in insisting that one should go round rather than through it). What I wish to show in this essay is that difference between Kantianism and Jamesianism is perhaps too easily exaggerated4 and that Jamesian pragmatism might be fruitfully reconciled with a kind of critical, transcendental idealism. My point is very general-I shall mainly discuss what can be called of making no attempt to interpret Kant's ethics in any detailed way. There are, basically, three reasons why I consider Kant/James reconciliation possible. I shall outline them in following three sections. My remarks are meant to be suggestions towards future work on these issues rather than final or conclusive interpretations of Kant and James. I am not so much concerned with what these great philosophers really thought about metaphysics of morals, after all; I am more interested in formulating a viable position that both neopragmatists and neo-Kantians of our day might be able to take seriously. upshot of my reconciliatory attempt will be a particular Kantian-pragmatic notion of moral subject, a notion surprisingly close to what one can find in tradition of existentialism (see my concluding section). This (transcendental) subject is not ontologically distinct from empirical subject living in this world of empirical sorrow and suffering. But she is a subject who, in a Kantian fashion, actively constitutes world within which she lives and, in accordance with James's pragmatism, bases this constitutive project on her social, purposive, value-laden (and thus historically changing) practice. …

Kant's Transcendental Psychology, and: Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 6~9 Patricia Kitcher. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 199o. Pp. xiii + u96. Cloth, $35.oo. C. Thomas Powell. Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 199o. Pp. viii + u68. Cloth, $56.oo. Among the several recent book-length studies that emphasize the psychological dimension of the Crit/que ofPure Reason, the works here under review are particularly instructive . Kitcher's book exhibits a high degree of awareness of the methodological issues in the emerging debate between analytic and psychological Kant interpretations. Powelrs study is a good example of combining traditional analytic Kant interpretation with increased attention to Kant's philosophical psychology. Kitcher takes her starting point from the prevailing focus of analytic Kant interpretation on the conditions for the justification of empirical knowledge claims. While conceding the legitimacy of such an epistemological reading, she argues for the recognition of a further, equally important dimension of the first Crit/que, that of Kant's detailed examination of the mental capacities that make cognition possible. Kitcher's claim is not that psychological considerations regarding the mind's faculties can replace the epistemological concern with matters of justification and validity. Rather, she advances the weaker claim that an account of the human practice of cognition is incomplete without the consideration of the mental capacities that enable us to engage in such a practice (9)- It might therefore be most appropriate to read her work not as replacing the epistemologically oriented work on Kant but as supplementing it by rehabilitating an unduly neglected and unfairly maligned dimension of Kant's transcendental philosophy. Kitcher's defense of transcendental psychology amounts to a comprehensive reassessment of Kant's transcendental project in which the Quinean critique of any philosophy proceeding by means of analysis alone is combined with the insistence on the empirical nature of Kant's major starting points. On Kitcher's view, the Critique does not give an analytic argument for the conceptual requirements of possible experience. Rather, Kant is seen as pursuing a twofold argumentative strategy: first, specifying the psychological requirements that are sufficient for knowledge Cepistemic analyses," 19); and second, inferring the actuality of those psychological requirements from the undisputed account of the cognitive tasks that we perform ("analyses of empirical capacities," 19). The term "transcendental psychology," as employed by Kitcher, thus indicates the high level of generality at which Kant's examination of the empirical cognitive capacities is carried out, rind is not meant to suggest the adoption of a nonempirical psychology by Kant. Accordingly, Kitcher abandons any claim to apodictic certainty on behalf of transcendental psychology, making the latter a fallible enterprise that is continuous with and preparatory for empirical research on human cognition. Kitcher's psychological interpretation of Kant is cast in the terminology of a functionalist theory of the mind. The mind is seen as a device that processes material by subjecting it to the formative influence of various mental functions. The principal forms of such processing are a priori in the psychological sense of the term, viz., they 620 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~O:4 OCTOBER 1992 originate in the human mind (15f.). In carrying out her revisionist reading of Kant, . Kitcher concentrates on the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic . The former is presented as an analysis of the mind's contributions to spatial perception (Chapter 2), the latter as an extended argument, reaching from the Deduction (Chapter 3) through the Principles (Chapter 6), concerning the psychological basis of representational content. Especially noteworthy is Kitcher's functionalist understanding of synthesis as a higher-order processing that results in contentual connections among already formed perceptions (74f.). At the center of the book stands Kitcher's interpretation of the doctrine of transcendental apperception as a response to Hume's skepticism about personal identity (Chapter 4), followed by an extensive discussion of the purely cognitive nature of mental unity (Chapter 5). Kitcher radically disengages the mind's synthetic activity from any personal agency. The "combiner" behind the synthetic unity of apperception is said to be not some transcendental self but the mind's cognitive apparatus (x22f.). The book concludes with a chapter on the first three Paralogisms...