Pure Concepts Research Articles

A Deduction of Kant’s Concept of the Highest Good

This paper attempts a deduction of Kant’s concept of the highest good: that is, it attempts to prove, in accordance with Dieter Henrich’s interpretation of the notion of deduction, that the highest good is an end that is also a duty. It does this by appealing to features of practical reason that make up the legitimating facts that serve as the premises that any deduction must possess. According to Kant, the highest good consists of happiness, virtue, and relations of proportionality and causation between happiness and virtue, such that happiness is proportional to and caused by virtue. I argue, by drawing on accepted Kantian notions, that Kant had compelling reasons for concluding that the highest good is in fact an end that is also a duty. If correct, then this argument provides the deduction promised in my title. I. THE NEED FOR A DEDUCTION OF THE CONCEPT OF THE HIGHEST GOOD n the Critique of Practical Reason Kant asserts that the highest good is “the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law” (CPrR, 5:122).1 That this is true is no more obvious than the assertion that the pure concepts of the understanding necessarily apply to the objects of experience. To make good on this latter claim, the Critique of Pure Reason contains extended efforts, in the form of the transcendental deductions of the categories, to demonstrate that these concepts may be employed in an a priori fashion with reference to all possible experience. Furthermore, Kant placed such importance on deducing the categories that he replaced the deduction of the first (A) edition with an entirely new deduction in the second (B) edition. So, clearly, I

Geometrical concept of the propagation of general Gaussian beams

The propagation of a general Gaussian light beam in free space and through an arbitrary optical system in paraxial approximation is described in terms of a pure geometrical optics concept. Also, several parameters that are introduced to express the general Gaussian beam are described more clearly. In general case some parameters compose a non-symmetric matrix which sense is explained through analysis of footprints with the help of ray tracing.

Deleuze’s Challenge: Thinking Internal Difference

In his early essay on Bergson, Gilles Deleuze advances the claim that: To think internal difference as such, as pure internal difference, to reach the pure concept of difference, to raise difference to the absolute, such is the direction of Bergson's effort.1 In this account we recognize not only Bergson's effort, but the orbit and aim of Deleuze's own thought: an oeuvre dedicated to marshalling the resources necessary to articulate a notion of difference irreducible to identity, and prior to the logic of contradiction; a difference that does not reside between things, but one that lives in the heart of things themselves, internal to what we labor to call their identity. The genius of Deleuze's early historical works, particularly with respect to his reading of Bergson and Spinoza, lies precisely in his ability to find in these thinkers the tools needed to affirm such a difference. But affirmation is not explication; hence, while Deleuze supplies us with a number of resources that support the former, realizing the latter, arguably, requires supplementation. Indeed, the question regarding the specific nature of this difference remains to be explored. Let us pose the question as follows: what does it mean to speak of a difference that is internal to identity or being? Or, as noted in a recent study by Michael Hardt: What can be meant by a that is not numerical? In other words, how can something be different when it is absolutely infinite and indivisible? What is a difference that involves no other?2 The weight of these questions will burden the following discussion; the aim of which is the clarification of the meaning of internal difference as expressed through the figure of qualitative or non-numerical distinction; one of the principle themes Deleuze deploys in affirming internal difference. Specifically, the following questions will demand our attention. First, what is the nature of qualitative distinction, that is, in what sense is it non-numerical? Second, how is it that internal difference is expressed through qualitative distinction? And third, insofar as internal difference is non-numerical, how is it ostensibly resistant to appropriation in terms of the one and the multiple? It is well known that Deleuze's interest in qualitative difference develops from Bergson's articulation of the same, by way of the between difference in degree, or numerical difference, and difference in nature or kind, that is, qualitative difference: What Bergson essentially reproaches in his predecessors is not having seen the true differences of nature.... Where there were differences of nature, we have retained only differences of degree.... It is in this sense that differences of nature are already the key to everything: we must start from them, we must in the first place find them again. Without prejudicing what the nature of difference as internal difference is, we already know that it exists, if we suppose that there are differences of nature between things of the same kind. Thus, either philosophy proposes this way and this aim itself(differences of nature in order to arrive at internal difference), or else it will only have a negative and generic relation with things. it will end up as criticism or generality, in any case in a merely external state of reflection. Placing himself within the first point of view, Bergson proposes the ideal of philosophy: to tailor for the object a concept appropriate to the object alone, a concept one can barely say is still a concept. since it applies only to that one thing. This unity of the thing and the concept is internal difference, which is reached via differences of nature.3 Moreover, a comparable motif appears in Deleuze's nuanced appropriation of Spinoza, where the doctrine of real distinction is also taken to be indicative of qualitative difference: The identification of an attribute as belonging to an infinitely perfect substance is, in the Ethics as in the Short Treatise, no provisional hypothesis. …

Epistemologies of Rupture: The Problem of Nature in Schelling's Philosophy

IN HIS 1801 ESSAY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FICHTE'S AND SCHELLING'S System of Philosophy, Hegel set out that difference in terms of a contrast between reflective and speculative philosophy. Dichotomy, rupture [Entzweiung], he argued, gives rise to the need for philosophy, a rupturing which reflective philosophy both seeks to resolve and exasperates. The understanding strives to enlarge itself to the absolute, but, in its finitude, it only reproduces itself endlessly, positing oppositions within itself and its products, and so mocks itself. (1) The being of nature, in particular, is either dissolved into abstractions or remains but a deadly darkness within intellect. Although Fichte was Hegel's prime target here, much of contemporary philosophy was included in his critique. Hegel argued that the identity philosophy of Schelling, however, in which reason raises itself to speculation and provides a positive account of being, overcomes such finitudes and ruptures. The Critical Journal of Philosophy that Schelling and Hegel launched from Jena in 1802, critical of the limitations of proliferating contemporary philosophical systems, sought to establish objective philosophical criticism based upon such a speculative use of reason. (2) In Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century, all philosophy, and especially all philosophical criticism, began with reference to Kant's critical philosophy. In the Preface to his Difference essay, Hegel praised the spirit of Kantian philosophy, the speculative principle articulated in the transcendental deduction of the categories, but deprecated the remainder--the hypostatization of the thing-in-itself, the transformation of the categories into dead compartments of the understanding and their opposition to the empirical realm of sensation, the restriction of practical reason to what can be conceived by the understanding--all of which became fodder for reflective philosophy (Hegel, Differenz 5-6). Kant never had the opportunity to comment on the project of The Critical Journal of Philosophy, but his own critical project started from exposing the errors and contradictions of reason in its purely speculative use and arguing for its restriction to finite, empirical knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant's critical works were primarily preoccupied with the cognitive processes involved in the production of such knowledge, with the laws of reason that are the necessary conditions of possible experience, with interrogating how cognition in general is possible. Yet Kant left a problematic rupture in his critical examination of the conditions and sources of cognition, a rupture that he explicitly acknowledged and graphically represented in the Introduction to his 1790 Critique of Judgment as an immense gulf [Kluft] between the two domains of our cognitive powers, that in which understanding legislates through the concept of nature and that in which reason legislates through the concept of reason, the subjects of his first two critiques. (3) For Kant, this chasm leaves indeterminate not only how freedom was to be reconciled with the necessity of nature, but also how nature was to be comprehended as organized system. We are left merely with reflective judgments of these relations, problematic acts of synthesis, rather than determinative judgments based upon the necessary laws of cognition. Kant also acknowledged a rupture in his attempt to determine the conditions and sources of cognition in his 1782 Critique of Pure Reason, when he referred the relation of sensory intuition and understanding to a common, unknown root [Wurzel]. (4) As Heidegger has argued, it is the transcendental imagination that acts as this unknown root, unconsciously relating the concepts of understanding to the manifold of intuition in judgment. Indeed, it is the unconscious transcendental imagination that enacts the synthesis of the manifold of intuition, prior to apperception, to produce a unified representation of appearances for reflective consciousness in Kant's celebrated, if problematic, Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. …

Chemism and Chemistry

One of the enduring puzzles about Hegel’s system is the relationship between his Science of Logic and his Philosophy of Nature. 1 What happens when he turns from the realm of pure concepts to space and time, matter and magnetism, chemical change and living creatures? Does thought simply follow its normal a priori pathway, deriving “natural” concepts in the same way that it generated “logical” terms? If, instead, philosophy takes account of the contingent givens of experience, how is it different from natural science? What does the philosophy of nature provide that mechanics and physics, chemistry and zoology do not already offer? Indeed, it was at precisely the point where his system moves from one to the other that some of the earliest criticisms were directed. Shortly after Hegel’s death, his former colleague, Friedrich Schelling, attacked his transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature: “While the logical self-determination of the concept (and what a concept!) endures (as might be expected) as long as the system proceeds within the merely logical, as soon as it has to take the difficult step into reality, the thread of the dialectical movement breaks off completely. A second hypothesis becomes necessary, namely that it occurs to, or strikes the fancy of, the Idea (one knows not why if not to break the boredom of its merely logical being) to let itself fall apart into its moments whence nature should originate.”2

Generalized Pure Modules

For right modules M<N over a ring R, consider any system of equations in M of the form ∑{xirij∣i∈I}=dj∈M,j∈J, where rij∈R. The usual definition of M as pure in N is that for any such a finite system, if the system is solvable in the bigger module N, then it is already solvable in M. Here the above ordinary concept of purity will be generalized by allowing I and J to be of possibly infinite cardinalities |I|<μ and |J|<ℵ for fixed cardinals μ and ℵ. In this way, generalized (μ<,ℵ<)-pure and absolutely pure concepts are defined in terms of μ and ℵ and studied. Here the number ℵ of relations of a module is simultaneously studied with the more familiar number μ of generators.

Kant's early critics: the empiricist critique of the theoretical philosophy

Acknowledgements Frequently cited texts and abbreviations Introduction: major trends in the early empiricist reception of Kant's critical philosophy Part I. Feder/Garve and Garve: 1. The Gottingen review 2. The Garve review: Christian Garve, 'Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant' Part II. The Transcendental Aesthetic: 3. Dietrich Tiedemann, 'On the Nature of Metaphysics: An Examination of Professor Kant's Principles - Against the Aesthetic' 4. [Hermann Andreas Pistorius], 'Elucidations of Professor Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason,' by Johann Schultze' 5. Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, On Space and Causality: An Examination of the Kantian Philosophy, 1-64, 84*-91* 6. [Anonymous], 'On Space and Causality: An Examination of the Kantian Philosophy by Johann Georg Heinrich Feder' 7. Friedrich Gottlob Born, Investigation into the First Grounds of the Doctrine of the Senses, 87-92 Part II. Idealism: 8. Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, On Space and Causality: An Examination of the Kantian Philosophy, 61-83*, 114-118 9. J. C. G. Schaumann, On the Transcendental Aesthetic: A Critical Attempt, 131-175 10. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 'On Transcendental Idealism' 11. [Hermann Andreas Pistorius], 'Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant' 12. Friedrich Gottlob Born, Investigation into the First Grounds of the Doctrine of the Senses, 117-120, 141-153 Part IV. The Categories: 13. C. G. Selle, 'Attempt at a Proof that there are no Pure Concepts of Reason that are Independent of Experience' 14. Dietrich Tiedemann, 'Continuation of the Examination of Professor Kant's Thoughts about the Nature of Metaphysics - Against the Analytic' 15. [Johann Schultz], 'Institutiones Logicae et Metaphysica by Jo. Aug. Henr. Ulrich' 16. Gottlob August Tittle, On Kantian Forms of Thought or Categories, 3-41, 103-11 Part V. Empiricism vs. Purism: 17. Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Some Remarks about Empiricism and Purism in Philosophy Occasioned by Selle's Principles of Pure Philosophy' 18. [Hermann Andreas Pistorius], 'On Carl Christian Erhard Schmid's essay about Kant's Purism and Selle's Empiricism' Appendix A: about the authors Appendix B: biographical sketches of figures in early Kant reception Notes Glossary Bibliography Index.

The Proof Structure of Kant's A-Deduction

Kant wrote two versions of the Transcendental Deduction, the first, “A-”Deduction in 1781, and the second, “B-”Deduction in 1787. Since Henrich's “The Proof Structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction”, most work on the Transcendental Deduction attempts to make sense of the B-Deduction's two-step argument structure. Though the A-Deduction has suffered comparative neglect, it has received some attention from interpreters who take its extended treatment of the “subjective” side of cognition to amount to a brand of proto-functionalism. Whatever the merits and demerits of these proto-functionalist approaches, they tend to deemphasize the two arguments that constitute the “objective” side of the A-Deduction, the “argument from above” and then the “argument from below”. Since Kant himself refers to this objective side of the A-Deduction as the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding”, it is surprising that the structure of these arguments has not received closer scrutiny. This is doubly true since Kant actually claims that his revisions for the 1787 version of the Deduction impacted only the “presentation” of it. Any lessons learned from the central arguments of the A-Deduction should help clarify the structure of its younger and more closely studied brother.

The Complexity of Reasoning with Cardinality Restrictions and Nominals in Expressive Description Logics

We study the complexity of the combination of the Description Logics ALCQ and ALCQI with a terminological formalism based on cardinality restrictions on concepts. These combinations can naturally be embedded into C^2, the two variable fragment of predicate logic with counting quantifiers, which yields decidability in NExpTime. We show that this approach leads to an optimal solution for ALCQI, as ALCQI with cardinality restrictions has the same complexity as C^2 (NExpTime-complete). In contrast, we show that for ALCQ, the problem can be solved in ExpTime. This result is obtained by a reduction of reasoning with cardinality restrictions to reasoning with the (in general weaker) terminological formalism of general axioms for ALCQ extended with nominals. Using the same reduction, we show that, for the extension of ALCQI with nominals, reasoning with general axioms is a NExpTime-complete problem. Finally, we sharpen this result and show that pure concept satisfiability for ALCQI with nominals is NExpTime-complete. Without nominals, this problem is known to be PSpace-complete.

Investigating the Transcendental Tradition

Even though both and writers have in twentieth century moved a long way from Immanuel Kant's philosophy, it is clear that both major currents of contemporary philosophy are profoundly, though often only implicitly, post-Kantian ways of thinking and crucially indebted to Kant. These traditions must face continuous need to re-evaluate their relation to (or critical) project launched in Konigsberg more than two hundred years ago. Fortunately, novel contributions, both historical and systematic, to debate on nature of philosophy appear once in a while.1 Both analytic and Continental philosophers have been active in this regard. This review essay discusses David Carr's recent critical investigation of notion of subjectivity in tradition as well as some new work on structure of arguments collected in an anthology edited by Robert Stern.2 I do not mean to imply that these two books simply represent Continental and analytic approaches to philosophy, respectively. Carr's book, for example, aims at building bridges across these movements. Generally speaking, however, Continental philosophers seeking to understand (and often criticize) their Kantian heritage have-particularly after Martin Heidegger's famous critique of the metaphysics of subject- focused on concept of subjectivity, or ego, whereas analytic philosophers, at least since appearance of Peter Strawson's Individuals in 1959,' have attempted to analyze arguments as responses to skepticism. After having discussed these projects at some length, I shall suggest a way of synthesizing two approaches to philosophy. It seems to me that debates over subjectivity as well as analytic accounts of arguments leave room for a pragmatist reinterpretation of tradition. Such a reinterpretation might yield a fruitful way of reconciling certain basic Kantian ideas (perhaps even idealism) with a (non-reductively) naturalistic conception of world and our place in it. Needless to say, only a very preliminary suggestion toward further work on such a reconciliation can be made within a review essay like this. Since late 1950s and especially since 1960s, several leading analytic philosophers have tried to understand conceptual structure of arguments, standard model of which is Kant's notoriously difficult transcendental deduction of categories, that is, of pure concepts of understanding. Special emphasis has been directed to question of what, if anything, arguments can achieve in epistemology. Such arguments are typically designed to show how something (e.g., knowledge, experience, conscious thought, meaningful discourse, or some other given feature of human life)4 is possible. They are meant to demonstrate that certain things (e.g., Kantian categories or Wittgensteinian public, rule-governed language-games) will have to be in place as necessary conditions of possibility of what is assumed to be actual in premise. The most recent episode of analytic debate on such arguments can be found in Robert Stern's collection, Transcendental Arguments, which is a highly useful volume, containing fifteen chapters (including editor's introduction) and a good bibliography of books and articles on arguments up till 1998. Most of papers in TA are based on presentations and responses that took place at a conference in Sheffield in 1997. These include Ralph Walker's discussion of Kant and problem of induction, responded to by Graham Bird; Stern's paper, also dealing with Kant's answer to Hume, with a response by Mark Sacks; Paul Franks's historical treatment of post-Kantian idealism, with a response by Michael Rosen; Barry Stroud's analysis of goal of arguments, with a response by Christopher Hookway; and Anthony Brueckner's evaluation of possibility of basing arguments on content externalism, with a response by Gregory McCulloch. …

In the Shadow of Chaos

The posing of the question is philosophy? is, for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a response to what they perceive as philosophy's devaluation in the face of disciplines and tendencies that attempt to undermine it, to question its relevance, or even to displace it. They are concerned to reinstate philosophy as one of the primary disciplines of thought and and to place it alongside art and science as a mode of inquiry distinct from these but of equal importance and value. They do not argue for a new philosophy that gains validity by compromising with the hegemonic forces that pervade the current social, cultural, political, and economic climate. Rather they try to clarify what it is that philosophers do, what they have always done, and what they must continue to do. They seek to expose as myth philosophy conceived as the discovery of truth, as the unveiling of the eternal, irrefutable foundations of being, knowledge, and thought. This ideal has been brought seriously into question, following Nietzsche, by the recent so-called postmodernist and poststructuralist movements. While Deleuze and Guattari insist that they are not associated with these traditions, being critical of their tendency to be too limited and pessimistic in their outlook,' they do sympathize with the resistance such thinking proposes to what they call major discourse. Certainly they do not see this critique of philosophy as problematic for philosophy's continued importance, and neither do they see it as diminishing interest in philosophers who have presupposed these traditional ideas and goals; what continues to be interesting and often remarkable in the works of the great philosophers are the ways that they invent for coming to terms with their historically and geographically, socially and politically oriented world and with the events which take place therein. Philosophy, art, and science all make claims about the world and the ways in which we think about it. The focus of the arguments in Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy? (Columbia University Press, 1994a book that represents the swan song of a collaborative writing career spanning more than twenty years-is to show that each discipline has its own distinct methods and fields of inquiry and orientation: philosophy is defined from the outset as knowledge through pure concepts, science as through functions and reference, art as through percepts and affects. It should be stressed here that these are not purely stipulative definitions, What is Philosophy? being rife with examples intended to demonstrate and test these definitions as clearly and precisely as possible. The purpose of the boundaries which Deleuze and Guattari draw between these three Thought-forms, as they call them, is not strictly to exclude, that is they are not intended to preclude the involvement of philosophy in science or science in art, etc. In fact what may often be most interesting is to explore the interferences of each Thought-form in the others. The intention is rather to demarcate, to show that no one of these forms is reducible to the other, and that any attempt to blur the boundaries is to be resisted. For example, while the scientist may claim to understand beauty, and witnesses it in the quality of certain equations or geometrical figures, this beauty is not reducible to and may not replace aesthetic beauty, a point which Kant shows with such force in the Critique of Judgment. So, in the process of formulating an answer to the question is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari are set the task of qualifying specifically artistic or scientific fields of inquiry and of showing how these differ from that of philosophy. Before we begin to examine the factors that allow differentiation between them, we need to understand what it is that links them together, what unites them under the banner of Thought. The uniting factor is that each maintains an essential relationship with chaos. …

The Two Steps of the B-Deduction

Since the publication of Dieter Henrich's classic paper, ‘The proof structure of the transcendental deduction’, in The Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969), the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding has been under focus in Kant studies in a very special way. The B-deduction seems to be a proof in two steps. Consequently, the focus has been on questions like, ‘What is the structure of the deduction?’, and ‘Why is the deduction carried out in two steps?’ No doubt the structure of the deduction has been the most debated exegetical issue in Kant's theoretical philosophy, and the most important too, while the answers mirror one's overall understanding of Kant.

Unity of Apperception and the Division of Labour in the Transcendental Analytic

In theCritique of Fure ReasonKant distinguishes two sorts of conditions of knowledge. First, there are the space and time of pure intuition, introduced in the Transcendental Aesthetic. They are grounded in our dependence on a special sort of perceptual (or imaginative) field for the location of objects. Second, there are pure concepts of the understanding, or categories, introduced in the Analytic. In one respect these are grounded in the logical function of the understanding in judgements, introduced in the first chapter of the analytic of concepts: Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding; in another respect, they are grounded in transcendental unity of apperception, which is introduced in the second chapter: Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, or Transcendental Deduction. I shall be concerned with the latter and its contribution to the overall strategy of argument in the analytic. Within the Analytic, Kant distinguishes between an Analytic of Concepts and an Analytic of Principles (also called ‘transcendental doctrine of judgement’ [A137/B176]). This corresponds to a traditional distinction between a doctrine of concepts (or understanding) and judgement. It is arguable that Kant's theory of concepts undermines this distinction. However, I shall not deal with that general issue, but with a more specific issue related to the first two chapters of the Analytic of Principles: the Schematism and the System of Principles. (The third chapter, on phenomena and noumena, is basically an appendix.)

Heinrich von Stackelberg’s textbook Grundlagen der theoretischen Volkswirtschaftslehre revisited

Compares Stackelberg’s Grundlagen der theoretischen Volkswirtschaftslehre with a standard modern micro‐economic textbook. Reveals some confusing shortcomings in the English translation. Focuses on unique peculiarities of Stackelberg’s analysis of the price formation on imperfect markets. Suggests that it might be an effective approach in a course on micro‐economics to combine a modern textbook with Grundlagen since they would complement each other in a number of aspects: at least, but very important, in the different emphasis of the time aspect. Finds that in general the English translation of Grundlagen by A.T. Peacock is of an outstanding quality. Mistakes are rare and hardly ever confusing, with the exceptions related to the perfect market and pure competition concepts. So, if one uses the English translation of Grundlagen as a supplement in a course on micro‐economics one may devote some attention to these concepts. It is quite possible that Stackelberg, at least in Grundlagen, is not convinced of the potential compatibility of Chamberlin’s theory of monopolistic competition and the Edgeworth‐Bertrand oligopoly theory with the method he proposes to derive at “peculiarities of price formation in the imperfect market”. Hence the absence of any reference in Grundlagen to these theories may not be at all accidental.

Kant's Problem of Causality and the Ding-An-Sich

Kant's Copernican Revolution in philosophy was mainly a response to the thought of the British Empiricists. He wanted to ground certain con cepts and precepts that the British Empiricists had nearly destroyed. We can say that the Copernican Revolution in philosophy addressed probems with the ego, justice and the Good, and so on. The aspect of the Coperni can Revolution with which I am concerned in this essay is Kant's view of the necessityof cause and effect relationships. My concern in this essay is to show that Kant is not committed to the problem of transcendental cau sality. In short, some philosophers have claimed that Kant must be com mitted to holding the following contradiction: There is no causal agency known outside of the realm of categorial judgment, yet appearances must becausedby thingsin themselves, whicharenotcategorially judged. Kant, in one breath, states that judgements of cause and effect hold only of ap pearances, while stating at other times that things in themselves must be the cause of our appearances. I will argue that Kant can escape this difficulty. In order to remove the apparent contradiction, I will show that Kant can claim that things in them selves need not be the cause of our appearances. Rather, they provide the ground for appearances. Even though Kantdoes indeedsometimes speak as though things in themselves should be the cause of appearances, it will be shown that, ultimately,he is not committed to this language. Therefore, Kant will not be committed to the contradiction. First,I shouldlike to exposethe problem as it is in the Critique ofPure Reason. Kant states in the Transcendental Deduction section of the Cri tique ofPureReason: All attempts to derive these pure concepts of the understanding ['cause and effect' is a pure concept of the understanding] from experience, and so to ascribe to them a merely empirical origin, are entirely vain and useless.1 From where are thepureconcepts of the un derstanding derived? Kant states, ...I maintain that the categories...are

Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" of 1794: A Commentary on Part I (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 693 between the world of our sense perception and the world of objects "in and for themselves," had suggested that the failure to appreciate this distinction was a "Grundvorurteil" common to all controversies, and, finally, had argued for the need to distinguish between the self revealed in "inner sense" and the self as it is in itself, unknowable to us. In his extremely valuable article, "Funzioni logiche e categorie in Kant," Silvestro Marcucci retlects on a complex of issues surrounding Kant's claim to have discovered some sort of correspondence between the components and structure of a "table" of logical functions and those of a set of"pure concepts" or "categories" for the objective determination of objects through the contents of human sensibility. Of central concern to Marcucci is the error of supposing that what is in question is either a mere parallel between functions of judgment and categories or some sort of real identity between them. What is in question, according to Marcucci, are three "uses" but only two "levels" (piani): the foundational level is that of an operative.judgmental "functionality" by which the categories and the pure forms of general logic are produced. He argues that Kant is appealing here neither to pure logical form nor to logical "functions" that are in some way identical with the categories of understanding, but rather to functions of judgment more fundamental than either. The final two essays deal with two of Kant's immediate heirs, Reinhold and Fichte. In "The Sun of Enlightenment" Nathan Rotenstreich argues that Reinhold's notion of Enlightenment had an important social aspect, which is concerned with the distribution of enlightenment and is distinguished from his systematic view. Claudio Cesa, in "Die Vieldeutigkeit des Begriffes 'Trieb' von J. G. Fichte" traces the development of this important concept from Reinhold's concept "Kraft," which was itself neither sensible nor intellectual but changed depending upon its objects: sensibility, understanding, or reason. Cesa goes on to outline how Fichte developed a more positive notion including the conception of inner purposiveness expressing itself in humans as a form for realizing the I. JANE KNELI.ER Colorado State University RICHARD AQUILA University of Tennessee George J. Seidel. Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" of z 794: A Commentary on Part I. Purdue University Series in the History of Philosophy. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. Pp. ix + 126. Cloth, $25.00. Paper, $12.95. The recent revival of interest in Fichte is now well entrenched in North America and has begun to yield a fairly diverse harvest: new translations, articles, monographs, and, predictably, conferences and a scholarly society. With this volume, however, we have the first entry in the "commentary" category. Given its notorious obscurity and disarray, Fichte's corpus--particularly his Jena corpus, which has remained the main focus of attention--would seem to be an apt subject for the genre. The work to which Seidel has 694 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 devoted his attention--the Foundations of the Entire "Wissenschaft~lehre"--particularly invites this sort of undertaking; it is a text which, by Fichte's own account, was intended to be accompanied by elaborations, illustrations and explanations. Seidel focuses on what is certainly the most interesting and important part of the text, the first three sections (about 3~ pages in all) which together make up "Part I" of this version of the Wissenschaftslehre. It is here that Fichte tries to articulate the basic principles that will govern his entire philosophical investigation. He uses as the lever for his enquiry two fundamental logical dicta--the principles of identity and contradiction--claiming to uncover three fundamental principles which underlie them: the principles of selfpositing , counter-positing and limitation. The body of the Wissenschaflslehreitself is an elaborate dialectical attempt to work out the implications of these basic features of human subjectivity--in particular to use them to give a deduction of the fundamental categories of human experience. There are a number of different approaches that a commentary might take to this dense piece of text. At one extreme stands the example provided by Findlay, whose commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology takes the form of a detailed paraphrase...

Synthesis and the Content of Pure Concepts in Kant's First Critique

Synthesis and the Content of Pure Concepts in Kant's First Critique J. MICHAEL YOUNG 1. THE NOTION OF synthesis figures prominently in the central argument of the first Critique. That argument rests, according to Kant, on the principle of the necessary unity of apperception or self-consciousness (B 135). This principle is said to be analytic. Nonethelss, it "reveals the necessity of a synthesis of the manifold given in intuition, without which the thoroughgoing identity of selfconsciousness cannot be thought" (ibid.). The categories of the understanding are said to be the concepts "which give unity to this pure synthesis, and which consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetic unity" (A79/ B Io4, B 143). It is just because of this, Kant concludes, that "the manifold in a given intuition is necessarily subject to the categories" (B 143). In spite of its prominence, Kant's notion has proved vexing. The problem is not just that he says obscure and apparently conflicting things about it. ~It is rather that the notion itself, and the theory to which it belongs, seem profoundly ill-conceived. In explaining the notion Kant regularly talks about combining, connecting, and uniting representations, about running through a manifold and holding it together, and about producing synthetic unity in that manifold. His aim, it would seem, is to specify the activities that produce experience and to identify the faculties or agencies that direct those activities. Sensibility is apparently to be viewed as a source of raw materials. Understanding and imagination are to be seen as supervisory faculties, which guide the ' He ascribes synthesis both to imagination (A78/Bao3)and to the understanding (Bx3o),for example; and after ascribing it to imagination he comments darkly that imagination is"a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which weshould have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcelyever conscious"(A78/B1o3). [33 x] 332 3OURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:3 3ULY 1994 various activities through which sensible materials are combined or connected. Experience, it seems, is supposed to be the product of these activities, and the categories are supposed to be applicable to experience precisely because they are imposed upon it as it is produced. Admittedly, this talk about mental manufacture sounds to the contemporary ear like a caricature. But much in the text suggests this picture, and many readers, friendly and otherwise, have been led to suppose that this is in fact what the theory of synthesis is supposed to be. If Kant's aim were to propound such a theory, however--more generally, if his theory of synthesis were meant to be a theory as to how experience gets produced--his efforts would be sadly misdirected. For he would be pushed toward one or the other horn of an unwelcome dilemma. If it were meant to be empirical, his theory as stated would be superficial at best, providing merely an armchair account of how it seems to us that we process sensory information. Even if it were built on a more solid empirical foundation, moreover, it would still be inadequate to Kant's purposes, for the most it could establish is that we have a subjective need to employ the categories, not that the objects of experience actually fall under those categories. If it were meant, on the other hand, to describe activities and faculties which produce experience but which are not themselves empirically accessible, Kant's theory would violate his own strictures against speculating beyond the bounds of possible experience. Again, too, it would be inadequate to his purposes. How could Kant claim to know that unobservable processes necessarily impose the categories throughout all experience? How could he know that other forms are not and will not be imposed? Even if he could know such things, how could be justifiably claim that the resulting experience constitutes knowledge? On this view the categories would be nothing more than what Kant himself calls "subjective dispositions of thought," and the difficulties would be obvious: Apart... from the objection that on such an hypothesis we can set no limit to the assumption of predetermined dispositions to future judgments, there is this decisive objection against [such a...

The Pure Concept of Diplomacy. By José Calvet de Magalhães. Translated by Bernardo Futscher Pereira. New York, Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1988. Pp. 150. Index. $37.95.

The Pure Concept of Diplomacy. By José Calvet de Magalhães. Translated by Bernardo Futscher Pereira. New York, Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1988. Pp. 150. Index. $37.95. - Volume 84 Issue 4

Lotus Lithium-Lead Fusion Blanket Concept for Neutronics Experiments

AbstractThe objective of the LOTUS experimental program, started in 1983, is to perform various integral neutronics measurements like neutron spectrometry, activation, and tritium breeding ratio (TBR) on fusion reactor blanket concepts. The first blanket concept studied at the LOTUS facility was the fission-suppressed type. Investigations of pure fusion blanket concepts constitute a logical continuation of this program. The new LOTUS fusion blanket concept employs a eutectic of lithium and lead, for example, 17L-83Pb, and lithium-metal as tritum breeders. The blanket consists of a first wall of low-activation ferritic steel, followed by zones of 17Li-83Pb, 6Li, and a reflector made of graphite or silicon carbide (SiC). The choice of structural material for each zone is based on its compatibility with the primary zonal component. Vanadium alloy (V-15 Cr-5 Ti), low-activation ferritic steel (Fe-11 Cr-2.5 W-0.3 V-0.15 C), and the same vanadium alloy were retained for 17Li-83Pb, 6Li, and graphite or SiC zones...

Explaining the Inexplicable. The Hypotheses of the Faculty of Reflective Judgement in Kant's Third Critique

In the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) Kant wants to answer the question: How are a priori synthetic judgements possible? (CPR, B19). This is the question of how judgements, which are not logically true (or contradictory) in virtue of their form, can relate a priori to objects. Kant answers this question in the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic of the CPR: the categories, the pure concepts of the understanding derived from the forms of judgement, relate a priori to objects; and the principles of pure understanding which arise a prior from the application of these categories to pure intuitions are, as synthetic a priori judgements, objectively valid. All possible objects of human experience must correspond to the categories and principles. It is this consequence which Kant has in mind when he claims of the human understanding that it prescribes to nature a priori laws (cf. e.g. Prologomena, ? 36 and CJ, ? 70) and thus makes objects of human knowledge possible (CPR, A158/B197). Thanks to the principles of the pure understanding we know with absolute certainty that all possible 'objects of human experience are substances with extensive and intensive magnitudes which endure in time and space and among which there are mechanical relations of causality and reciprocity. All determinate concepts and laws of nature which are used in the description and explanation of nature must be specifications of the categories and principles: for it is only as such specifications that they fulfill a necessary condition for their relation to the objects which, taken together, make up nature, the object of human knowledge.