Kant defined moral evil as reversing the order between self-love and morality. For many critics, however, his egoistically-orientated notion of self-love fails to make sense of the infinitely manifold incentives of evil under the human condition. Against this criticism, my article will re-interpret Kantian self-love and empirical self-conception from both the transcendental and empirical level, thus offering a transcendental grounding for the empirical manifestations of evil. In this way I will argue that we can explain rather sufficiently the infinite manifoldness (...) of evil incentives in real human life with Kant’s prima facie simplistic definition of evil. (shrink)

According to Kant, we refer to what is out there in the world by performing a demonstrative act, like pointing at an object with a finger. A Kantian mode of demonstrative reference is characterized by the existence of a real, 2-placed affective relation between an intuiting subject and the referent. Parsons suggests that Kantian intuition is both singular and immediate, and immediacy demands an object of intuition to be present, a condition clearly satisfied by objects within our immediate perceptual field. (...) But since we do not have an immediate relation with remote objects, the scope of our demonstrative reference is severely restricted by intuitional immediacy. I wish to develop a global Kantian intuition in order to extend the scope of demonstrative reference. Kant's ontology of space entails that the global representability of space be given to an intuiting subject as a form of intuition. According to Melnick, Kantian intuition is a kinematic operation which involves directing attention and moving about. To make contact with the world, the subject must move away from its locale: although a spatially remote object is not immediately present, we can shift our location by taking a path such that W will become so. Once we are close enough to be affected by W, we will be able to point at W and say "This." Thus, the intuitive scope of demonstrative reference is globalized as we shift our location. (shrink)

In the present paper I aim to discuss the philosophical foundations of the early correspondence principle, by comparing the conceptual structure underlying the first correspondence principle with the procedure of analogy that Immanuel Kant introduced in the Critique of Judgment from 1790. On such a comparison, I will seek to demonstrate the consistency of the conceptual ratio according to which the correspondence principle is to the classical "concepts" of space and time, as these a priori forms of intuition, in Kant, (...) are related to the separate faculty of pure intuition. As a result, it will turn out that the conceptual structure of the correspondence principle suits to the Kantian doctrine of a separate faculty of pure intuition, which is divided from the faculty of understanding. The aim is to shed new light on the line of reasoning underlying Niels Bohr's analogical thinking in quantum physics. (shrink)

롤스의 반성적 평형은 도덕철학 및 정치철학의 영역에서 현재까지 가장 유력한 정당화의 방법론으로 간주되어왔지만, 다른 한편으로 그것이 직관주의 혹은 상대주의에 불과하다는 비판, 수렴가능성에 대한 비판, 정합성이 갖는 정당화의 힘에 대한 비판, 공허함에 대한 비판 등등이 지속적으로 제기되면서 정당화 방법론으로서 진지하게 고려되기 어렵다는 상반된 평가를 받고 있다. 본 논문은 이러한 상황을 타개하기 위해 칸트의 윤리형이상학 정초의 논의를 실마리로 삼아서 롤스의 공정으로서의 정의에서 반성적 평형이 이해되는 방식을 보다 충실하게 재구성하고자 시도한다. 이러한 재구성은 반성적 평형이 모든 유관한 요소들을 흡수해버리는 공허한 방법론으로 전락하는 것을 막으면서도 (...) 그것에 지금까지 제기되어온 여러 비판들을 극복하게 해주는 하나의 해석을 산출하게 되는데, 그것을 반성적 평형에 대한 칸트적 해석으로 명명할 수 있다. (shrink)

This chapter emphasizes four crucial differences that serve to distinguish the proto-Marxist interpretation from the standard post-Kantian framework. The first and foundational difference involves the existence of final causality or internal purposiveness in nature. The now-standard post-Kantian interpretation of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel presupposes Sellars's core distinction between the realm of "empirical description" and the "space of reasons", a distinction that necessarily presupposes the absence of final causality in nature. The proto-Marxist framework approaches Hegel as the first modern philosopher to (...) overcome the strained but stubbornly persistent fantasy of pure mechanism and to recognize the ineliminable role of Aristotelian final causes in even the most basic domains of nature. The third difference involves the nature of Hegel's dialectic. Fourth, these competing frameworks provide divergent accounts of the constitution of the object. The post-Kantian framework plainly acknowledges Hegel's tendency to talk about organisms, artworks, and institutions as purposively structured wholes that cannot be properly explained in terms of causal laws. (shrink)

This paper concerns a surprisingly sharp disagreement about the nature of ancient Pyrrhonism which first emerges clearly in Kant and Hegel, but which continues in contemporary interpretations. The paper begins by explaining the character of this disagreement, then attempts to adjudicate it in the light of the ancient texts.

In this article, I discuss an interpretation of Hegel's concept of the “Inverted World”, which is present in the final part of the chapter on Force and Understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Other than my own reading of the chapter, I also summarize the three most important interpretations of the verkehrte Welt from the last century: those of Jean Hyppolite, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Joseph Flay. I have chosen these three due to the typology of interpretation within them: the first (...) one adopts a Christian reading of Hegel, the second a Hellenistic phenomenological interpretation, and the last one, which is closest to the interpretation I also propose, a reading consistent with the thought of Immanuel Kant. The article ends with a possible interpretation of Hegel's verkehrte Welt through Kant's “Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” from his Critique of Pure Reason, where I argue that Kant's fundamental faculty of imagination and its object, schemata, play the same role in Kant's system that Hegel's verkehrte Welt does in the development of natural consciousness. (shrink)

This paper proposes a reading of Kelsen’s basic norm based on Kant’s regulative ideas. I begin by exposing Kant’s conception of the principles of reason. Then I criticize an interpretation of the basic norm along the same lines made by Stanley Paulson. Thirdly I analyze two theses from Hermann Cohen that influenced Kelsen greatly and reinforce my stance on the basic norm. Lastly, I explain how the Kelsenian tenet that the basic norm is the transcendental grounding of the normativity of (...) law can be comprehended based on the role the ideas of reason play in the systematization of knowledge. (shrink)

We create value for ourselves by making sacrifices. In Sacrifice and Value, Sidney Axinn presents the role of sacrifice in the work of many figures in the history of Philosophy. A novel feature is the attention given to Kant's use of sacrifice, and the way this changes the usual view of the Categorical Imperative, and Kant's concept of value.

Despite the praise his writing garnered during his lifetime, e.g., from readers such as Einstein and de Broglie, Émile Meyerson has been largely forgotten. The rich tradition of French épistémologie has recently been taken up in some Anglo-American scholarship, but Meyerson—who popularized the term épistémologie through his historical method of analyzing science, and criticized positivism long before Quine and Kuhn—remains overlooked. If Meyerson is remembered at all, it is as a historian of classical science. This paper attempts to rectify both (...) states of affairs by explicating one of Meyerson׳s last and untranslated works, Réel et déterminisme dans la théorie quantique, an opuscule on quantum physics.I provide an overview of Meyerson׳s philosophy, his critique of Max Planck׳s interpretation of quantum physics, and then outline and evaluate Meyerson׳s neo-Kantian alternative. I then compare and contrast this interpretation with Cassirer׳s neo-Kantian program. Finally I show that, while Meyerson believes the revolutionary new physics requires "profoundly" modifying our conception of reality, ultimately, he thinks, it secures the legitimacy of his thesis: that science seeks explanations in the form of what he calls "identification." I hope my research will enable a more general and systematic engagement with Meyerson׳s work, especially with a view to assessing its viability as a philosophical method today. (shrink)

Calling Kant a liberal philosopher requires important qualifications. Much like his theoretical philosophy, his political transcendentalism was and remains a great enterprise of navigating between the extremes of liberalism and conservatism, of balancing the “empirical” and the “pure” in human society, as well as in human mind. Of all the attempts to enlist Kant among the classics of liberalism, John Rawls’ is the most impressive and thorough. However, it is hardly a success. The reason for this lies in a profound (...) difference in their answering the fundamental question “What is Man?”. This paper is an attempt to revise the debate about the extent of Rawls’ Kantianism and to compare the meanings of basic concepts of what could be called “pure political anthropology” in Kant and in Rawls. (shrink)

It would be misleading to make any reference to Marx's “theory” of truth-for nowhere in the corpus of Marx's writings will one find an essay dealing with truth in a thematic way. Marx's scattered remarks on truth occur within the context of discussions of social questions. What one can pull together on the topic of truth amounts at most to the sketch of a concept which applies to social knowledge and not knowledge in general. My aim will be to reconstruct (...) Marx's concept of social truth on the basis of his writings on society and social theory.Those who want a systematic essay developing a general Marxist theory of knowledge have, of course, Lenin's classical formulation of Marxist epistemology in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. We also have Leszek Kolakowski's bold and heretical attack on Lenin's interpretation in “Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth” where we find the astounding claim that Marx's view of truth is closer to that of William James than to that of Lenin.Kolakowski's essay has been the subject of numerous attacks both by predictably indignant true believers and by independent, creative Marxists. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The New Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan once compared the ethics of Mengzi to that of Kant, claiming that Mengzi’s ethics shares the same fundamental features with Kant’s and can therefore be better understood through a Kantian lens. This paper aims to argue against Mou by elaborating on two important but hitherto insufficiently addressed differences between Kant’s and Mengzi’s ethics. First, the paper shows that, as opposed to what Mou suggests, passages 6A1 to 6A3 of the Mengzi demonstrate Mengzi’s adoption of (...) an a posteriori approach to ethics that stands in direct contrast to Kant’s a priori approach. Second, the paper argues that even if we read Kant’s ethics in a non-rigorous way that works in favor of Mou’s interpretation, ren (humaneness), yi (optimal appropriateness), li (observance of rites), and zhi (wisdom), as the core concepts of Mengzi’s ethics, can still hardly be regarded as Kantian moral laws. (shrink)

This book presents a critical reconsideration of the Kantian cognitive and practical subject. Special attention is devoted to highlight the complex relation between subjectivity as it is presented in the three critiques and the way in which it is construed in other writings, in particular the Anthropology. While for Kant our cognitive apparatus and the structure of our will are common to all humans, the anthropological subject reveals degrees of variation, depending on a myriad of external circumstances that pose a (...) challenge to the unity of Kant's account and await theoretical solutions. The essays collected in the volume delve into how the different shapes of human nature are not unrelated. They explore how and why different "Kantian subjects" are closely connected and at their core, if not entirely unified. The notions of personality, humanity, and citizenship will serve as leading threads for the reconstruction of this possible underlying unity. An engaging read that promises to deepen our understanding of human nature, the volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of philosophy, politics, psychology, social anthropology, ethics, and epistemology. (shrink)

Fichte is the first great Post-Kantian Idealist and his debt to Spinozism has been acknowledged by virtually all of his commentators. However, the extent of Spinoza’s influence on Fichte has not been spelled out in much detail. In response to this I propose to do two things. Firstly, I propose to provide a typology of interpretations of Fichte’s Absolute I, as some commentators seem to get entangled in these different interpretations, which can be very confusing to their readership. Secondly, I (...) wish to demonstrate that the Fichtean system is better understood in the light of its Spinozist influences. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of moral action faces a serious difficulty concerning motivation: how do commands of pure practical reason solely move human agents to perform moral actions? In his response, Kant claims that human agents perform moral actions out of a feeling of respect for the moral law. However, attempts to accommodate a feeling of respect into Kant’s rigorously rationalist ethical theory have led to two diverging strands of interpretation in the secondary literature: intellectualism and affectivism. Against this context, this paper (...) proposes an interpretation of Kantian moral motivation with an appropriate place for the notion of respect within it to resolve the motivational problem concerning moral actions. According to the model of Kantian moral motivation that this paper develops, motivation to act morally takes place in two sequential stages, each involving the positive role of respect as a motive. By arguing for a positive role of the feeling of respect in the process of moral motivation, this model aligns with the affectivist school of interpretation. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to interpret the naturalist epistemological project of W. Quine from a problematic nucleus that we can identify in I. Kant, especially in the Critique of Pure Reason, which is expressed in the categories of explanation-justification, experimental psychology and transcendental philosophy. The hypothesis of our work is that the naturalization of epistemology in a psychology by Quine is possible due to a dissolution of the limits of the concepts of explanation and justification, which have in (...) Quine a translation in the notions of concept and doctrine. To account for this, (i) we will propose, in a general way, the Kantian problematic nucleus about the distinction between explanation and justification and its relationship with the experimental psychology of the 18 th century; ii) we will analyze some important texts of W. Quine where he bases the project of a naturalization of epistemology. Our focus will be to establish the relationship between concept and doctrine as translations of Quine of the concepts of explanation and justification; (iii) finally; we will describe the psychology as a new epistemology and observational statements as an expression of this epistemological turn of Quine. (shrink)

This is an unedited version of a paper written in 2012 accepted for publication in a forthcoming Festschrift for Mark Platts. In it I argue that the Helmholtz/Bayes tradition of free energy neuroscience begun by Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues, and now being carried forward by Karl Friston and his, can be seen as a fulfilment of the Quine/Davidson program of radical interpretation, and also of Quine’s conception of a naturalized epistemology. -/- This program, in turn, is rooted in Helmholtz’s (...) scientific reconception of Kant’s notion of a concept-led synthesis of affectations by an extra-sensory reality that creates human self-consciousness, a topic previously discussed in my (2012) Psychoanalysis, Representation, and Neuroscience. -/- I also argue that 20th century analytical philosophy went astray when Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein ignored their legacy from Helmholtz and espoused a conception of perception and epistemology that he had already shown to be false. (shrink)

This paper attempts to present the intellectual structure within which Paul Ricoeur has conceived the possibility of a philosophical interpretation of myth. I propose that Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been able to integrate and harmonize structural analysis, phenomenological description, and ontological-existential analysis of the myth through a group of epistemological and ontological coordinates from the two first Critiques and from Kant's philosophy of religion.

LIU Qingping’s criticism of Confucian teachings of filial piety, though valuable in stimulating critical attitude toward classic Confucianism, is largely based on misinterpreting Confucians as Kantians. The article tries to show that, unlike the Kantian rule-oriented ethic that provides universal ethical principles, Confucianism focuses on the process of person-making, and the teachings of classic Confucianism are more like gongfu instructions than moral principles. Looking from the gongfu perspective, Liu’s criticism becomes misdirected, if not irrelevant.

RÉSUMÉKant affirme que nous exigeons l'accord des autres quand nous rendons des jugements de goût. Je soutiens que cette affirmation fait partie d'une explication de la façon dont la phénoménologie des jugements esthétiques familiers appuie son affirmation selon laquelle les jugements de goût sont universels. La théorie esthétique de Kant n'est plausible que si nous rejetons l'affirmation répandue selon laquelle cette exigence est normative. Je propose une lecture non normative des jugements de goût kantiens basée sur une étude des textes, (...) puis je conteste les trois interprétations normatives importantes, qui nous obligent à attribuer à Kant une position qu'il n'acceptait pas. (shrink)

This is a study of the epistemological theory of Theodor Adorno.

In this paper, I engage the debate on Suits’ theory of games by providing a Kantian view of Utopia. I argue that although the Kantian aspects of Suits’ approach are often overlooked in comparison to its Socratic-Platonic aspects, Kant’s ideas play a fundamental role in Suits’ proposal. In particular, Kant’s concept of ‘regulative idea’ is the basis of Suits’ Utopia. I regard Utopia as Suits’ regulative idea on game playing. In doing so, I take Utopia to play a double role (...) in Suits’ theory of games. First, it highlights the primary condition of possibility of game-playing, namely, the lusory attitude. Second, it provides a normative criterion that serves as a critical principle to evaluate instances of game playing and as a counterfactual assumption that makes game playing possible. I provide further support for my Kantian interpretation of Suits’ Utopia by bringing to light the anthropological assumptions upon which Utopia is built. In doing so, I argue that both Suits’ theory of games, in general, and his Utopia, in particular, lay out the conditions of possibility of game playing, not an analysis on the life most worth living. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between republican democracy and justice by comparing Philip Pettit's notion of neo-republicanism with that of Immanuel Kant. It begins by describing a republican, political conception of justice as nondomination and explaining why the discourse of republicanism and that of theories of justice often remain at odds with one another. It then considers the basis of a republican conception of justice as nondomination and locates it within the principle of justification, along with Pettit's idea of autonomy (...) and respect. It also examines the notions of ‘arbitrariness’ and ‘domination’ as well as Pettit's ‘negative republicanism’ and its emphasis on legally and politically secure freedom of choice. The chapter argues that a Kantian interpretation of modern republicanism is more convincing than Pettit's ‘negative republicanism’. (shrink)

This article outlines an epistemological perspective to understand the organism as a temporally changing whole. To analyze the mental faculties involved, the organism’s development and persisting existence is differentiated into four interdependent aspects: descent, future existence, persistent species, and environmentally adapted physical appearance. It is outlined that these aspects are recognized by comparative memory, concept-guided anticipation, conceptual thinking, and sensory perception, respectively. Furthermore, it is pointed out that these aspects correspond to the famous four Aristotelian “causes” or principles of explanation. (...) The descent of an organism corresponds to Aristotle’s efficient principle (“where does it come from?”), its future existence to the final principle (“what is if for?”), its physical structure to the material principle (“out of what is it?”) and its persistent species to the formal principle (“what is it?”). Aristotle regarded the unity of the efficient, formal and final principle as the ontological cause of the organism and called it the “soul” (psyche), while the material principle can be understood to represent its “body” (soma). I suggest that Aristotle’s “soul” corresponds to three of the four mental faculties required for cognition of a self-maintaining organism. I argue that in a Kantian perspective, the Aristotelian “soul” represents the condition for recognizing an organism at all. Therefore, the Aristotelian principle of life becomes intelligible and even empirically observable through the inner sense. In summary, I suggest that the four aspects of the organism described here can be viewed as the general, epistemological and ontological principle of the organism, the Bio-Logos. (shrink)

Presents the transcendental interpretation approach to psychological inquiry based on the use of the Kantian transcendental argument, which relies on the criterion of consistency. Kant's purpose in employing this argument was as a means for justifying particular knowledge claims. Use of this approach is illustrated by examining the intersubjective and moral conditions necessary for the practice of selfhood. It is argued that phenomena of interest to psychological study differ fundamentally from those of natural science, rendering some of the methods applied (...) in the latter inappropriate to the study of the former. The transcendental argument can provide a direction for psychological research in 2 ways: By helping it to lend intelligibility to its subject matter, and extending ordinary practices by making explicit the goods and norms that motivate them. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show how the interaction between Kantian ethics and some aspects of Heideggerian philosophy can lead to the model of a subject in immediate relationship with others and with his or her community. The positions of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida on this question are presented in contrast with those of Alain Renaut and Emmanuel Lévinas to elucidate their differing ways of interpreting the relationship between Kant and Heidegger with regard to ethics, apriorism, and (...) subjectivity. (shrink)

It has been argued that, on Kantian grounds, pedophiles, rapists and murderers are morally obligated to take their own lives prior to committing a violent action that will end their moral agency. That is, to avoid destroying the agent's moral life by performing a morally suicidal action, the agent, while he still is a moral agent, should end his body's life. Although the cases of dementia and the morally reprehensible are vastly different, this Kantian interpretation might be useful in the (...) debate on the permissibility of suicide for those facing dementia's effects. If moral agents have a duty to act as moral agents, then those who will lose their moral identity as moral agents have an obligation to themselves to end their physical lives prior to losing their dignity as persons. (shrink)

As a rule, the Kantian capacity for self-control is interpreted as a kind of tool for compelling ourselves to act on the basis of the maxims we have adopted. To the extent that we merely acknowledge its role in following already-adopted maxims, however, we fail to capture the distinctive aspect of moral self-control identified by Kant. In this paper, I propose a fuller account of the Kantian capacity for moral self-control; I do so mainly by analyzing this capacity as our (...) ability to “abstract from” various sensible impressions. This analysis shows that Kant’s conception of moral self-control involves two intimately related levels, which are subject to different criteria. Whereas the first level is connected to our ability to adopt moral maxims and requires that we abstract from all sensible impressions, the second is associated with our ability to follow these maxims and does not necessarily require this radical abstraction. (shrink)

The Kantian legacy has had a key impact on the landscape of theoretical philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Philosophers both in Germany and in Russia saw Immanuel Kant’s ideas as seminal for their philosophical research. The main schools of that era were formed in discussions of the problems and the solutions which were proposed by Kant. The methodological legacy of the critical philosophy effectively became the main benchmark of the thinking of a whole generation of intellectuals. (...) Research into the unity of “form” in the structure of human cognition was also in many ways mediated by the Kantian tradition. To prove this thesis I first look at the philosophy of Gustav Shpet who creatively interpreted the German tradition and proposed an original project of his own, and then I examine the theory of Ernst Cassirer, an outstanding representative of Neo-Kantianism who in the later period of his work proposed considering the phenomena of the humanities to be symbolic forms closest to the spontaneity of the biological. The common feature of the approaches of the two philosophers is their attempt to preserve the integrity of cognition which is destroyed by mathematisation of the common denominator (ultimate categorisation) and hierarchisation of the phenomena of human life. The alternative is the metaphor of mutational change, through which the concept of “form” acquires a new meaning. In conclusion I show that the analysis of the projects of Shpet and Cassirer has heuristic value for the historical-philosophical understanding of the fate of the Kantian philosophy and for modern philosophical culture. (shrink)

There is some limited contemporary scholarship on the theory of metaphor Kant appears to provide in his Critique of Judgment. The dominant interpretations that have emerged of Kant’s somewhat nascent account of metaphors are what I refer to as the symbolist view, which states that Kantian symbols should be viewed as Kantian metaphors, and the aesthetic idea view, which holds that Kant defi ned metaphors as aesthetic ideas . In this essay, I claim that the symbolist view of Kantian metaphors (...) is not plausible and that we should accept the aesthetic idea view in its stead. The jumping off points for my discussion are two fairly recent essays on the subject: A. T. Nuyen’s “The Kantian Theory of Metaphor” and Kirk Pillow’s “Jupiter’s Eagle and the Despot’s Hand Mill: Two Views of Metaphor in Kant.” Nuyen defends the symbolist view of Kantian metaphor and Pillow defends a split view, i.e., Pillow thinks Kant has a dual-aspect view of metaphor that can bear both the symbolist and the aesthetic idea interpretations. Although I make use of some of Pillow’s objections against the symbolist view, I conclude that both he and Nuyen are wrong in thinking that Kantian symbols have any relationship to Kantian metaphors at all. Lastly, I will provide my own positive account of Kant’s theory of metaphors as well as show how this debate affects Kant’s overallaesthetic theory. (shrink)

This paper is about Michel Henry’s interpretation of the topic of the soul in Kant’s thought. Two aspects of this topic will be particularly examined: Kant’s criticism of the concept of the soul as a substance and the I think as the consciousness that every representation of mine is a representation for me. Henry thinks that the insertion of this consciousness in Kant’s thought is a necessary incoherence that shows the impossibility to reduce appearing to representation. At the end it (...) will be shown that, in the context of henrian thought, the abandonment of the concept of the soul as a substance is a condition to assert the radical difference between human beings and things. (shrink)

The depth and diversity of scholarship on both Nāgārjuna and Kant is so staggering that any work invoking both risks losing itself in a sea of competing currents. I hope that the present offering is modest enough to stay afloat, but incisive enough to present interested readers with a thought-provoking case. Rather than a comparison between Kant and Nāgārjuna, my goal is to present an interpretation of Nāgārjuna that is lent systematic support by Kantian presumptions. Specifically, I am proposing a (...) reading of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamad-hyamakakārikā that takes advantage of a Kantian picture of the nature of judgment to account for how this text may achieve its goals.To accomplish this, we must set out with a... (shrink)