This paper defends a constructive interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is built in analogy with an experimental construction that Kant believes to characteristic of chemistry. I also argue for a way to reconcile the methodological perspective of the constructivist method with that of transcendental reflection. I therefore provide a constructive explanation for what Kant describes as being pure reason and the argument of the transcendental deduction. I propose to frame the different perspectives in such a way that (...) the experimental construction is the ratio cognoscendi of pure reason, while pure reason is the ratio essendi of the experimental construction. O’Neill (1989, 2015) is one of the most important scholars that have argued for a constructivist reading of the Critique of pure reason (CPR). In this paper I develop and explore new aspects of this line of interpretation. One of the main criticisms raised against constructivist readings of Kant’s philosophy is an alleged commitment to subjectivism or voluntarism (cf. Kleingeld & Willaschek 2019). This concern led some scholars to rename their position as constitutivist instead (Korsgaard 2009; Sensen 2013, 2017; Formosa 2011). Constitutivism, is intended to be a sort of constructivism capable of avoiding voluntarism. However, it becomes difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between the constitutivist and foundationalist positions, which are based on transcendental reflection and imply a sort of realist perspective on reason. The same preoccupation applies to the constructivist interpretation of the CPR. In order to deal with this issue, the following questions must be addressed: how can constructivism justify the necessity and universality of transcendental principles of pure reason without compromising the normative and procedural aspects of the construction? How to reconcile arguments based on the analysis of representations and faculties with a constructivist procedure? Or even, how may transcendental reflection, as a view of the possibility of a priori cognition, be rendered compatible with a constructive procedure? This paper is divided into three sections, followed by brief final remarks. The first section outlines the main characteristics of constructivism and relates them to Kant’s positions about the nature of philosophy and its method. The second part argues for a type of experimental constructivism that might serve as a guiding analogy to understand the method underlying the CPR. Thirdly, I will show how the transcendental subject and pure reason are derived from this experimental construction. The conclusion briefly points out some advantages of this position. (shrink)

This paper offers a nuanced interpretation of Kant’s conception of the a priori, particularly in the context of constitutive principles. Contrary to the received view that separates necessity/universality from constitutivity—a distinction Kant allegedly failed to make—I propose a dual interpretation of the a priori that reconciles these aspects. This interpretation differentiates between a priori as ground (a priori-g) and as knowledge (a priori-k). The a priori-g, rooted in our mind’s invariant structure, encompasses pure (...) intuitions, concepts, and apperception, underpinning all knowledge and embodying constitutivity. Conversely, the a priori-k, deriving its necessity and universality from the a priori-g, is explained by the immutable subjective constitution. This paper argues that Kant implicitly prefigured Reichenbach’s distinction between necessity/universality and constitutivity, viewing their interconnectedness as justifying an extension of the former “marks” to all apriority. My analysis focused less on the synthetic a priori or the synthetic method and more on the constitutive, transcendental dimension of apriority, revealing Kant’s reasoning within the systematic context of the first Critique. It makes explicit Kant’s multiple notions of experience and a priori and his interconnected reasons for them—something that tends to be passed over in contemporary literature on constitutive a priori principles. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Bibliography.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic by Karen NgMarina F. BykovaKaren Ng. Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. iii + 319. Hardback, $85.00.In her insightful book, Karen Ng defends the fundamental significance of Hegel's concept of life, which she considers "constitutive" not merely of his dynamic account of reason but also of his "idealist program" itself (3–4), the very core (...) structure that grounds his idealism (151, 291). Integrating this concept into his philosophy allows Hegel to resolve three systematic problems indicated in the subtitle of the book: self-consciousness, freedom or self-determination, and logical form.The book offers a systematic account of the logical concept of life by defending three interconnected claims, helpfully summarized in chapter 1. The first, rather general claim clarifies Ng's interpretive point of departure. She maintains that the "core tenets" of Hegel's philosophy can be understood through the "purposiveness theme" inherited from Kant's a priori principle of purposiveness in his Critique of Judgment (5, 43). Ng advances this claim in chapter 2, where she argues that it is working through Kant's concept of inner purposiveness of natural ends from the teleological power of judgment that leads Hegel to develop his own account of Concept, which is foundational for his entire philosophical system (61–64).Chapter 3 continues the examination of Hegel's immediate predecessors in relation to the interpretation of his "speculative identity thesis" (8), which constitutes the second claim. According to Ng, Hegel first introduces this thesis—which remains central to all his works—in the Differenzschift. In this work, Hegel, siding with Schelling, criticizes Fichte's subjective version of idealism, more specifically for his explanation of the relation between subject and object as constructed and facilitated by subjective consciousness itself, thus rendering "nature lifeless and dead" (88). Opposing this approach, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel interprets the identity of object and subject as facilitated by the relation and opposition between self-consciousness and life. Thus, the speculative identity thesis assumes a fundamental significance of life for self-consciousness. Unfolding this thesis is at the core of Hegel's absolute method in the Science of Logic as well. On Ng's reading, Hegel's speculative thesis along with his account of self-consciousness also have their roots in the purposiveness theme inherited from Kant. What is at work here is Kant's claim that the principle of purposiveness is a necessary condition for judgment, which Hegel develops into a claim about the concept of life as being constitutive for self-consciousness.In the rest of the book (chapters 4–8), devoted to a close analysis of Hegel's Science of Logic, Ng advances her third and perhaps most original claim: understanding Hegel's [End Page 527] Subjective Logic "as his own version of a 'critique of judgment'" (18). She demonstrates that this part of the Logic offers a positive account of the concept of life that Hegel develops in his critical interaction with Kant. The most illustrative in this respect is the "Subjectivity" section of the Logic, in which the form of life is presented as the ground and presupposition of Hegel's theory of concepts and judgments. According to Ng, such a reading makes evident that "life opens up the space of reasons" (234, 281).Chapter 4 takes up Hegel's immanent deduction of the Concept argument, revealing that the key to understanding it is the concept of reciprocity (Wechselwirkung) (127), most fully recognizable as an internal purposiveness of the Concept itself.Ng traces the purposiveness theme through the entirety of the Subjective Logic, establishing its significance for understanding the deduction of the Concept and for the transition to the Idea. In her analysis, she closely follows Hegel's division of the Subjective Logic and addresses Subjectivity, Objectivity, and the Idea in chapters 5–8, respectively. With chapter 5, Ng moves to a discussion of how Hegel finds judgment to arise from the "original judgement of life," the initial unity and division of subject and object within life (172). Chapter 6 extends this discussion by elucidating the tension Hegel... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 232-233 [Access article in PDF] Giuseppina D'Oro. Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xi + 179. Cloth, $80.00. There is a resurgence of interest in Collingwood among philosophers and political theorists in the English-speaking world. One of the scholars leading this resurgence is Giuseppina D'Oro, whose fine monograph on Collingwood's metaphysics and epistemology appears in the (...) series "Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy." D'Oro's prose is lucid and tightly argued: her analyses of the problems that concerned Collingwood, as well as her reinterpretations and supporting arguments, are a thoughtful model of clarity.Collingwood is generally ignored except by philosophers of art and history; D'Oro aims to reassess Collingwood's important metaphysical and epistemological views and raise awareness of them. Arguing that, when not ignored, these aspects of Collingwood's philosophy often have been misinterpreted, D'Oro supplies a reconstruction and defense of Collingwood's conception of philosophical thought. Admirably and insightfully, she contextualizes his concerns within the past three centuries of philosophy and also within influential contemporary discussions (addressing, for example, relationships to Locke, Hume, Kant, Prichard, Russell, Ryle, Ayer, James, Rorty, and Quine). D'Oro demonstrates that Collingwood provides crucial contributions to both the history of philosophy and contemporary debates.For D'Oro, Collingwood's key text is his An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), which is concerned with the proper subject matter, method, and task of philosophy. This work, [End Page 232] with its distinction between philosophical and empirical concepts, introduces into Collingwood's metaphysics the Kantian element that D'Oro emphasizes to support her original interpretation. Collingwood's metaphysics, like Kant's, is described as a "descriptive metaphysics" or "metaphysics of experience" (2-3) which was intended to reform, not jettison, metaphysics. Conceptual rather than ontological, Collingwood's metaphysics is an epistemological project that reveals not the "structure of reality," but the "structure of experience" (2). According to Collingwood, all knowledge is based on presuppositions and conditioned by them; thus, metaphysics cannot be a presuppositionless "study of pure being" (3) or things-in-themselves. Rather, Collingwood's Kantian metaphysics aims to uncover the absolute presuppositions behind various aspects of experience, presuppositions that ground or make possible diverse forms of knowledge and that structure different domains of inquiry. D'Oro here argues intriguingly against a view of much Collingwood scholarship: that for the later Collingwood of An Essay on Metaphysics (1940), metaphysics is the study of the historically relative presuppositions adopted by diverse people of different historical eras or epochs, i.e., metaphysics entails historical relativism. Instead, D'Oro contends, metaphysics for Collingwood is the second-order study of the absolute presuppositons that provide the conditions for the possibility of disciplinary knowledge. Furthermore, she argues, this metaphysical view is consistent with An Essay on Philosophical Method. Contra some commentators, there is no "early" and "late" Collingwood, and the notion that he ultimately experienced a "radical conversion" (79) to historical relativism is false.Collingwood's metaphysics of experience entails that domains of inquiry such as art, religion, natural science, and history are governed by distinct presuppositions or a priori principles and thus provide complementary, not competing, accounts of reality. Hence, history deals with actions and presupposes that their causes are freely chosen reasons or motives; natural science deals with events and presupposes that they are caused by empirical regularities in nature. These presuppositional distinctions are philosophical and conceptual rather than empirical, and different areas of knowledge may address the same empirical objects in different ways.This truncated summary hardly does justice to the rich totality of D'Oro's book, much of which provocatively works out the implications of her reinterpretation. Among other things, she defends Collingwood against metaphysical realism, neo-empiricism, and logical positivism; addresses his idiosyncratic "'rehabilitation' of the ontological proof" (67); argues against the common view that his philosophy of history promotes "re-enactment" as a methodological procedure for historical practice; and explores his non-dualist and non-physicalist resolution of the mind/body problem.Perhaps... (shrink)

This paper draws out and connects two neglected issues in Kant’s conception of a priori knowledge. Both concern topics that have been important to contemporary epistemology and to formal epistemology in particular: knowability and luminosity. Does Kant commit to some form of knowability principle according to which certain necessary truths are in principle knowable to beings like us? Does Kant commit to some form of luminosity principle according to which, if a subject knows a priori, then they can (...) know that they know a priori? I defend affirmative answers to both of these questions, and by considering the special kind of modality involved in Kant’s conceptions of possible experience and the essential completability of metaphysics, I argue that his combination of knowability and luminosity principles leads Kant into difficulty. (shrink)

According to Greenberg, most commentators have misunderstood Kant’s purpose and method in the Critique of Pure Reason, as well as his underlying ontology. To correct these errors, Greenberg defends four theses. First, Kant is concerned only with a priori and not empirical knowledge in the Critique. Second, Kant’s underlying ontology consists of a monism of “things.” Third, the table of the logical functions of judgement is not drawn from general logic, because these functions have a “content.” And fourth, the (...) deduction depends on a distinction between two concepts of relations corresponding to the German terms Verhaltnis and Beziehung. The distinction is important, however, since Kant argues that the subject’s B-relation to objects consists in certain V-relations among representations. Throughout, Greenberg targets Strawson’s dismissal of Kant’s idealism, as well as positions taken by Allison, Guyer, and Kitcher. Although I am sympathetic with some of his views, it is not always clear how much he actually diverges from the standard reading. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents the Principle of Anticipations of Perception as follows: ‘In all appearances the real, which is an object of the sensation, has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree.’ This paper defends the tenability and coherence of Kant’s argument by solving three prominent difficulties identified by commentators. Firstly, on my interpretation, the schema of the category of ‘limitation’ presents an infinite sphere of possible realities, which provides the transcendental basis for the Principle. Secondly, I take (...) Kant’s otherwise problematic examples of intensive magnitudes to show how we determine a degree according to an ordinal sequence that is constituted by cardinal quantities. Thirdly, I distinguish in Kant’s writings the categorical continuity concerning the a priori principle and the empirical continuity concerning a posteriori sensations. While the former is necessary, the latter is merely possible; but we must nevertheless assume the latter as a cognitive aim. (shrink)

“Mathematics, synthetic unity and constitutive a priori”. Starting from the emphasis about the Kantian idea of the originary synthetic unity of apperception like the basic function on which rest the production of all synthetic judgment, in this paper I defend the idea of constitutive a priori of experience under the form of a similar synthetic principle but essentially formal, namely, the concept of transformation and group of transformations. To the same time, I try to show that Kant himself (...) inspired, for articulate his own position, on mathematics, especially on synthetic geometry. (shrink)

I examine how Kant argues for the transcendental ideality of space. I defend a reading on which Kant accepts the ideality of space because it explains our (actual) knowledge that mathematical judgments are necessarily true. I argue that this reading is preferable over the alternative suggestion that Kant can infer the ideality of space directly from the fact that we have an a priori intuition of space. Moreover, I argue that the reading I propose does not commit Kant to (...) incoherent modal views. If we carefully distinguish between different senses of modality, the fact that our spatial form of intuition is (in some sense) contingent does not undermine the claim that this form can explain how our mathematical judgments are (in some sense) necessary. (shrink)

This paper replies to objections that have been raised against my operational-Kantian account of thought experiments by Fehige 2012 and 2013. Fehige also sketches an alternative Neo-Kantian account that utilizes Michael Friedman’s concept of a contingent and changeable a priori. To this I shall reply, first, that Fehige’s objections not only neglect some fundamental points I had made as regards the realizability of TEs, but also underestimate the principle of empiricism, which was rightly defended by Kant. Secondly, in opposition (...) to what he states, my account does not differ in a very essential way from the empiricist solutions either as regards the power of TEs to predict something new about empirical reality, or as regards the criteria for telling apart good from bad TEs. Thirdly, in the light of the Kantian definition of the a priori, Friedman’s corresponding notion is contrary both to the spirit and to the letter of Kant’s philosophy; moreover, from a theoretical point of view, a material a priori is theoretically untenable since, counter to Friedman’s own intentions, it leads to relativism. -/- . (shrink)

After the completion of I. Kant’s “Copernican” turn in metaphysics, all subsequent European philosophy to one degree or another was under his influence. The purpose of the article is to consider the reception and transformation of the Kantian theoretical philosophy by the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. It is necessary to analyze the reasons for H. Cohen's and P. Natorp’s interpretation of Kant's criticism. To do this, one should consider (i) internalist and (ii) externalist factors in the formation of the Marburg (...) School. Neo-Kantianism, on the one hand, emerged as a response to materialism, naturalism, and post-Kantian German idealism. In addition, the Marburg School was strongly influenced by the change in the scientific paradigm in mathematical natural science at the end of the 19th century. The justification by the Marburgers of Kant’s a priori doctrine presupposed thematization, first of all, of: a) purity of thought; b) systematic unity of thought and experience; c) the orientation of philosophy to the “fact of science”; d) transcendental method. As a result, the Marburg School interpreted the Kantian concept of the unity of consciousness; abandoned the principle of synthetic (real) unity of consciousness in favor of systematic (logical) unity; substantiated the purity of scientific thinking; put forward the requirement of orientation of philosophy to the “fact of science”; developed the concept of the origin of thinking (Ursprung); abandoned the idea of “givenness” of the subject of knowledge and proved its “assignment”; changed the understanding of the essence and functions of the transcendental method; put forward the concept of thinking as “generation” (“production”); formulated a new understanding a priori. The changes that took place in the 19th century in philosophy, mathematical natural science and mathematical sciences led to a sharp activation of constructivism. It can be concluded that Kant’s epistemological paradigm was realistic constructivism. Pure constructivism became the paradigm of the Marburg School. (shrink)

This study aims, first, to delimit the seemingly synonymous concepts of “phenomenon” and “appearance” and second, to trace the functions of each in Kant’s philosophy and the phenomenological tradition. The analy­sis is based on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the central works of Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink. Kant does not explicitly distinguish the two terms and only speaks about phenomena when he deals with the categorial application of reason. With Husserl, appearance is linked with the area of (...) the natural attitude while the phenomenon is absolute. Fink’s position is interesting in that it differs from the views of the main representatives of transcendental philosophy, Kant and Husserl. According to Fink, appearing is the foundation of the fact that what exists is and that appearing is being. Fink takes a different approach to the meanings of appearance as opposing the thing in itself which possesses true but unknowable being and appearance as taking place in the “relative” sphere of the natural attitude : with Fink, appearance turns out to be the condition of the existence of objects. Appearance, understood through the prism of the human being which perceives something as Vorschein, implies an inherently open world. Following Fink, I analyse these provisions and examine, first, light as the metaphysical source of cognition, second, the human being as a special kind of being, third, the pre-Socratic treatment of being and, fourth, the formation of a distinct phenomenological idiom. I come to the conclusion that the metaphysical-ontological method of phenomenological analysis of appearance proposed by Fink affords a new insight into the a priori principle and the nature of Kant’s “thing in itself” and proposes a new grounding of Husserl’s thesis which questions Kant’s agnosticism. (shrink)

Kant claims that empirical laws of nature “carry with them an expression of necessity” (Kant, 1998 ; A159/B198). What precisely is this “expression of necessity” and what grounds it? The metaphysical necessitation approach asks “What are laws of nature for Kant?” It answers that, for Kant, empirical laws possess necessity and are grounded in the properties and causal powers essential to natural kinds. The epistemological systematization approach claims that empirical natures, kinds and causal laws are rightly viewed as necessitating in (...) virtue of the place they ideally take within an ultimate systematic conception of nature. The paper defends a hybrid transcendental-idealist approach to empirical necessity. It argues that Kant offers a transcendental deduction of the a priori principle of the systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature. In contrast to the systematization approach, this builds necessity into our most fundamental, conceptually articulated experience of nature. The approach can furthermore complement metaphysical necessitation accounts by showing that the commitment to necessitation follows from the metaphysical doctrine of transcendental idealism and the critical project of articulating the a priori transcendental conditions of experience. Recognizing the transcendental status of the principle of the systematic conceptual purposiveness of nature thus allows us to merge valuable insights of both the epistemological systematization and the metaphysical necessitation views. (shrink)

Sympathetic commentators on Kant’s account of physical knowledge agree that while philosophy of science has much to gain from Kant’s notion of constitutive a priori principles, Kant’s conceptual and methodological resources are inconsistent with the possibility of scientific change. In this article, I argue that this received view is lacking since Kant’s claim that a unique set of a priori principles structures our knowledge for all time is not central to his account of the constitutive a (...) priori. Two underemphasized points of Kant’s theory bear this out. First, Kant applies ‘a priori’ widely to include non-truth-evaluable elements of knowledge. As such, Kant primarily understands the necessity that attaches to these elements in light of the constitutive role they play in knowledge rather than in terms of truth for all time. Second, Kant uses two methods to establish the existence of constitutive a priori principles: the analytic and the synthetic. On my interpretation, while scientific change has discredited the analytic method, the synthetic method remains viable. In this way, I offer a new perspective on the ways in which Kant’s theory of the constitutive a priori can ground Neo-Kantian philosophies of science like those of Hans Reichenbach and Michael Friedman. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders the relation between Kantian transcendental reflection and 20th century philosophy of science. As has been pointed out by Michael Friedman and others, the notion of a "relativized a priori" played a central role in Rudolf Carnap's, Hans Reichenbach's and other logical empiricists' thought. Thus, even though the logical empiricists dispensed with Kantian synthetic a priori judgments, they did maintain a crucial Kantian doctrine, viz., a distinction between the level of establishing norms for empirical inquiry and (...) the level of norm-governed inquiry itself. Even though Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is often taken to be diametrically opposed to the received view of science inherited from logical empiricism, a version of this basically Kantian distinction is preserved in Kuhn's thought. In this respect, as Friedman has argued, Kuhn is closer to Carnap's theory of linguistic frameworks than, say, W.V. Quine's holistic naturalism. Kuhn, indeed, might be described as a "new Kant" in post-empiricist philosophy of science. This article examines, first, the relativization of the Kantian a priori in Reichenbach's work, arguing that while Reichenbach criticized "transcendentalism", he nevertheless retained, in a reinterpreted form, a Kantian-like transcendental method, claiming that the task of philosophy is to discover and analyze the presuppositions underlying the applicability of conceptual systems. Then, some reflections on Kuhn's views on realism are offered, and it is suggested that Kuhn can be reinterpreted as a Kantian transcendental idealist. Given the central importance of Kuhnian themes in contemporary philosophy of science, it is no exaggeration to claim that Kantian transcendental inquiry into the constitutive principles of empirical knowledge, and even transcendental idealism, still have a crucial role to play in this field and deserve further scrutiny. (shrink)

Abstract: This article contends that the relation of early logical empiricism to Kant was more complex than is often assumed. It argues that Reichenbach's early work on Kant and Einstein, entitled The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920) aimed to transform rather than to oppose Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One the one hand, I argue that Reichenbach's conception of coordinating principles, derived from Kant's conception of synthetic a priori principles, offers a valuable way (...) of accounting for the historicity of scientific paradigms. On the other hand, I show that even Reichenbach, in line with Neo-Kantianism, associated Kant's view of synthetic a priori principles too closely with Newtonian physics and, consequently, overestimated the difference between Kant's philosophy and his own. This is even more so, I point out, in the retrospective account logical empiricism presented of its own history. Whereas contemporary reconstructions of this history, including Michael Friedman's, tend to endorse this account, I offer an interpretation of Kant's conception of a priori principles that contrasts with the one put forward by both Neo-Kantianism and logical empiricism. On this basis, I re-examine the early Reichenbach's effort to accommodate these principles to the paradigm forged by Einstein. (shrink)

TGiulio Preti, born in Pavia (Italy) in 1911 and dead in Djerba (Tunisia) in 1972, represents one of the most subtle Italian thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. After graduating in 1933 discussing a thesis about The Husserl’s historical significance, he connected more and more to the Antonio Banfi’s lesson of critical rationalism and he elected him as his master. Starting from Banfi’s The principles of a reason theory (1927), Preti studied in depth the program of (...) historization of the Kantian transcendental both in books such as Idealism and positivism (1942), and in Praxis and empiricism (1957), in Rhetoric and logic (1968), and then in his numerous essay studies, later collected in fundamental posthumous volumes, Philosophical essays (1976, 2 vol.). Preti’s decisive problem is the following question: how is it possible to historicize human knowledge without a relativization? According to Preti, in order to answer this question, it is necessary to acknowledge the objectivity of scientific knowledge. The objective knowledge mustn’t be confused with an absolute knowledge or, least of all, with a subjective, or toutcourt relative, knowledge. Therefore it is necessary to avoid either opposite poles, but specular, in which the different epistemologicaltraditions of the last century are, on the contrary, stopped. In Preti’s opinion, the objectivity of knowledge arises from the eidetic, linguistic and operative structures, within the limits of which develops a determinate form of human scientific knowledge. In other words: every scientific knowledge, structured into a particularscientific theory and relating to a particular technological heritage, consists of a precise theoretical-practical horizon, that determines, with Husserl’s words, a specific “ontological region”, or, with Bachelard’s words, a specific “ontogenesis”. So Preti recovers the heuristic rule of the Kant’s transcendental reason. Nevertheless, unlike Kant, Preti believes the aprioristic structures of our ideas always have a conventional and historical foundation. In this way, the Kantian a priori changes into an historical and relativistic a priori. Certainly in Kant’s opinion an historical and relativistic a priori would have looked like a “round-square”, an authentic contradiction, a pure logical impossibility. According to Preti, on the contrary, this paradoxical aspect is the true distinctive feature of scientificknowledge objectivity, which has no more any eternal or absolute value, but is always built by men born to die and is always bound to determinate historical forms of civilization. Starting from these assumptions, Preti builds, in this way, a research programme on the possibility to individualize a form of “critic ontologism”, which hasn’t any more connection with the claims and the traditional metaphysical structures of the “Being qua Being”. On the contrary, Preti thinks the only “being” we can rationally talk about is the one constituted within the different cognitive ambits. Philosophy then must be able to develop a “meta-reflection” on different knowledge elaborated by single sciences. According to Preti, in fact, philosophy is the formality of human culture, it is, in other words, a form of self-reflection by the human culture about itself. Therefore philosophy has no more any privileged subject, but it must be always able to reflect, with great theoretical humility, on the different cognitive forms, in order to study languages, structures, methods, extension and limits of the human knowledge. In this way Preti’s “critic ontologism” is a kind of historical-objective transcendentalism, able to study the different configurations of the technical-scientific heritage produced by mankind during his history. (shrink)

The term "positivism" is generally used to refer to philosophical approaches that involve the acceptance of a verifiability principle. In this book, however, Richard Miller uses the term with a somewhat different sense, according to which "positivism is the assumption that the most important methodological notions--for example, explanation, confirmation and the identification of one entity with another--can each be applied according to rules that are the same for all sciences and historical periods, that are valid a priori, and that (...) only require knowledge of the internal content of the propositions involved for their effective application". Miller maintains that positivism, so understood, is fundamentally flawed. At the same time, however, he does not wish to embrace either a relativistic view of scientific theories--such as has been advanced by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty--or an antirealist view--defended, for example, by Bas van Fraassen. Miller attempts, therefore, to develop an alternative approach to the philosophy of science that, on the one hand, will avoid the difficulties which positivism encounters, and, on the other, will provide a satisfactory foundation for a defense of scientific realism. (shrink)

Epistemology has recently witnessed a number of efforts to rehabilitate rationalism, to defend the existence and importance of a priori knowledge or warrant construed as the product of rational insight or apprehension (Bealer 1987; Bigelow 1992; BonJour 1992, 1998; Burge 1998; Butchvarov 1970; Katz 1998; Plantinga 1993). This effort has sometimes been coupled with an attack on naturalistic epistemology, especially in BonJour 1994 and Katz 1998. Such coupling is not surprising, because naturalistic epistemology is often associated with thoroughgoing empiricism (...) and the rejection of the a priori. In this paper, however, I shall present a conception of naturalistic epistemology that is entirely compatible with a priori justification or knowledge. The resulting conception, I claim, gives us a better appreciation of the respective merits of the rational and the empirical, as well as a better understanding of how moderate epistemological naturalism comports, at least in principle, with moderate rationalism. This paper defends moderate rationalism; but it does not defend everything rationalists have often wanted, only what it is reasonable to grant them. (shrink)

How we read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has a huge influence on how convincing we find the parts of which it is composed. This thesis will argue that by taking its arguments and concepts in isolation we neglect the unifying architectonic method that Kant employed. Understanding this text as a response to a single problem, that of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgement, will allow us to evaluate it more fully. We will explore Kant's attempts to relate (...) the a priori and the synthetic in the Introduction, Metaphysical Deduction and Analytic of Principles of the Critique of Pure Reason. Having developed this reading at length we will be able to reassess Kant's relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's critique of Kant and his tendency to make selective use of his work has so far characterised their relations. However, by reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of its unifying method we will open up a new means of relating these two thinkers. Whilst Deleuze rejects many key Kantian concerns and concepts he embraces his methodological concern with the ability of problems to unify our thought. The problem-setting and forms of argument that emerge within Kant's architectonic method will be related to Deleuze's account of experience. This thesis will contribute to both Kant and Deleuze studies on the basis of the reading of the Critique of Pure Reason it will present. By showing how Kant's text is to be read as a whole we will be able to challenge the conclusion that the arguments he makes ultimately rely upon a notion of 'subjective origin'. The problem of accounting for 'the actual' through its relation to 'the virtual' in Deleuze's thought will be re-assessed on the basis of his newly established relation with Kant. Understanding Kant's method in the Critique of Pure Reason will be shown to strengthen both his own account of experience and that offered by Deleuze. (shrink)

According to a common reading of Kant, autonomy refers to the idea that pure reason gives the moral law to itself. Pauline Kleingeld and Marcus Willaschek reject this standard view both on textual as well as philosophical grounds. Instead, they argue that autonomy only selects mid-level principles, such as ‘help others,’ and that the moral law is a priori and not given. – In this paper, I first analyze on textual grounds what Kant means when he says that (...) a principle is a priori. I argue that Kant does not conceive of a priori laws as permanently existing entities. Rather they are the product of how reason necessarily functions if it is prompted by sensibility. Kant also uses the word ‘autonomy’ in this context. I then argue that this non-standard view of autonomy as an activity can meet the philosophical objections that Kleingeld and Willaschek raise against autonomy as a giving of the moral law. (shrink)

In his 1920 monograph Relativitätstheorie und Erkenntnis apriori the young Reichenbach distinguished between two meanings of the a priori: ‚apodictically valid, true for all time‘ and ‚constituting the concept of object‘. At the end of the 1990s Michael Friedman drew again the attention of philosophers of science to this forgotten distinction. In the spirit of Reichenbach’s early Kantianism Friedman attempted to construct a relativized or temporally variable a priori, which is nevertheless constitutive of the object of knowledge. Friedman (...) rejects an alternative historicized version of the a priori elaborated by the Marburg school and in particular by Cassirer. According to Friedman, Cassirer defended a regulative, but absolute version of the a priori, the existence of a yet-to-be-found set of final principles that are conditions of all scientific experience. This paper suggests that using the constitutive/regulative distinction as a basis for comparison is misleading. In order to understand the Marburg school’s conception of the a priori one should get back to Hermann Cohen’s interpretation of Kant and in particular to his own distinction between two meanings of the a priori. A more suitable comparison is that between Cohen’s opposition metaphysical-vs.-transcendental a priori and Reichenbach’s distinction apodictic-vs.-constitutive a priori. If the comparison is conducted along these lines—as already suggested in the mid-1920 s by the Dutch neo-Kantian Alfred C. Elsbach—it turns out that Cohen and the Marburg school and not Reichenbach provided a good example of a relativized a priori. (shrink)

When reasons are given for compositionality, the arguments usually purport to establish compositionality in an almost a priori manner. I will rehearse these arguments why one could think that compositionality is a priori true, or almost a priori true, and will find all of them inconclusive. This, in itself, is no reason against compositionality, but a reason to try to establish or defend the principle on other than quasi-a priori grounds.

This thesis is concerned with explaining how a subject can acquire a priori knowledge of arithmetic. Every account for arithmetical, and in general mathematical knowledge faces Benacerraf's well-known challenge, i.e. how to reconcile the truths of mathematics with what can be known by ordinary human thinkers. I suggest four requirements that jointly make up this challenge and discuss and reject four distinct solutions to it. This will motivate a broadly Fregean approach to our knowledge of arithmetic and mathematics in (...) general. Pursuing this strategy appeals to the context principle which, it is proposed, underwrites a form of Platonism and explains how reference to and object-directed thought about abstract entities is, in principle, possible. I discuss this principle and defend it against different criticisms as put forth in recent literature. Moreover, I will offer a general framework for implicit definitions by means of which - without an appeal to a faculty of intuition or purely pragmatic considerations - a priori and non-inferential knowledge of basic mathematical principles can be acquired. In the course of this discussion, I will argue against various types of opposition to this general approach. Also, I will highlight crucial shortcomings in the explanation of how implicit definitions may underwrite a priori knowledge of basic principles in broadly similar conceptions. In the final part, I will offer a general account of how non-inferential mathematical knowledge resulting from implicit definitions is best conceived which avoids these shortcomings. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Based on the dispute between Protagoras and Socrates on the origin of ethics, one can ask the question of whether the principle of ethics is reason orfeeling/emotion, or whether ethics is grounded on reason or feeling/emotion. The development of Kant’s thoughts on ethics shows the tension between reason and feeling/emotion. In Kant’s final critical ethics, he held to a principle of “rational a priori.” On the one hand, this is presented as the rational a priori principle being the (...) binding principle of judgment. On the other hand, it is presented as the doctrine of “rational fact” as the ultimate argument of his ethics. Husserl believed that Kant’s doctrine of a rational a priori totally disregarded the a priori essential laws of feeling. Like Husserl, Scheler criticized Kant’s doctrine of a rational a priori, and therefore developed his own theory of an “emotional a priori”. Both of them focused their critiques on the grounding level of ethics. Scheler, however, did not follow Husserl all the way, but criticized him and reflected on his thoughts. At last, he revealed the primary status of a phenomenological material ethics of value. (shrink)

One of the main theses defended in the Critique of Judgment – the specific aesthetic nature of an object solely consists of what is “merely subjective” – offers a wide range of points to be clarified in Kant´s third critical chief work. These includes above all the crucial question of justification of a special type of judgment based, on one hand, on a purely aesthetic satisfaction and claiming, on the other, a general approval and hence some kind of intersubjective validity: (...) a question which according to Kant only can be solved in a transcendental way, what means: on the basis of a principle a priori, universally valid for all aesthetic judgments. One of the most important structural components of this doctrine is undoubtedly Kant´s key concept of a “free play of the faculties of cognition” and the further issue of a “sensus communis aestheticus”. My purpose is to show that in these sections is stated that we have to consider, besides the particular structure of an aesthetic judgment, its specific feasibility conditions, and that in this respect Kant´s concept of an “aesthetic common sense” represents an important systematic complement addition to his transcendental argumentation strategy as a whole. (shrink)

Historians of modern philosophy have been paying increasing attention to contemporaneous scientific developments. Isaac Newton's Principia is of course crucial to any discussion of the influence of scientific advances on the philosophical currents of the modern period, and two philosophers who have been linked especially closely to Newton are John Locke and Immanuel Kant. My dissertation aims to shed new light on the ties each shared with Newtonian science by treating Newton, Locke, and Kant simultaneously. I adopt Newton's philosophy of (...) geometry as the starting point of investigation, for here I believe we have a constructive means by which to assess Locke and Kant's relationship to Newton, In particular, I defend the thesis that the justification Newton, Locke and Kant offer for applying geometrical principles to nature is central to understanding their respective ties to a Newtonian science characterized by the intermingling of mathematics and experiment, Although little is said by Locke in regard to a mathematical approach to nature, I hope to show that his interpretation of the origins of our geometrical ideas has a close affinity to Newton's own characterization of geometry, leading us to reexamine the extent of Locke's 'Newtonianism.' Kant famously attempts to bridge the gap between geometry and the empirical world by establishing space as a "pure form of intuition." My discussion of Kant's Newtonian approach to nature centers on the imagination, and I argue that the mediating work completed by this faculty in geometrical construction and experience in general is equally important to understanding Kant's application of geometry to the empirical realm, In the end, I hope my treatment of the strategies employed by Newton, Locke, and Kant to account for a mathematical-experimental method of natural philosophy sheds further light on the importance of Newton to the progress of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Famously, in the essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Prize Essay), Kant attempts to distance himself from the Wolffian model of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, Kant scholars have pointed out Kant’s claim that philosophy should not imitate the method of mathematics and his appeal to Newton’s “analytic method.” In this article, I argue that there is an aspect of Kant’s critique of the Wolffian model that has been neglected. Kant presents a (...) powerful attack of the idea that philosophy should proceed through the analysis of concepts and argues that we should give up the aim of arriving at “complete” concepts as one of its fundamental desiderata. Importantly, this attack of philosophy conceived as conceptual analysis is distinctive and original if one compares it with Kant’s critique of analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason, which rests on the idea that analysis is insufficient to ground substantial metaphysical truths. I also make an additional point: Scholars have debated whether the appeal to Newton’s analytic method involves a form of empiricism. I submit that this debate is ill-conceived because Kant uses a notion of “given concepts” that is indeterminate with respect to their a priori or a posteriori status. (shrink)

Reconstructions of Kant are prominent in the contemporary debate over naturalism. Given that this naturalism rejects a priori principles, Kant's anti-naturalism can best be discerned in the “critical turn” as a response to David Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but to defend rational metaphysics. But when Kant went transcendental did he not, in fact, go transcendent? The controversy in the 1990s over John McDowell's Mind and World explored just this suspicion: the questions of the normative (...) force of reason and of the ontological “space of reasons” vis- -vis the world. “Bald naturalism” appears to “extrude” rationality both ontologically and epistemologically from the natural world. Kant sought to discriminate a transcendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion. But was Kant's notion of the autonomy and spontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as McDowell's critics would have it? Situating Hume and naturalism in the eighteenth-century German context can help us understand the “critical turn” more accurately. While Hume recognized procedural proprieties for reflection, he did not believe in their a priori necessity. Initially, Kant shared that view. What assimilating Leibniz and Locke in the late 1760s garnered for Kant—the simultaneous spontaneity and self-transparency of reason—seemed to provide a means for overcoming Hume's skepticism and establishing a new foundation for metaphysics. Accordingly, all of the efforts of modern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of the transcendent in Kant's transcendentalism. (shrink)

The article considers reflection as a method and condition of the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Husserl. At the beginning, the author refers to Kant's predecessors who used the term reflection (Wolf, Baumgartner) and concludes that Kant, when referring to reflection, rather adheres to the tradition laid down by Leibniz. Based on the text of the “Critique of Pure Reason”, the article argues that it is with the help of reflection that the formation of a priori categories and a (...) priori synthetic principles can be explained. The author distinguishes between reflection and the transcendental unity of apperception and examines, within the framework of the phenomenological interpretation of the “Critique of Pure Reason”, the role of this unity in the predilection of sensory diversity. The article shows the continuity in the understanding of reflection between transcendental phenomenology and Kant's philosophy. In Husserl's philosophy, reflection as a method is associated with reduction and contemplation. The author dwells on the features of the use of reflection in Husserl's studies, which include, first of all, the temporal language of description and the dependence of reflection on the phenomena to which it is directed. Orlova Yulia Olegovna (1970 2011) – is a Russian philosopher, Ph.D., in 1998 - 2011 worked at the Department of Ontology and Theory of Cognition of the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University. (shrink)

In this paper I present a new solution to the so-called ‘neglected alternative’ objection against Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism. According to this objection, Kant does not give sufficient justification for his claim that not only are space and time forms of our intuition but they also fail to be things in themselves or properties thereof. I first discuss a proposal by Willaschek and Allais, who try to defend Kant against this charge by building on his account of a (...) class='Hi'>priori intuition, and argue that it is insufficient to meet the objection in its full force. I then present my own solution to the problem. It is based on a reconstruction of Kant’s account of properties of appearances, and tries to show that this account implies that spatio-temporal properties could in principle not pertain both to appearances and to things in themselves. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I defend an interpretation of the methodological development of transcendental philosophy from Kant's first Critique to Fichte's later Jena-period Wissenschaftslehre. Both Kant and Fichte claim that experience is founded upon certain a priori subjective structures and capacities. However, I argue that the methodology of Kant's first Critique includes a number of assumptions and explicit doctrines that limit his ability to explain experience. The chief problem of Kant's theory of method is, I claim, his distinction between the (...) methods of philosophy and mathematics, whereby the method of construction is limited to mathematics. I argue that Fichte attempts to solve Kant's problem by expanding the method of construction to philosophy itself. As a method, construction has two aspects. First, the task of the philosopher is to reconstruct discursively the spontaneous process whereby subjectivity is self-constructing. By "self-construction," I refer to a functional structure wherein subjectivity is the achievement of a range of proto-conscious, primitive mental activities. Second, the method of the philosopher is similar to the method of geometric construction, viz., the postulation of a task to be completed regarding which one---beginning from putatively self-evident resources---creatively and imaginatively seeks out a solution. Fichte turns to construction since there is no algorithm for philosophical reflection and he revises Kant's important doctrines regarding intellectual intuition and the productive imagination. However, though Fichte's solution to Kant's problem is promising, the notion of construction itself generates a number of problems. (shrink)

In the current dialogue between two authors with different views on analysis, philosophy, and the use of labels, the leading question is: How should one understand the expression ‘analytic philosophy’? Lewin argues that as there are no generally agreed tenets and methods of what is being called ‘analytic philosophy’, the name is to be replaced by a more specific one or abandoned. Williamson defends the use of this phrase, claiming that it is quite serviceable, as it relates to a (...) broad tradition of influence, while it is not even required to adhere to the method of analysis in any distinctive sense. Lewin counters that, in this case, ‘analytic philosophy’ is too empty. One could heal this by conceptual analysis of ‘analytic philosophy’ — but then Kant, for whom philosophy is inherently analytic, would be a proponent of analytic philosophy. Another option is to follow Ryle’s ideal of a label-free, coherent and honest thinking. As Lewin argues, Williamson’s views seem at least partially to agree with Kant’s conception of the difference between philosophy and history of philosophy as well as empirical analysis and the underlying empirical realism. Williamson replies that he uses ‘analytic philosophy’ in its current meaning, which is not composed of the meanings of ‘analytic’ and ‘philosophy’. The current use is different from the earlier ones and not applicable to Kant. He argues against the transcendental idealism and the coarse-grained distinction between analytic and synthetic and a priori and a posteriori that requires an update. (shrink)

The main thesis defended in this paper is that Hildebrand’s distinction between what we could call quiddities—or “quasi-essences,” endowed with chaotic and accidental unity—and genuine essences possessing an intrinsically necessary unity, grounds the radical distinction between analytic and synthetic a priori knowledge. This thesis has not been expressly emphasized by Hildebrand himself. In order to prove it, we: (1) relate the three types of unities distinguished by Hildebrand with the three kinds of judgments discriminated by Kant; (2) outline what (...) we can call the “crux of empiricism”; (3) analyze four characteristic examples of synthetic a priori judgements; and (4) elaborate a provisional typology of synthetic a priori propositions, trying to include in it Hildebrand’s favorite examples. (shrink)

This article is mainly a critique of Philip Kitcher's book, The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. Four weaknesses in Kitcher's objection to Kant arise out of Kitcher's failure to recognize the perspectival nature of Kant's position. A proper understanding of Kant's theory of mathematics requires awareness of the perspectival nuances implicit in Kant's theory of pure intuition.

My aim is to demonstrate the specificities and differences between transcendental deduction of concepts and deduction of the fundamental principles of pure practical reason in Kant’s metaphysics. First of all it is necessary to examine Kant’s attitude to the metaphysics of his time and the problem of its new justification. Kant in his philosophy explicated not only the theoretical world of cognition, but also the practical world of freedom. Accordingly, the fundamental means of proving metaphysics’ claims are the deduction (...) of pure concepts of understanding and the deduction of the principles of pure practical reason. The underlying premises of the Kantian project of reviving metaphysics, “the Copernican Turn”, the critical methods and basic principles of transcendental idealism also provide the methodological basis of transcendental deduction, a new method of proving the claims of metaphysics in various spheres of human being. Proceeding from the above, I analyse the essence, structure and the peculiarities as well as the differences between the deduction of experience and the deduction of freedom. I single out the following features of the two types of deduction. First, theoretical use of reason is aimed at objects while practical reason is aimed at noumena, the foundations of will and freedom. Second, the transcendental deduction of space and time, as well as the deduction of categories, is preceded by transcendental reduction, which is absent in the deduction of freedom. Third, Kant orients the methodological movement of deductions in opposite directions. Theoretical deduction proceeds from pure forms of sensible intuition to concepts of understanding and thence to fundamental principles. Practical deduction proceeds from a priori principles to the concepts of the metaphysics of morals and thence to moral feelings. Fourth, deduction in the theoretical sphere forbids speculative reason to go beyond experience. Practical deduction has pointed to the intelligible world and has proved its “legitimacy”. (shrink)

While not paramount among Kant scholars, issues in the philosophy of mathematics have maintained a position of importance in writings about Kant’s philosophy, and recent years have witnessed a rejuvenation of interest and real progress in interpreting his views on the nature of mathematics. My hope here is to contribute to this recent progress by expanding upon the general tacks taken by Jaakko Hintikka concerning Kant’s writings on geometry.Let me begin by making a vile suggestion: Kant did not have a (...) philosophy of mathematics. When Kant was writing about mathematics, essentially he was reporting the views of others. The texts provide sufficient evidence to make this suggestion plausible. Generally, when Kant writes about mathematics in his mature works, he does so in order to illustrate or argue for a philosophical point. There are important references to mathematical method in the preface to the 1787 edition of Critique of Pure Reason; however, Kant’s purpose is to describe those basic features of a method that he intended to incorporate in his theory of philosophical method: ‘our new method of thought, namely, that we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them.’ Indeed, Kant makes it clear in this preface that he thought there to be no extant problems to be solved in mathematical methodology; such was the state of the science, he thought. It was for this reason that Kant felt some confidence in borrowing from this method to improve the state of metaphysics; it is also for this reason that one should not expect to find Kant engaging in basic research in mathematical methodology. Similarly, the material on syntheticity added to the second edition Introduction to Critique of Pure Reason occurs in the context of a discussion of the syntheticity of metaphysical principles; that the propositions of both disciplines are synthetic a priori lends credence to the extrapolation of some features from the mathematical method for use in developing a metaphysics. Many writers find a philosophy of mathematics in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’; it is clear, however, that in this section his concern is to support his theory of the nature of space, time, and sensation. What is said about geometry, for example, is restricted to those of its features relevant to the subjectivity of space. The other major discussion of mathematics and its method is found in the section, ‘Doctrine of Method.’ Here we find Kant’s fullest account of the mathematical method and of constructions. It must be borne in mind, though, that his purpose is to argue against views that the proper methods of mathematics and metaphysics are identical, that the disciplines differ in subject matter alone. The result of the discussion is not a theory of mathematical method, but an account of the method proper to the philosopher.2 Kant simply is mentioning certain features of mathematical method sufficient to support the claim that the philosopher cannot incorporate it lock, stock, and barrel.’ In short, we do not find a systematic theory of mathematics or its method described by Kant in the first Critique, nor do we find discussions of mathematics other than in contexts where philosophical positions are being developed. This holds for Kant’s other works, too. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction: Emancipation from Metaphysics? Natural History, Natural Philosophy and the Study of Nature from the Late Renaissance to the EnlightenmentTinca Prunea-Bretonnet and Oana MateiThis special issue is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between natural history, natural philosophy, and the metaphysics of nature in the early modern period up to the mid-eighteenth century. It considers the evolving dynamics among these disciplines as well as the role played by (...) natural history in modern hermeneutics and aesthetics. The collected papers examine how early modern natural history acquires a growing importance in the study of nature, while observation and experiment gain epistemic priority among experimental philosophers. In the early modern and modern periods the critique of systems of natural philosophy and of Cartesian metaphysics goes hand-in-hand with the prioritization of experimental facts and collected data. The latter become the first, indispensable step in the process of knowledge acquisition. This is the case for Francis Bacon and his followers, who establish natural and experimental history as [End Page 549] the preliminary step and the foundation for natural philosophy. Baconian natural history consists of a vast collection of observations and experiments from which, by induction, the experimenter is able to provide axioms and general rules of nature. These axioms and general rules constitute the foundation on which natural philosophy would be built. According to this approach, theoretical claims must be supported by experimental evidence, while natural philosophical theories, alert to the dangers of speculation, are inferred, by induction, from natural and experimental history (Anstey 2005, pp. 215–42; Anstey 2020; Anstey and Jalobeanu 2022, pp. 222–37; Anstey and Vanzo 2012, pp. 499–518; Corneanu et al. 2012; Jalobeanu 2015; Serjeantson 2014, pp. 681–705). Laws and principles are thus to be admitted in the study of nature, but only if founded on experimentally verified facts. This perspective seems to reject speculation and abstract systems and to contest their role in natural philosophy altogether. However, in spite of its influence on eighteenth-century thinkers, this approach to natural history would not go uncontested.In the eighteenth century these transformations were accompanied by a new emphasis on metaphysics in the study of nature. While natural history was still largely regarded as preliminary to natural philosophy and continued to play a significant role in knowledge acquisition, Enlightenment philosophers elaborated new methods which rehabilitated metaphysical principles in the study of nature and promoted competing perspectives reassessing their pre-eminence (Anstey 2020). Two rival perspectives seem to compete on the philosophical scene: on the one hand, experimental thinkers justifying the theoretical autonomy of natural philosophy and emphasizing the prevalence of mathematical and empirically-oriented methodologies; on the other hand, novel approaches to the theory of principles arguing for the foundational role of metaphysical (a priori) principles and of speculative disciplines, such as metaphysical cosmology. This special issue explores the tension between the new role conferred to metaphysical disciplines and the study of nature, including a particular focus on the writings of Maupertuis, d’Alembert, and Kant. Our aim is to nuance the familiar narrative that inscribes Kant in the metaphysical tradition of Descartes and Wolff and opposes the latter to an experimental lineage comprising post-Newtonian thinkers such as Condillac, d’Alembert, and Maupertuis (Leduc 2015, pp. 11–30; contrast with Anstey 2018, pp. 131–50).In order to shed new light on these transformations and tensions, the collected papers address the complex interplay between natural history, natural philosophy, and the metaphysics of nature. Particular attention is devoted to the different methodologies in use starting with the late Renaissance and leading up to the mid-eighteenth century. We examine not only conceptions arguing for a decisive role played by observation [End Page 550] and experiment, but also more speculative treatments of the study of nature, where principles and metaphysical standpoints reclaim a foundational function, albeit through a revised definition of metaphysics and a novel understanding of the role of speculative disciplines, such as cosmology.Andreas Blank’s paper, “Protestant Hermeneutics and the Persistence of Moral Meanings in Early Modern Natural Histories,” examines the divergences in the symbolic interpretations of animals proposed in hermeneutics and in natural histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth... (shrink)

This book introduces a new approach to the issue of radical scientific revolutions, or "paradigm-shifts," given prominence in the work of Thomas Kuhn. The book articulates a dynamical and historicized version of the conception of scientific a priori principles first developed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. This approach defends the Enlightenment ideal of scientific objectivity and universality while simultaneously doing justice to the revolutionary changes within the sciences that have since undermined Kant's original defense of this ideal. Through (...) a modified Kantian approach to epistemology and philosophy of science, this book opposes both Quinean naturalistic holism and the post-Kuhnian conceptual relativism that has dominated recent literature in science studies. Focussing on the development of "scientific philosophy" from Kant to Rudolf Carnap, along with the parallel developments taking place in the sciences during the same period, the author articulates a new dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles. This idea applied within the physical sciences aims to show that rational intersubjective consensus is intricately preserved across radical scientific revolutions or "paradigm-shifts and how this is achieved. (shrink)

The theory of space-time developed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is connected to Leonhard Euler’s proof of invariance under Galilean transformations in the “On Motion in General” of the latter’s 1736 Analytical Mechanics. It is argued that Kant, by using the Principle of Relativity that is the output of Euler’s proof as an input to his own proof of the kinematic parallelogram law, makes essential use of absolute simultaneity. This is why, in (...) the Transcendental Aesthetic, he observes that “our theory of time explains as much a priori knowledge as the general theory of motion displays.” In conclusion, it is shown that the same proof-method, under a different definition of simultaneity, leads to the parallelogram law of the “Kinematic Part” of Einstein’s 1905 “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. (shrink)

Kant's original version of transcendental philosophy took both Euclidean geometry and the Newtonian laws of motion to be synthetic a priori constitutive principles—which, from Kant's point of view, function as necessary presuppositions for applying our fundamental concepts of space, time, matter, and motion to our sensible experience of the natural world. Although Kant had very good reasons to view the principles in question as having such a constitutively a priori role, we now know, in the wake (...) of Einstein's work, that they are not in fact a priori in the stronger sense of being fixed necessary conditions for all human experience in general, eternally valid once and for all. And it is for precisely this reason that Kant's original version of transcendental philosophy must now be either rejected entirely or radically reconceived. Most philosophy of science since Einstein has taken the former route: the dominant view in logical empiricism, for example, was that the Kantian synthetic a priori had to be rejected once and for all in the light of the general theory of relativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 Paul Guyer. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 482. Cloth, $59.5 o. Paper, $x9.95. For several years now, Paul Guyer has been publishing articles on what he sees as numerous different strategies pursued by Kant in his attempt to deduce the objective validity of pure categories. In this very long, extremely (...) detailed book, he has brought together the results of much of that work, added to it extensively, and defended at length a comprehensive and highly controversial view of the Deduction. The book has five major parts: on Kant's early views, on the deduction from 178187, on the "principles of empirical knowledge" (most of which is devoted to an elaborate reconstruction of the Analogies argument), on the Refutation of Idealism, and on transcendential idealism in general. More broadly Guyer's central thesis has two parts. In the first he tries to show that the more well-known versions of the Deduction are disappointing failures. According to Guyer, Kant variously tried to deduce the objective validity of pure concepts from the assumption that we do possess a priori knowledge of objects, from the assumption of empirical knowledge of objects, for which a priori conditions must be found, from a claim about a priori knowledge of unity of the self, and from the a priori conditions of empirical self-knowledge. The first three attempts are said to fail, all for somewhat different reasons, but all in a way linked to an implausible (and, to a skeptic, question-begging) premise about "necessary connection" in experience. Moreover, given this premise, these strategies all involve a commitment to very strong views about experience (e.g., it is necessary that any possible manifold of experience be subject to the categories) and to an accompanying claim about the mindimposed unity of experience, considered by many the "dark side" of Kant's enterprise. It is the last strategy that for Guyer represents the most philosophically interesting tactic and that constitutes the second major claim he makes. In this version, Kant is trying to show that "time determination," whether of objects represented in consciousness, or of representations themselves, empirically apperceived, can be shown to presuppose the objective validity of, at least, the Analogies. Guyer claims that this last strategy, while it represents the "original" idea of a Deduction entertained by Kant in the first half of the Silent Decade, only emerges in the Cr/t/que in the Analogies and Refutation of Idealism, and is only fully explored by Kant after the Critique's publication. It involves only a "conditional" argument for the categories ("if there is to be experience there must be objectively valid categories"); the categories are thus valid for whatever in a manifold can be an object of a cognitive claim, and are not "necessarily" imposed on a manifold per se. Guyer's attack on what he regards as the standard reading of the Deduction is far too detailed to address point by point. I can merely note three difficulties with his approach. First, he attributes to Kant a premise that goes far beyond the "standard" beginning contrast between the "arbitrary representations of states of the self as such" and the "rule-governed representation of an object." According to Guyer, all commentators (somewhat surprisingly) have failed to see the following: that when Kant makes this contrast, and appeals to the object as "that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united" (B x37), he really means that the "object" is that in virtue of BOOK REVIEWS 139 which the representations of a manifold are necessarilyunited 0og). This attributes to Kant the very strange view that empirical judgments are necessary truths of some sort, and even though Kant often explicitly denies this (even once in the course of the Deduction, at B142, cited but dismissed by Guyer), Guyer claims that only by such a claim can Kant hope to deduce the objective validity of pure categories. In almost all cases of textual evidence cited by Guyer, however, it is possible and often much more natural to read Kant as claiming that... (shrink)

Like previous theorists of natural law, Kant believes in the possibility of a rational theory of ius, but also claims that the very concept of ius naturae and the method of investigation of its principles must be thoroughly reformulated. I will maintain that Kant solves the methodological problem of natural law theories by stating that a rational doctrine of Right concerns pure rational knowledge. Right must be conceived as a metaphysical doctrine in which its principles and laws are (...) determined a priori. By conceiving the idea of a “metaphysics of morals” and linking Right with it, he finds a way both to conserve the notion of ius naturae ) and to purify it from any empirical or anthropological element. (shrink)

I argue that Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy—in particular the doctrine of transcendental idealism which grounds it—is best understood as an `epistemic' or `metaphilosophical' doctrine. As such it aims to show how one may engage in the natural sciences and in metaphysics under the restriction that certain conditions are imposed on our cognition of objects. Underlying Kant's doctrine, however, is an ontological posit, of a sort, regarding the fundamental nature of our cognition. This posit, sometimes called the `discursivity thesis', while considered (...) to be completely obvious and uncontroversial by some, has nevertheless been denied by thinkers both before and after Kant. One such thinker is Jakob Friedrich Fries, an early neo-Kantian thinker who, despite his rejection of discursivity, also advocated for a metaphilosophical understanding of critical philosophy. As I will explain, a consequence for Fries of the denial of discursivity is a radical reconceptualisation of the method of critical philosophy; whereas this method is a priori for Kant, for Fries it is in general empirical. I discuss these issues in the context of quantum theory, and I focus in particular on the views of the physicist Niels Bohr and the Neo-Friesian philosopher Grete Hermann. I argue that Bohr's understanding of quantum mechanics can be seen as a natural extension of an orthodox Kantian viewpoint in the face of the challenges posed by quantum theory, and I compare this with the extension of Friesian philosophy that is represented by Hermann's view. -/- A shorter version of this paper, focusing specifically on the views of Grete Hermann, has been published as: Cuffaro, Michael (2023). Grete Hermann, Quantum Mechanics, and the Evolution of Kantian Philosophy. In Jeanne Peijnenburg & Sander Verhaegh (eds.), Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 114-145. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to explore and demonstrate a specific mode of transcultural philosophical comparison by introducing an innovative theoretical model that I tentatively call the “method of sublation.” Through an illuminating case study centered around L i Zehou 李澤厚, a prominent figure credited with pioneering this method, its profound potential for generating creative innovation comes to light. L i Zehou skillfully combined Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Marx’s historical materialism, creating a unique synthesis that sublated traditional divides. This sublation (...) elevates the empirical, seamlessly integrating it into the transcendental domain. The foundation of this paper lies in providing a concise yet comprehensive overview of the method’s theoretical underpinnings, closely followed by a meticulous dissection of its operational structure. A tangible application of the method is then vividly demonstrated through L i Zehou’s adept process of seamlessly sublating static Kantian _a priori_ forms with the dynamic principles of Marxist social development theory, exemplifying the potency of this transformative approach in the realm of philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scientific Method in PhilosophyAuthor's note: Thanks to Gregory Landini for helpful clarifications.Gregory Landini. Repairing Bertrand Russell's 1913 Theory of Knowledge. (History of Analytic Philosophy.) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. x, 397. isbn: 978-3-030-66355-1, us$139 (hb); 978-3-030-66356-8, us$109 (ebook).The title of this book might suggest a rather narrow study of a problem with Russell's Theory of Knowledge and a proposed solution. But as with Landini's first book, Russell's Hidden Substitutional (...) Theory, the title does not capture the full scope of the work. That work did not just point out the lingering substitution theory in Principia, but gave a sweeping view of Russell's overall development from Principles to Principia and one of the most detailed accounts of the formal system in Principia in any work. This work gives a sweeping overview of Russell's philosophy up to 1918, including not just Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment, but the whole project of what Russell called scientific method in philosophy, which was the subtitle to his 1914 Our Knowledge of the ExternalWorld. Landini thinks this is the height of Russell's philosophy and proposes a fix to the problems which led Russell to abandon the project.Landini does not just present Russell's views during this period, but vigorously defends them, and not just the multiple-relation theory of judgment mostly associated with Theory of Knowledge, but also the views that logic should be understood as synthetic a priori, Russell's doctrine of acquaintance, including the acquaintance with universals as the grounding of synthetic a priori knowledge, and Russell's view that logic is the essence of philosophy. The book contains a wide range of discussions, including issues in philosophy of mind, theories of representation, theories of universals, evolution in philosophy, and the metaphysics of time and space.The book opens with an overview of some main themes, including Landini's view of the three main phases of Russell's post-idealist philosophy and his discussion of what he calls the revolutions in logic and mathematics. The three phases Landini has in mind are the Principles phase, the Principia phase [End Page 81] (which includes The Problems of Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge) and the neutral monist phase, which Landini sees as a mistake Russell made when he didn't see how to repair his 1913 work. According to Landini, the Principles era ends with the failure of the substitution theory from the po /ao paradox, the Principia era ends by 1918 with the abandonment of the attempt to finish the project of the 1913 Theory of Knowledge, and the neutral monist era begins in 1919 and continues through 1948. Landini wants to concentrate on repairing the view in the Principia era. Any remarks of Russell's from later rejecting, for example, his view of the subject, of acquaintance, of neutral monism, and remarks concerning logic as consisting of tautologies are to be rejected. Landini firmly believes that after abandoning the 1913 project, Russell took a wrong turn. Landini's discussion of the multiple-relation theory of judgment is therefore quite different from the other discussion in the literature, in that most commentators have thought Russell was correct in abandoning the theory and most think there is something to Wittgenstein's criticism. Landini thinks Wittgenstein's criticism was based on his new vision of logic, and that Russell should have rejected it and proceeded with the project of Theory of Knowledge.Given the controversies involved in these claims, I think the best way forward is an explication of Landini's new emphasis on the revolutions in logic and mathematics and some of the key claims Landini makes concerning the Principia era. Then we can look at the details of Landini's repairing of the project.the two revolutionsWhat is striking about Landini's more recent work is his emphasis on these two revolutions. One is the revolution within logic, which originates with Frege; the other a revolution in mathematics which originates with Weierstrass, von Staudt, Pieri and Cantor. While most historians of this period are aware of the important shifts... (shrink)

In Chapter 6 of Objects of Credence, Anna Mahtani argues that the opacity of credence raises difficulties for the Principal Principle and proposes a revised principle relating credence and chance that avoids it. In this comment on her book, I both defend Mahtani’s proposed principle against a charge of triviality and argue that the opacity of belief does not threaten the role of chance in guiding credence.