This article presents a critical analysis of two influential readings of Kant’s Second Analogy, namely, Gerd Buchdahl’s “modest reading” and Michael Friedman’s “strong reading.” After pointing out the textual and philosophical problems with each, I advance an alternative reading of the Second Analogy argument. On my reading, the Second Analogy argument proves the existence of necessary and strictly universal causal laws. This, however, does not guarantee that Kant has a solution for the problem of induction. After I explain why the (...) empirical lawfulness of nature does not guarantee the empirical uniformity of nature, I examine the modal status of empirical laws in Kant and argue contra Buchdahl and Friedman that empirical laws express two different kinds of necessity that are not reducible to each other. -/- . (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article examines Kant's response to the criticisms of natural theology that Hume articulates in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Though Kant was in agreement with the Dialogues' rejection of dogmatic theism, he equally viewed many of its arguments as a threat to his aim of constructing a critical theology. Kant is often taken to have successfully diffused this skeptical threat on the basis of a symbolic anthropomorphism articulated in the Prolegomena. However, I argue that the Prolegomena (...) account remains susceptible to Hume's criticisms, and that it was only several years later in the third Critique that Kant was able to show how the Dialogues' skeptical conclusions can be circumvented. In this manner, I aim to show that Hume's challenge is more significant, and Kant's response more complex, than has previously been acknowledged. (shrink)

This dissertation project aims to solve −what I call− Kant’s “problem of empirical laws,” a problem concerning the coherence of Kant's claims that empirical laws as laws express a kind of necessity, and as empirical judgments they are contingent. In the literature, this issue is framed in the context of Kant’s relation to Hume, and formulated as a question of whether Kant agrees with Hume that empirical laws are mere contingent generalizations. The disagreement on Kant’s conception of (...) empirical laws partly stems from attributing different goals to Kant's argument in the Second Analogy. In my dissertation, I closely examine the two most popular readings of the Second Analogy, namely the "modest" and the "strong" readings, which view the Second Analogy as responding to Hume's "problem of causation" and "problem of induction" respectively. After pointing out some textual and philosophical problems with both readings, I offer an alternative interpretation of what the Second Analogy establishes, which allows me to read Kant's apparently conflicting passages in a coherent manner, and thereby solve Kant’s problem of empirical laws. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 101 Heft: 3 Seiten: 376-406.

In this book, the first to describe and assess Hume's influence throughout Kant's philosophy, Guyer shows where Kant agrees or disagrees with Hume, and where Kant does or doesn't appear to resolve Hume's doubts.

Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation (...) as such a refutation, and (3) that none of Hume’s early German critics provided responses to this account that would have satisfied Kant. Watkins’ reading of Kant’s account of causation is thus more compatible with traditional views about Kant’s relationship to Hume than Watkins believes. (shrink)

This paper will make the case that we can find in Kant’s Second Analogy a substantive response to Hume’s argument on induction. This response is substantive insofar as it does not merely consist in independently arguing for the opposite conclusion, but rather, it identifies and exploits a gap in this argument. More specifically, Hume misses the possibility of justifying the uniformity of nature as a synthetic a priori proposition, which Kant looks to establish in the Second (...) Analogy. Note that the focus on the paper is on Kant’s identification of the form that a solution to Hume’s inductive scepticism must take. In making this point, my paper will look to establish two lemmas: Kant identifies synthetic a priori judgments as a means of justifying metaphysical knowledge in a way that circumvents Hume’s dichotomy between matters of fact and relations of ideas; the Second Analogy looks to establish the uniformity of nature of as a synthetic a priori proposition. However, my paper generally abstains from the question of the tenability of Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy. Doing justice to this latter discussion would require more space than I am able to offer here. My paper therefore has a conditional bearing on the philosophical issue of inductive scepticism. If one believes Kant’s Second Analogy to be philosophically cogent, then Kant offers a successful justification of induction against Hume’s scepticism. If not, then at least one can still admire Kant’s identification of the gap in Hume’s argument, which, to a degree, can be exploited independently of Kant’s system. (shrink)

This paper takes off from Allison and argues that our ability to distinguish events from objects shifts the burden (or “challenge”) back to Hume as regards our concept of causation.

Teaching Kant’s metaphysics to undergraduates in a survey course can be quite challenging. Specifically, it can be daunting to motivate interest in Kant’s project and present his system in an accessible way in a short amount of time. Furthermore, comprehending some of the important features of his requires some understanding of Hume’s skepticism. Unfortunately, students often misunderstand the extent and relevance of Hume’s skepticism. Here, I offer three strategies for presenting Kant’s metaphysics as a response to (...) class='Hi'>Hume. First, I describe an exercise for presenting the problem of induction in a way that resonates with many students. Next, I provide a way of generating interest in Kant’s project so students are motivated to understand his position. Finally, I explain a game I use to bolster interest in Kant’s project and explain some of the more challenging aspects of the First Analogy. (shrink)

Kant’s Inferentialism draws on a wide range of sources to present a reading of Kant’s theory of mental representation as a direct response to the challenges issued by Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature. Kant rejects the conclusions that Hume draws on the grounds that these are predicated on Hume’s theory of mental representation, which Kant refutes by presenting objections to Hume’s treatment of representations of complex states of affairs and the nature of judgment. (...) In its place, Kant combines an account of concepts as rules of inference with a detailed account of perception and of the self as the locus of conceptual norms to form a complete theory of human experience as an essentially rule-governed enterprise aimed at producing a representation of the world as a system of objects necessarily connected to one another via causal laws. This interpretation of the historical dialectic enriches our understanding of both Hume and Kant and brings to bear Kant’s insights into mental representation on contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. Kant’s version of inferentialism is both resistant to objections to contemporary accounts that cast these as forms of linguistic idealism, and serves as a remedy to misplaced Humean scientism about representation. (shrink)

Book 1, Part 4, Section 5 of Hume’s Treatise is taken up with a response to an argument for the immateriality of the soul that Hume considered “remarkable,” and that Kant was later to describes as the “Achilles” (the strongest) of all the arguments for this conclusion. This paper surveys versions of the argument offered by Cudworth, Bayle, and Clarke before going on to argue that Hume’s own treatment of the argument departs from the standard in (...) a number of important ways. The departures restate the argument in Humean terms, replacing premises concerning inherence, substance, and action, which Hume considered to be false or unintelligible, with ones mentioning conjunction at a location in space, which he considered to be at least intelligible. These changes challenge the view that Treatise 1.4.5 was intended as a satire or a lampoon. A satire or lampoon exposes a flat statement of its target view to ridicule. It does not modify that view— certainly not by way of introducing improvements to make it more intelligible. Hume meant to endorse what he said in Treatise 1.4.5. In particular, he meant to endorse the tenets that that there are mental states that are spatially extended, and that it is as difficult to explain how an immaterial soul could contain extended mental images as to explain how a material soul could contain unextended thoughts. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to present Reid's answer to Hume's claim that religion is contrary to natural human moral passions. Religion, according to Hume, weakens natural human inclinations toward virtue and invents new species of merit. Reid would respond, first, that morality is indeed tied to human nature, and that Hume fails to recognize that a sense of justice is natural as well. Since justice does not arise within human social conventions, Reid would conclude that (...) justice is not a virtue that is limited to the human domain. Second, Reid would argue that the concordance between natural moral human motives and natural non-moral motives is a sign of design. And third, Reid would argue that uncorrupted religion is one that is faithful to morality and human nature, and that does not distort natural motives. Overall, Reid holds that the moral faculty is a natural human faculty that gives rise to natural inclinations and beliefs, but that these are concordant with religious beliefs and practices prescribed b.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:69. DID BEATTIE DEFER TO HUME? Robert Paul Wolff, in his essay, "Kant's Debt to Hume Via Beattie," points out a 'rather interesting mistake ' made by Norman Kemp Smith in his Commentary to Kànt's Critique of Pure Reason. In the Commentary Kemp Smith considers the similarities of the respective theories of self of Kant and Hume and finds it intriguing that the two philosophers (...) agree"...that there is no single empirical« 2 state of the self which is constant throughout experience". In spite of this agreement of doctrine Kemp Smith insists Kant must have arrived at his conclusions independently of any reading of Hume. We are told this is so because "Hume's view of the self is not developed in the Enquiry, and is 3 not mentioned by Beattie". And since, as Kemp Smith argues, Kant had only the Enquiry and certain passages of Hume's Treatise as quoted by James Beattie in An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth available to him, this agreement must be considered an accident rather than evidence of an 4 influence of Hume on Kant. Here then is the 'interesting mistake'. Wolff does not wish to dispute the more or less canonical assessment that Kant's knowledge of Hume rested on first hand acquaintance with the Enquiry and Beattie' s Essay rather than the Treatise. However, Wolff does want to question Kemp Smith's account of how much Hume Kant could have gleaned from Beattie. Kemp Smith tells us that in the Essay Beattie says nothing of Hume's theory of self. But as every reader of the Essay knows Beattie spent no less than six pages on Hume's discussion of self and personality, and considered it very important: at least important enough that he seems to have felt that a mere description of Hume on the self would serve as a reductio on the Humean body of beliefs. Still, according to Wolff, what appears to be a mistake made by Kemp Smith turns out not to be one at all. Wolff infers from the 1776 date of Beattie' s Essay which 70. Kemp Smith cites that he was working from the sixth edition, the edition which Beattie, responding to Hume's attempt in the Advertisement for the Enquiries to deny responsibility for the Treatise, "...altered his discussion of Hume's philosophy so that his criticism would not apply to the Treatise alone". Such an alteration of the Essay meant, according to Wolff, making the topics of the Essay line up in number and content with those of the Hume's Enquiry. But as we all know Hume does not discuss personal identity in the Enquiry. Thus this topic is omitted from the sixth edition of Beattie's Essay. And thus Kemp Smith's "mistake" turns out not to be one at all. Even if this dissolution by Wolff of what appears to be a mistake by Kemp Smith were correct we would still have puzzles to contend with. For example, the discussion of causation in the Enquiry has long been recognized to differ? significantly from that of the Treatise. One would then expect that Wolff would also cite some change in the sixth edition of the Essay on this score. Yet Wolff does not mention any alteration in the sixth edition account of causation, and in fact a comparison of the relevant sections of the sixth with an earlier edition will not yield any significant difference in the texts. But, be this as it may, where before we had one seeming mistake and the promise of its being dissolved, we now have two strange mistakes both irresolvable. For the discussion of Hume on personal identity which Wolff and Kemp Smith say does not occur in the edition of Beattie's Essay of 1776 is really there, substantially unchanged from earlier editions. For the sake of completeness it should be noted also that even though Wolff refers only to the sixth edition printed in 1776 there are also at least three other printings of the sixth edition (in 1777, 1778 and 1805), but this makes little difference since Beattie's treatment of the topic of personal identity... (shrink)

In issue 6.1 of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, James Van Cleve describes Thomas Reid's understanding of double vision and then presents a challenge to his direct realism found in works of David Hume based on double vision. The challenge is as follows: When we press one eye with a finger, we immediately perceive all the objects to become double, and one half of them to be remov'd from their common and natural position. But as we do not attribute (...) a continu'd existence to both these perceptions, and as they are both of the same nature, we clearly perceive, that all our perceptions [i.e., all the things we perceive] are dependent on our organs, and the disposition of our nerves and animal spirits. (THN: 210–211). (shrink)

By taking into account some texts published between the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that have been neglected by most of those who have dealt with the deduction of the categories, I argue that the core of the deduction is to be identified as the ‘almost single inference from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general’, which Kant adumbrates in the Metaphysical Foundations in order to ‘make up for the deficiency’ of the (...) A-deduction. Whereas the first step of the B-deduction is an attempt to show that the manifold of an intuition belongs to the ‘necessary unity of self-consciousness’ by means of the synthesis of the understanding, the second step has the task of showing that the very same synthesis is responsible for the spatio-temporal unity of the manifold. Thus, Kant's ‘answer to Hume’ is that no spatio-temporal objects of experience at all are merely ‘given’, independently of the conceptual activities of the understanding. Against the established view I substantiate the claim that with this ‘almost single inference’ of the second proof step the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience consequently vanished from Kant's thinking. (shrink)

This chapter is about how Deleuze read Hume and how that reading contributed to his idea of a transcendental empiricism. In particular it discusses, first, Deleuze's engagement with Hume's empiricism, which he understands to be founded on a thesis of the externality of relations; and, second, what Deleuze calls the problem of subjectivity, which is what he takes Hume's account of human nature to concern. The chapter provides some support for Deleuze's innovative readings and concludes with remarks (...) on a contrast between Deleuze's and Kant's transcendental philosophies, tracing a source for the contrast in Deleuze's and Kant's responses to Hume. (shrink)

Reid declared Hume's appeal to variation in the magnitude of a table with distance to be the best argument that had ever been offered for the ‘ideal hypothesis’ that we experience nothing but our own mental states. Reid's principal objection to this argument fails to apply to minimally visible points. He did establish that we have reason to take our perceptions to be caused by external objects. But his case that we directly perceive external objects is undermined by what (...) Hume had to say about the role played by color in our perception of the primary qualities of bodies. (shrink)

In the Second Analogy, Kant argues that we must presuppose, a priori, that each event is determined to occur by some preceding event in accordance with a causal law. Although there have been numerous interpretations of this argument, we have not been able to show that it is valid. In this paper, I develop my own interpretation of this argument. I borrow an insight offered by Robert Paul Wolff. In Kant's argument, our need to presuppose that the causal determination (...) of each event rests not upon our need to impose a 'necessary' and 'irreversible' temporal order upon representations of the states of an object, as Kant is usually interpreted, but upon our need to generate a comprehensive representation that includes a certain a priori conception of events in the world around us. Although the argument I attribute to Kant is valid, it cannot compel the Humean skeptic to accept the necessity of presupposing the causal determination of each event: Kant has not successfully responded to Hume in the Second Analogy. (shrink)

Kant's ethics demand suppositions where a noumenal freedom does not contradict natural causality. A rational faith in God makes this possible, through a progressive program in nature, including history, through strife, culminating in the doctrine that the republican form of government represents man's essential ethical essence. This captures many traditional religious views but Kant asserts them as a rational exposition in response to modern and contemporary intellectual currents, especially Hume, Rousseau and Herder.

It would be difficult to find a philosopher who has suffered more injustices at the hands of his commentators (friends and foes alike) than Immanuel Kant. This is particularly true when it comes to the many anecdotes that commentators are, for some reason, quite fond of reciting about Kant. The problem is that such tales are often used surreptitiously to twist Kant's own explicit claims about what he was attempting to accomplish, so that when his writings are read with (...) these stories in mind, misunderstanding is almost inevitable. As an example, it is only necessary to think of the tale of the old ladies of Königsberg who became so familiar with Kant's rigid schedule that they used to set their clocks by his daily comings and goings. This may or may not be true; the point is that unless this anecdote is recounted with a certain skepticism, it is likely to encourage a prejudice whereby the reader of Kant assumes at the beginning that Kant's writings are filled with the unreasonably rigid and formalistic ravings of someone out of touch with the unpredictable passions that punctuate the life of an ordinary person. In other words, such stories are in danger of creating an image of Kant that may have little or no justification in the text. One could cite other examples, such as the story of how Kant used to lead the procession of university professors up to the cathedral each Sunday, only to desert it at the door, or Bertrand Russell's quip that Kant's response to being “awakened” by Hume was merely to invent a transcendental “soporific” to help him fall asleep again. (shrink)

This paper offers an imminent interpretation of Kant's political teleology in the context of his response to Moses Mendelssohn in Theory and Practice III concerning prospects of humankind's moral progress. The paper assesses the nature of Kant's response against his mature political philosophy in the Doctrine of Right . In `Theory and Practice III' Kant's response to Mendelssohn remains incomplete: whilst insisting that individuals have a duty to contribute towards humankind's moral progress, Kant has (...) no conclusive answer as to how individuals might act on that duty. `Theory and Practice III' lacks a clear conception of the distinctness of political morality from the domain of virtue; Kant's resort to teleological argumentation is indicative of his lack of an account of instituting Right. The latter can be found in the Doctrine of Right —yet Kant's earlier teleological arguments contribute crucially to the development of his mature morality of Right. Key Words: inborn duty • moral progress • political teleology • principles of Right. (shrink)

Within much contemporary epistemology, Kant’s response to skepticism has come to be epitomized by an appeal to transcendental arguments. This form of argument is said to provide a distinctively Kantian way of dealing with the skeptic, by showing that what the skeptic questions is in fact a condition for her being able to raise that question in the first place, if she is to have language, thoughts, or experiences at all. In this way, it is hoped, the game played (...) by the skeptic can be turned against herself.1 At the same time, however, this appeal to transcendental arguments is also widely felt to show what is wrong with Kant’s response to skepticism: for, it is suggested, such arguments can only be made to work against the background of his transcendental idealism. As we shall see, what this doctrine amounts to is much disputed; but as with any form of idealism, the worry is that it means compromising the very realism and objectivity we want to defend against skepticism in the first place, so that the price for adopting this Kantian strategy appears too high—the cure of using transcendental arguments in conjunction with transcendental idealism is almost as bad as the disease.2 Faced with this difficulty, two kinds of response have been canvassed. On the first, it is accepted that transcendental arguments do require a commitment to the wider philosophical framework of transcendental idealism, but it is claimed that this framework can and should be defended against the suggestion that it is itself ‘‘quasi-skeptical.’’ On the second, transcendental idealism is indeed abandoned as wrongheaded, but it is held that Kant’s transcendental arguments can be made to.. (shrink)

Kant's answer to Hume is seen to comprise the following: agreement with Hume that causal connection cannot be inferred from experience; moving beyond Hume in making causal conceptions presuppositions of experience ; distinguishing causality from other, more basic presuppositions of experience . Not only is causality a Verknuepfung, rather than a Bedingung, thereby relegating it to a lower level of generality, but its presence in the table of categories simply signifies the possibility of its application at (...) any time, not the necessity for a universally valid interpretation of temporal succession as given in the manifold, a specification that is only introduced after the schematism, in the Analogies of experience. Furthermore, unlike e.g. the transcendental unity of apperception, cause involves regulative, not constitutive principles. Failure to recognize all of this has created unnecessary controversy concerning the relative merits of Kant's response to the problem of justifying induction. (shrink)

Kant famously noted that a memory of Hume "interrupted" his dogmatic slumbers, an alarm commonly taken to have been sounded by the challenge Hume raised against the rational foundations of causal connections. The Prolegomena's discussion of the role played by Hume's skepticism in the development of the critical philosophy makes it relatively easy to see how to formulate something along the lines of "Kant's response to Hume," and a great deal of ink and toil (...) have been devoted to debates about the success of this project. Developing "Hume's response to Kant" is a bit trickier, not least because by the time Kant's views were made available, Hume had succumbed to a slumber much more permanent and literal than the... (shrink)

Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest (...) account of this debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant’s relationship to Hume sketched above. (shrink)

Hobbes and Hume on the imagination can initiate a discussion of empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries: here, however, it provides the opportunity to focus on Kant's attempt to overcome the limits of their sense originating, naturalist ethics. I argue the general point that Kant's response to his predecessors, both empiricist and non-empiricists, is to modify their focus on nature without falling into skepticism; indeed, his speculative metaphysics also is a response to classical ontological (...) metaphysics. Kant by providing two realms or perspectives, a natural and a noumenal, avoids many difficulties resulting from Hobbes and Hume's starting point in sense leading to imagination and a non-normative reason. Yet, challenged by Herder and the romantics, he uses a sort of residual view of the imagination in relation to the freedom of the noumenal, which results in difficulties for his speculative, noumenal metaphysics. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

As a response to the question posed in the title, this article presents a critical assessment of how the works of the nationalist–ideological philosophers can be seen as evidence against David Hume’s and Immanuel Kant’s ideas of race. Hume and Kant have certain ideas about race; if these ideas are true, then there is—and indeed, can be—no African philosophy. But there is African philosophy—that of nationalist–ideological philosophy; therefore, Hume’s and Kant’s ideas about race are incorrect.

Recent work on Mary Shepherd has largely focused on her metaphysics, especially as a response to Berkeley and Hume. However, relatively little attention has thus far been paid to the epistemological aspects of Shepherd’s program. What little attention Shepherd’s epistemology has received has tended to cast her as providing an unsatisfactory response to the skeptical challenge issued by Hume. For example, Walter Ott and Jeremy Fantl have each suggested that Shepherd cannot avoid Hume’s inductive skepticism (...) even if she is granted her metaphysics. In this paper, I examine Shepherd’s epistemology and argue that her response to Hume is more successful than the current literature suggests. In particular, I argue that, if Shepherd is granted her metaphysics, she can answer Hume’s demand for a rational justification of ordinary inductive inferences via a deductively justified uniformity principle and an appeal to parsimony. (shrink)

One thing to expect from a theory of absolute music is that it explains what makes it so significant to us. Kant rightly observes that the essence of absolute music is our affective response to it. Yet none of the standard 18 th century theories, arousal theory and aesthetic rationalism, can explain both the universality of a judgment of taste and its subjective emotional content. The paper argues that Kant’s own aesthetic theory of aesthetic ideas is on the right (...) path for explaining the emotive significance of music, but that Kant does not further pursue this route because his interest in a “theory of music” is only peripheral to his systematic interest as a transcendental philosopher. For both philosophical and historical reasons, Kant does not have a “theory of music.” Nevertheless, if we free Kant’s conception of aesthetic idea and its restriction to Geist from the background of its 18th century humanism, then Kant’s aesthetics of free play becomes a good theory to account for the broad variety of emotions in absolute music as a fine art proper. (shrink)

For Kant one of the goals of any critique of pure reason is to answer the question, how are a priori synthetic propositions possible? Because rationalists such as Eberhard and Wolff took the principle of sufficient reason (hereafter, the PSR) as the principle of all a priori synthetic judgments, understanding both the various formulations of this principle and arguments in favor of its use as an axiom in metaphysical reasoning provides an interesting back door to understanding The Critique of Pure (...) Reason. Despite his statements in the First Critique rejecting the PSR as a principle of judgment1, I argue that Kant was actually more sympathetic to the PSR than these passages alone would suggest. The Kant-Eberhard Controversy suggests that, even though Kant explicitly denies that the PSR can guide metaphysical reasoning, he actually presupposes its truth. I show that Kant’s position is tenable because, like the rationalists, Kant accepts the assumption that real essences exist and that they ground real possibility2; this leads him to accept the truth of all clear statements of the PSR. Unlike the rationalists, however, he does not accept the assumption that human understanding is isomorphic with real essences. As a result, Kant rejects only the use of the PSR to determine a priori the existence or properties of a thing. In this paper I hope to illuminate this position. I will begin with a survey of the various formulations of the PSR that have been put forward by Kant and his predecessors: Leibniz, Eberhard, and Wolff. Then I will examine Wolff and Eberhard’s arguments in favor of the PSR along with Kant’s criticisms of these arguments. Lastly, I will show why Kant rejected the very possibility of justifying this use of the PSR while presupposing its truth. (shrink)

George Wilson has recently defended Kripke’s well-known interpretation of Wittgenstein against the criticisms of John McDowell. Wilson claims that these criticisms rest on misunderstandings of Kripke and that, when correctly understood, Kripke’s interpretation stands up to them well. In particular, Wilson defends Kripke’s Wittgenstein against the charge of “non-factualism” about meaning. However, Wilson has not appreciated the full significance of McDowell’s criticism. I use a brief exploration of Kripke’s analogy between Wittgenstein and Hume to put this significance in sharp (...) relief. It emerges that McDowell’s response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein account of meaning is in important respects analogous to Kant’s response to Hume’s account of causality, particularly Kant’s complaint that Hume reduced the objective necessity of the causal nexus to a merely subjective necessity. In the same way Kripke’s Wittgenstein reduces the objective normative force of meanings to a “quasi-subjective.” community-relative status. (shrink)

Kant's response to ‘Hume's problem’ in his analysis of the a priori structure of causality as law-governed succession in the Second Analogy of Experience has unquestionably overshadowed the account of simultaneity (Zugleichsein), which follows in the Third Analogy. The analysis of simultaneity in the first Critique relies entirely upon that of succession and is ultimately no more than a more complicated variant of the causal dependence of substances: two objects are experienced as simultaneous only when each of (...) those objects grounds some determination of the other, that is when they are reciprocally determined in dynamic community. By investigating Kant's remark in the third Critique that the experience of the sublime “makes simultaneity intuitable” this paper develops a Kantian analysis of simultaneity that is irreducible to the more prominent analysis of causal succession. This more robust account of simultaneity is then seen to play an essential role in the constitution of the objects of perception (and not only the regulation of their relations) as thematized in the Axioms of Intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason. (shrink)

Although commentators sometimes mention a link between Kant and Nietzsche, this paper claims that the continuities in their moral thought have been insufficiently explored. I argue that Nietzsche may offer us a profound rethinking of Kant’s morality – one indebted to Kant’s ideal of critique. The paper first considers the wide apparent gulf between the thinkers. The second section seeks to explain this gulf in terms which relate to Kant’s overall project, while the final section deals with Nietzsche’s critique of (...) Kant’s reliance on rules of various sorts. I conclude with two suggestions for contemporary Kantian ethics that we might take from Nietzsche’s engagement. (shrink)