a vigorous and challenging defence of direct realism in which one gets not only a clear overview of what precisely the problems are, but also a forceful and ...

SummaryThe paper undertakes to disentangle the problem facing Kant's Third Antinomy from the problems confronting the transcendental reality of time and the distinction between things–in–themselves and appearances. Three different resolutions of the Third Antinomy are distinguished. It is shown that neither the appeal to the transcendental ideality of time nor to the distinction between things‐in‐themselves and appearances in the first Kritik resolution succeeds in resolving the antinomy as Kant states it. The appeal in the Groundwork to the distinction between heteronomy (...) and autonomy shifts the problem. And the reliance in the second Kritik on our ability to know a priori that there are necessary connections in our experience fails in yet another way to forestall the antinomy. The common core of all of these difficulties lies in what is called here the Duplication Problem: The tendency of the distinctions introduced to resolve the problem to duplicate the very antinomy they are supposed to resolve. Finally, it is shown how isolating these issues helps to strengthen Kant's argument for transcendental ideality and to clarify the conditions under which the antinomy can he resolved. (shrink)

The author states and tries to defend what he calls the Theory of Direct Reference against descriptionalist theories of referential expressions. Both kinds of theory are applied to proper nouns and indexicals as well as to general terms. The author also attempts to defend the claim that there are, contrary to the philosophical tradition, necessary a posteriori propositions that are not only self-consistent but true. And, finally, the author holds that the Theory of Direct Reference has certain potential consequences for (...) Essentialism. (shrink)

The author claims that "'true' is not a real predicate". She argues to this conclusion by first dividing the received accounts of truth into the correspondence, redundancy, and prosentential theories, continues by attempting to refute them all, and ends by replacing them with what she calls the "resentential theory." The author correctly identifies the problems facing any theory of truth only to offer a theory which itself succumbs to those very problems.

The Kant-Hegel theory of the self allegedly prevents us from explaining how we can attribute passitivity and activity to one and the same self without either destroying the distinction or covertly assimilating one part of it to the other. Kant's theory of the self inaugurates Hoffman's problem. Kantian synthesis is the work of the Understanding. But the awareness that a series of representations belongs to a single object is not another element in the synthesized manifold. It is supplied by the (...) pure ego and we are passive when we intuit objects; active when we synthesize them. The form of an object in general is supplied by the pure self. Thus the ostensible facts of passive intuition turn out to be covert facts of conceptual transcendental activity. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, moments are parts of one time. In the Transcendental Analytic, the unity of time is a product of the pure ego. The unity of time is not itself another moment in time. Thus, the unity of temporal succession is not just a concept of such a unity but a fact about the activity of the pure ego. We are not merely unable to know time independently of an act of the pure ego. Time itself cannot exist apart from such an act. (shrink)

The author tries to read ontology out of existence by means of a series of linguistic recommendations. His presiding assumption is that all ontological disagreements are matters of linguistic reference. His dominant claim is that quantification has wrongly been thought to imply existence. His strategy rests on the success of his claim that Kant's reasons for holding that "exist" is a logical and not a real predicate is the precursor of Frege's account of existence as a second rather than a (...) first order predicate. His conclusion is that all of the traditional problems which have dominated ontological inquiry can be dissolved once it has been shown, first, that the vehicles of reference which have historically been associated with ontological claims are linguistically dispensable and secondly, that what have been taken to be names or definite descriptions are really second order predicates. Both names and definite descriptions can be translated without remainder into second order predicates. Predicates do not denote because they are not names. The problems of ontology are not really problems at all because their traditional formulations are ill formed. Ontology is a linguistic repugnancy. (shrink)