Paul Guyer

Causal laws and the foundations of natural science

In the Transcendental Analytic Kant develops a characteristically striking - and at the same time characteristically elusive - conception of the causal relation. Thus, for example, in a preliminary section (13) to the transcendental deduction Kant introduces the problem by remarking that, with respect to the concept of cause, “it is a priori not clear why appearances should contain something of this kind” (A 90 / B 122); for, as far as sensibility is concerned, “everything could be situated in such disorder that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing offered itself that suggested a rule of synthesis - and thus would correspond to the concept of cause and effect - so that this concept would therefore be entirely empty, null, and without meaning” (A 90 / B 123). A memorable paragraph then follows: If one thought to extricate oneself from the difficulty of this investigation by saying that experience unceasingly offers examples of such rule-governedness of appearances, which [examples] provide sufficient inducement for abstracting the concept of cause therefrom and thereby simultaneously prove the objective reality of such a concept, then one is failing to observe that the concept of cause can absolutely not arise in this way. Rather, it must either be grounded completely a priori in the understanding or be entirely abandoned as a mere chimera. For this concept positively requires that something A be such that something else B follow from it necessarily and in accordance with an absolutely universal rule . Appearances certainly provide cases in which a rule is possible according to which something customarily occurs, but never that the result is necessary . To the synthesis of cause and effect there consequently also belongs a dignity that one absolutely cannot express empirically: namely, that the effect is not merely joined to the cause, but rather is posited through it and results from it. The strict universality of the rule is certainly not a property of empirical rules, which, through induction, can possess nothing but comparative universality: i.e., extended utility. Thus, the use of the pure concepts of the understanding would be entirely altered if one wanted to treat them only as empirical products. (A 91-2 / B 123-4)

The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant

The Unity of Reason is the first major study of Kants account of reason. Susan Neiman argues that Kants philosophy reconceives the nature of reason, and she shows how that philosophy provides a basis for the unity of theory and practice. Exploring the historical background of Kants notion of reason, as well as the role of reason in Kants accounts of science, morality, religion, and philosophy, she provides a fundamentally new perspective on Kants entire work.

The transcendental deduction of the categories

In the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant wrote: I know of no investigations that would be more important for getting to the bottom of the faculty that we call understanding and at the same time for determining the rules and limits of its employment than those that I have undertaken in the second part of the Transcendental Analytic, under the title of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding; they have also cost me the most, but not, I hope, unrewarded effort.” (A XVI) However, the initial response to Kants argument, which he also titled the “transcendental deduction of the categories” (A 85 /B 117), was largely one of incomprehension, and in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, Kant himself acknowledged that precisely “that part of the Critique which should have been the clearest was the most obscure, or even revolved in a circle” (4:474 n.). So in the second edition of the Critique , published the following year, Kant completely rewrote the transcendental deduction. He claimed that this revision touched only the manner of “ presentation ,” not the “propositions themselves and their grounds of proof” (B xxxvii-xxxviii). But in spite of Kants efforts at clarification, the intervening two centuries have brought little agreement in the interpretation of the deduction, even on the fundamental question of whether the two editions of the Critique , in 1781 and 1787, try to answer the same question by means of the same argument. The last three decades alone have brought forth dozens of competing interpretations or “reconstructions” of Kants transcendental deduction.

KANT ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF AUTONOMY

We all know what Kant means by autonomy: “the property of the will by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of the objects of volition)” ( G , 4:440), or, since any law must be universal, the condition of an agent who is “subject only to laws given by himself but still universal ” ( G , 4:432). Or do we know what Kant means by autonomy? There are a number of questions here. First, Kants initial definition of autonomy itself raises the question of why the property of the will being a law to itself should be equivalent to its independence from any property of objects of volition. It is also natural to ask, how does autonomy as Kant conceives it relate to more familiar notions of freedom. For example, consider Lockes conception of freedom as the condition of a person “to think, or not to think; to move, or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind,” rather than according to the preference or direction of any other person. What is the relation between autonomy and this traditional conception of freedom as the liberty of an agent? And what is the relation of autonomy to the traditional conception of freedom of the will; that is, the condition that obtains, as G. E.

Rational theology, moral faith, and religion

BACKGROUND By the middle of the seventeenth century, Lutheran theology had become an ossified and sterile orthodoxy. It was challenged by two currents of thought that were to lead to the eighteenth-century German Enlightenment. The first was Pietism, founded by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705). The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of doctrinal propositions but a living relationship with God. They stressed above all the felt power of Gods grace to transform the believers life through a conversion of “born again” experience. Pietism was hostile to the intellectualization of Christianity. Like Lutheran orthodoxy it exalted scriptural authority above natural reason, but for Pietism the main purpose of reading scripture was inspiration and moral edification. The experience of spiritual rebirth must transform the believers emotions and show itself in outward conduct. Within the universities, the Pietists favored cultivation of piety and morality in life rather than theoretical inquiry. In religious controversy, they urged that the aim should be to win over the heart of ones opponent rather than to gain intellectual victory.

Empirical, rational, and transcendental psychology

Although Kant never developed a theoretical psychology of his own, he discussed psychological topics throughout his life. These discussions ranged from early, brief remarks on mind-body interaction in the True Estimation of Living Forces (§§5-6, 1:20-1) of 1747 to the relatively late, extended treatment of the faculties of cognition in the Anthropology, published from Kants lecture notes under his supervision in 1797. In his lectures on metaphysics, from the 1760s onward, he followed common practice and regularly discussed what he and his contemporaries called “empirical” and “rational” psychology (records of these lectures survive through student notes: 28:59- 122, 221-301, 583-94, 670-90, 735-75, 849-74, 886-906). And in the preface to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) he examined the question of whether empirical psychology could ever achieve a scientific status like that of physics, notoriously answering that it could not (4:471). For our purposes, however, the central problems pertaining to Kants relation to psychology arise in the Critique of Pure Reason . In the Critique Kant distinguished his philosophical aim from that of empirical psychology. He also investigated the possibility of empirical and especially of rational psychology. In addition, and problematically, he adopted, even in the avowedly philosophical portions of the work, an implicitly psychological vocabulary. Because of his extensive use of this vocabulary, interpreters have, from the instant of the Critiques publication, disputed the extent to which Kant rested his arguments on psychological ground.

A History of Modern Aesthetics

Volume 1: 1. Prologue Part I. Aesthetics in Britain, 1725-1800: 2. Hutcheson to Hume 3. Hogarth, Burke, and Gerard 4. From Kames to Alison and Stewart Part II. French Aesthetics in Mid-Century: 5. Andre to Rousseau Part III. German Aesthetics between Wolff and Kant: 6. The first generation of Wolffian aesthetics 7. German aesthetics at mid-century 8. Coming closer to Kant Part IV. Kant and After: 9. Kant 10. After Kant. Volume 2: Part I. German Aesthetics in the First Half of the Nineteenth-Century: 1. Early Romanticism and idealism 2. In the shadow of Schelling 3. The high tide of idealism 4. In the wake of Hegel Part II. (Mostly) British Aesthetics in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: 5. Ruskin 6. Aestheticism 7. Bosanquet and Tolstoy Part III. German Aesthetics in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: 8. In the shadow of Schopenhauer 9. Neo-Kantian aesthetics 10. Psychological aesthetics: play and empathy. Volume 3: Part I. German Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century: 1. German aesthetics between the wars: Lukacs and Heidegger 2. German aesthetics after World War II Part II. Aesthetics in Britain until World War II: 3. Bloomsbury, Croce, and Bullough 4. First responses to Croce 5. Collingwood Part III. American Aesthetics in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: 6. Santayana 7. The American reception of expression theory I: Parker to Greene 8. Dewey 9. The American reception of expression theory II: Cassirer and Langer 10. After Dewey and Cassirer Part IV. Wittgenstein and After: Anglo-American Aesthetics in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century: 11. Wittgenstein 12. The first wave 13. The second wave.

Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume

Credits vii Sources and Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 CHAPTER 1: Common Sense and the Varieties of Skepticism 23 CHAPTER 2: Causation 71 CHAPTER 3: Cause, Object, and Self 124 CHAPTER 4: Reason, Desire, and Action 161 CHAPTER 5: Systematicity, Taste, and Purpose 198 Bibliography 255 Index 263

Beauty and Utility in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

There was considerable debate about the relationship between beauty and utility in eighteenth-century aesthetic theories from Shaftesbury to Kant. But nobody gave a plausible account of this relationship until Kant, and even he failed to give an extensive statement of the key premise on which his solution to this puzzle rests, or even an explicit statement of his solution, at least until many sections after he had first presented his solution. In this paper, I will try to make Kant’s analysis of the relationship between beauty and utility clear and to expose the philosophical assumption on which his solution rests. The debate about beauty and utility began with the third Earl of Shaftesbury. In a well-known passage of The Moralists, Shaftesbury’s spokesman Theocles argues that “the property or possession” of the object of a vista, such as a vale or an orchard, is not necessary for “the enjoyment of the prospect,” and then continues to press his interlocutor Philocles:

The coherence theory of truth : realism, anti-realism, idealism

Clarifies the coherence theory and critically discusses the standard objections to it as well as those who can be interpreted as advocating it. This book should be of interest to students of philosophy and epistemology and professional philosophers.