Ralph C. S. Walker

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.

Kant on the Number of Worlds

It has long been disputed whether Kants transcendental idealism requires two worlds – one of appearances and one of things in themselves – or only one. The one-world view must be wrong if it claims that individual spatio-temporal things can be identified with particular things in themselves, and if it fails to take seriously the doctrine of double affection; versions that insist on one world, without making claims about the identity of individual things, cannot say in what way the world as we know it and the world of things in themselves can be ‘the same’. The two-world view must be wrong if it denies Kants empirical realism, or offers a phenomenalist interpretation of it. On moral grounds Kant ‘identifies’ each human person with a particular thing in itself, but the relationship here cannot be strict identity; instead its closeness may warrant regarding the two distinct entities as part of a composite whole. Perhaps up to the first edition of the Critique, Kant thought that empirical knowledge required a particular kind of close correspondence between appearances and things in themselves, one that would make it appropriate to speak of composite wholes here also. By the time of the second edition, he saw that there could be no good grounds for thinking that. In this respect something a bit like the one-world theory might make more sense for the first edition than for the second; but in both cases there is room to speak of two worlds as well. Talk of the number of worlds is metaphorical, and both metaphors have their dangers.

The Primacy of Practical Reason

Kant holds that practical reason warrants belief in certain things for which theoretical reason finds no place, particularly freedom of will. Walker argues that Kant is right. For theoretical reason is not a means to truth, but a categorical imperative. We must follow it in interpreting the world, but only in limited respects.

Review article — New kant books

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Vol. I, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770. Ed. and tr. by D. Walford in collaboration with R. Meerbote, Cambridge University Press, 1992. lxxxi + 543 pp. £50.00 The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Vol. DC, Lectures on Logic. Ed. and tr. by J. Michael Young, Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxii + 695 pp. £50.00 The Genesis of Kants Critique of Judgment by John H. Zammito, University of Chicago Press, 1992.490 pp. £51.95 hb; £15.25 pb.

Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy

The dozen philosophers who have been made to play their parts upon our stage would all answer this question in different ways. There are lots of reasons why language has mattered to philosophy, and the reasons have doubtless been different in the several eras of philosophical speculation. Sometimes concern with language has obsessed philosophers to the point where deep matters were too little touched upon. In other periods failure to reflect at length upon the nature of language has perhaps done harm. No one can doubt that language has mattered to many philosophers. I have chosen my topics with a particular tradition in mind, and within that tradition I have allowed free play for my own tastes. Even so we have had a good gamut of traditional Great Problems: truth, reality, existence, logic, knowledge, necessity, dreams, ideas. Another choice, even within the same tradition, might have given us chapters on God, freedom, morality, induction, intention. Had we used a quite different kind of net, we should have pulled in plenty of philosophico-linguistic reflection on society, history, consciousness, action, and Man. Aside from what, in the opening chapter of strategy, I called the minor reasons why language has persistently mattered to philosophers, there need not be any true and interesting general answer to my question. Indeed, I am sure that no such answer is valid over the whole domain of Western philosophizing from Plato to the present.