In this paper, I aim to reflect on the distinction between illusion and decep-tion regarding knowledge, using the analogy between the illusion of the senses and the tran-scendental illusion at the beginning of the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason as a guiding thread. After noting an affinity between the metaphor that opens the section & laquo;Phae-nomena and Noumena & raquo; of the Transcendental Analytic and the incipit of the Transcendental Dialectic, in the first section I discuss the gap between T & auml;uschung (illusion)and Betrug (deception) in the context of Anthropology, Lectures on Metaphysics and the Critique of Judgment. In the second part of this paper, I examine judgment as the key site where the shift from illusion to deception can occur; here my intention is to analyze the function of provisional judgments in empirical knowledge. The third and final section is devoted to transcendental illusion and responds to a twofold task: (I) to identify in regulative use of ideas the transcendental analogon of provisional judgments, and (II) to explore its positive implications for knowledge.
& centerdot; In this article I analyse how Kant conceives the problem of comparison in his pub-lished works (particularly the Anthropology, the first Critique, the third Critique) as well as in his Lectures on Anthropology and in his Lectures on Metaphysics. The aim of the article is to show that Kant changes his mind many times, attributing the capacity to compare sometimes to im-agination, sometimes to wit and sometimes to judgment. I will attempt to show that this in-decision is linked to an unclear distinction between intuitive comparison (which perceives a similarity) and logical comparison (which grasps an affinity). These two forms of comparison tend to overlap, creating conceptual confusion, because in most cases similarity and affinity occur together and similarity is the visible sign of affinity. However, it seems plausible to think that two things are similar when they have common sensible properties (for example, shape or colour), and two things are related or akin when they have a common origin or cause. In various text Kant seems on the verge of formulating this distinction, which, however, is never fully explicitly defined. This uncertainty is reflected in the indecision whereby comparison is sometimes attributed to imagination, sometimes to wit, and sometimes to judgment. Indeed, while the relation of similarity can only be grasped in a sensible comparison, for which im-agination seems necessary, the ascertainment of a relation of affinity is intellectual in nature and seems to require judgment.
This paper focuses on the current debate among Anglophone scholars about Kant's classification of human varieties and its impact on the development of his critical phi-losophy. In the last three years, literature on this controversial issue has grown significantly in quantity and nuance, amidst increasing attention to Kant's attitude towards human gender and race. In Part I we focus on the most recent work of Huaping Lu-Adler (2023), examining her perspective within the context of other dominant and dissonant views. In Part II we criti-cally assess the key notions and methods represented by her kind of analysis (& sect;& sect; 1-2), highlight-ing key aspects of Lu-Adler's conception of racism and reflecting on the anti-universalist pol-emic that seems to underlie her approach (& sect; 3).
K.L. Reinhold is generally taken to assert immediate knowledge of free will. I argue for a novel reading of Reinhold's epistemology of freedom, based on the methodological distinction between common human understanding and philosophizing reason. For Reinhold, the philosophical justification of the proposition that we possess free will is based on consciousness of the moral law, and therefore is not a baldly asserted fact. This philosophical justification involves tracing the & laquo;facts> of moral self-consciousness to their transcendental grounds. I conclude by showing that Reinhold's position is characteristic of the critical philosophy.
& centerdot; Hans Vaihinger interprets scientific fictions as useful misrepresentations of reality, enabling scientific inquiry. His fictionalism has been mainly associated with pragmatism, but some of its crucial aspects exhibit a Kantian lineage often overlooked. The paper argues that Vaihinger's fictionalism reconciles pragmatism and transcendental philosophy by focusing on the ethical motivations behind Kant's transcendentalphilosophy. It thus belongs broadly within the tradition of Baden Neo-Kantianism. I start by situating Vaihinger's epistemological project among 19th-century German 'pragmatist' and 'naturalized' readings of Kant. I then show that a coherent, albeit unconventional, transcendental perspective is at play in Vaihinger's fictional-ism. Two primary features of this perspective are highlighted: a psychologistic reading of productive imagination and an emphasis on the ethical motivations of transcendental critique. Fictions emerge as peculiar entia rationis with a regulative function toward empirical intuitions and a constitutive function toward scientific theories. The reconsideration of Vaihinger's fictionalism as a Neo-Kantian junction between pragmatism and transcendental philosophy offers relevant insight not only into the historical roots of contemporary fictionalism but also into some often-neglected conceptual intersections in early 20th-century epistemology.
In this paper I discuss the role played by descriptions of the first-person experience of embodiment in Immanuel Kant's Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. This text has proven difficult to interpret. It is not clear whether Kant is expressing skepticism towards metaphysics as such, whether he is simply attacking the metaphysics of his day, or whether he is taking steps towards a new approach to metaphysical questions. Furthermore, Kant's tone in this text is frequently derisive and sarcastic and it is not always clear whether he is writing in his own voice. I show that Kant provides a consistent phenomenology of embodi-ment in this text, which he takes to have deflationary value with respect to four metaphysical theses concerning how mind and body are related. I examine these theses that Kant discusses and demonstrate how for each, he provides a first person description of embodied awareness which is meant to aid the reader in grasping its implausibility. I argue that this shows that Kant takes embodied awareness to have epistemic authority that cannot be ignored in any attempt to do metaphysics.
& centerdot; The chapter on the typic of pure practical judgment has not attracted attention comparable to that of other passages of the Critique of Practical Reason so far. In this paper, I will argue, however, that pure practical judgment is indeed a crucial element of Kant's foun-dation of moral philosophy as of the Critique. Yet, the problem which underlies the typic chapter is not a new discovery of the Critique, but Kant now takes account of it by introducing a new doctrine. My first claim is that the performance of pure practical judgment consists in carrying out, by help of the & laquo;type of the moral law & raquo;, the so-called universalization test for maxims. The new level of differentiation that Kant now gives on this test provides impulses for solving an old riddle of Kant scholarship. My second claim is that the exact course of the moral examination of maxims is connected with the categories of freedom and their system-atic exhibition in a table, which Kant also introduces for the first time in the Critique and which immediately precedes the typic. The riddle of how exactly the course of that examination looks can be clarified by this doctrine, which has also not attracted much attention so far.
Drawing on Cassandra Basile's recent book on society as an illusory stage in Kant, this paper seeks to dimension the importance of theatre in the general conception of Kantian philosophy, showing its debt to the Baroque court culture of dissimulation (theatrum mundi), which reverberates in his very concept of world: the idea of prudence and & laquo;cosmic wisdom & raquo; (Weltweisheit as opposed the scholasticism) in Kant's thought is largely gestated in the philos-opher's reflections on dramatic art and the art of the actor.
Kant's theory of sympathy is puzzling. There is a tension between his dismissal of sympathetic action in the Groundwork (1785) and his recommendation that we act sympath-etically in & sect; 35 of the Doctrine of Virtue (1797). Kant appears to have changed his mind, aban-doning the motivational rigorism of his earlier works to adopt a more pluralistic, perhaps realistic theory of the moral value of actions. In my lecture, I argue that that is not the case. In the later work, Kant does tell us to make strategic use of sympathy to compensate for any remaining imperfections. But this is no more than a temporary substitute for the genuine moral motive. What is to be cultivated is not sympathy but pure moral interest or respect for the law, which will take over from sympathy as a motive as we progress on our path towards virtue. Ultimately, everything the motive of sympathy can do the representation of the moral law can do better. It is still imperative that we do our duty from duty and not from inclination. Kant's motivational rigorism remains in full force.
Starting from the Kantian thesis developed in the late drafts concerning the Progress in Metaphysics according to which the third stage of metaphysics-the practico-dogmatic metaphysics-constitutes the ultimate end of meta-physics, we analyze in a first part how Kant envisages within the framework of the architec-tonics of the Critique of Pure Reason the passage to practical metaphysical knowledge starting from the thesis of the impossibility for theoretical reason to access knowledge of the super-sensible. The notion of the need of reason serves as a common thread here. The analysis will show that on this basis the passage in question remains underdetermined from an argumen-tative point of view. In a second part, we will show how Kant conceives this passage in a much more systematic way in the Progress. In a third part, we will formulate the interpretation ac-cording to which the ultimate end of practical-dogmatic metaphysics does not reside primarily in a practical knowledge of the supersensible, but that it must be read with reference to the human being-kat anthropon-in his moral iteration.
Kant was much more liberal regarding the status of conclusions in traditional metaphysics than most commentators have thought. To defend this thesis, I first analyze the notion of "doctrinal" or "theoretical" belief (Glaube) as it appears in the first Critique and other writings, and then explore some key examples. The main focus in this paper is the cosmological inference to an "ultimate ground" I argue that although the inference fails to provide knowledge (Wissen), for Kant, it is still a legitimate object of firm theoretical belief (Glaube). Kant's Leibnizean-Wolffian opponents would not have appreciated this epistemic downgrade to their results, but contemporary metaphysicians tre likely to be fine with it. Kant is not the great enemy of metaphysics that he is sometimes made out to be.
Kant's Reason (2023) is an excellent study that develops an original set of inter-pretive claims and shows their relevance for contemporary theories of rationality. At the core of Karl Schafer's project is the following thesis: that Kant's account of reason is unified as a power of comprehension in both its theoretical and practical activities. The aim of my paper is to examine this thesis against Kant's doctrine of the Highest Good. In 1, I question some claims Schafer makes about the Highest Good. Then, in 2 and 3, I consider how we might develop a more detailed reading of this doctrine along the lines of Schafer's project. 4 concludes.
I respond here to the criticisms of Kant's Reason presented by Howard, Choi, and Ware in their commentaries. In doing so, I discuss Kant's views about the PSR in a theoretical and practical context, the relationship between comprehension and autonomy, and the best way to understand the unity of reason in Kant, among other topics.
The philosophical-political com-mitment of the misnamed German Kantian Jacobinism, related to certain historical episodes under the influence of the French Revolution, has been the object of conflicting interpre-tations. It has also received a scarce, unsatisfactory and biased attention by the different vari-ants-Gadamerian, Ritterian and Koselleckian-of conceptual history, all of them with a her-meneutic matrix. Starting from these antecedents, the present contribution reflects on the alleged antagonism between philosophical hermeneutics and transcendental philosophy, and focuses on the elective affinities and the disaffections between Kant and Fichte, especially as regards to their instruments for a critical dialogue with tradition.
In this article, I go against some interpretations of the Traume eines Geistersehers that read this work as the outcome of a profound crisis in Kant's thought, triggered by the reading of Swedenborg and ending with the complete abandonment of his entire philosophical production. To do so, I highlight the continuity, on the methodological level, between the Traume and the texts of the 1760s that precede it, in particular with the Deutlichkeit. Having clarified some of the principles of the analytical method developed by Kant in the latter text of 1762, especially the role played by language in determining the content of the concept, I show how, in the Traume, Kant em-ploys this method for analyzing the concept of spirit. Nevertheless, I take into account the spe-cific epistemology adopted by Kant in the Traume and the effect it has on the relationship be-tween method and metaphysics, the reconfiguration of which can be observed in the pages of the Traume. In contrast to the narrative that paints Kant as skeptical about metaphysics, I thus show how metaphysics was rather subject to a conceptual transformation that prepares the outcomes of Kant's later thought.
This discussion of Claudio Corradetti's essay Kant, Global Politics and Cosmopolitan Law. The World Republic as a Regulative Idea of Reason stresses how regulative normativity sheds a key light over Kant's political order. I engage in a discussion with the author that highlights the advantages stemming from assigning different values to the non-ideal and ideal structure of global politics in Kant's account of the republican order, taking into account recent related papers on this issue in Kant's political philosophy.
The topic of the present paper is the relation between the theory of truth and the theory of meaning in Kant's philosophy. I focus on this relation to show that the possibility to provide an explanatorily adequate concept of truth depends on the capacity to clarify how the meaning of judgement is constituted. I argue that the logical definition of truth falls short because of the inability of logic to provide us with a theory of meaning (rather than with a criterion of truth). This allows us to shed light on the project of the transcendental analytic as being a 'logic of truth', i.e., a theory of the structure of the semantic representation being conveyed by the judging activity.
In the Critique of Pure Reason and elsewhere, Kant uses the term 'object' in various ways and often without clearly signaling its different meanings. As a result, it is hard to gauge the extent to which Kant's account of the object of cognition breaks new ground. In this article, I take the Critique to establish what is required to generate an object of cognition per se solely by examining the various ways in which the human mind can objectify the content of its representations. To clarify this endeavor, I distinguish four different ways in which the term 'object' is used in the Critique, namely, to refer to (1) material things, (2) the content of any type of thought, (3) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the broad sense of the term, and (4) the mind-immanent correlate of a cognition in the strict sense of the term. On my reading, the fourth meaning of the term 'object' is key to the Transcendental Deduction and completes Kant's unprecedented conception of the cognitive acts by means of which the human mind produces objects of cognition out of a manifold of representations.
The debate on Kant's conception of the highest good has long been focused on the alternative between secular and religious readings. Bracketing this issue, in this essay I look at Kant's theory of the highest good in the second Critique as a specimen of transcendental critique. Indeed, Kant frames the idea of the highest good as a form of a priori practical synthesis and claims that its possibility has to be clarified by means of a transcendental deduction. Reconstructing the transcendental deduction of the highest good in the Critique of Practical Reason allows us to appraise the boundary encountered by transcendental critique when it tries to explain the possibility of an unconditioned practical synthesis a priori. I proceed in three steps. In 2, I consider Kant's remarks concerning the impossibility of a deduction of the moral law in the second Critique. In 3, I turn to the account of the highest good and show why, in the light of these remarks, Kant believes that a deduction can be given in this case. In 4, I examine the peculiar subjective character of the conclusion of Kant's argument and claim that it reveals the boundary that reason encounters when it tries to clarify the possibility of an unconditioned practical synthesis a priori in a transcendental manner.
In this reply, I clarify the general project behind the book. I respond also to the specific objections that are raised by my critics. I suggest, first, that Kant has a metaphysical conception of politics, one which connects the cognitive use of the regulative ideas to the role of the world republic (Weltrepublik). I take stock, next, of the hypothesis on the foundation of the legal order (domestic and international). I hold that this consists in a combination between the moral principle and the universal principle of right. I conclude that Kant's perspectives on cosmopolitanism and law are quite instructive for today's discussions. Accordingly, I invite scholars - not only Kantians - to consider the complexity of the views here discussed.
