The chapter takes up the question of how and why Kant marks the limits of metaphysics, particularly in light of the skeptical challenges to reason's use raised by Hume and Bayle. Here Kant's distinction between our cognitive faculties – the heterogeneity thesis – plays a crucial role, since it allows Kant to set the boundaries of metaphysics at the cognizable, which requires sensible content that dogmatic metaphysics is unable to provide. Kant's account of limits and boundaries bears a suggestive similarity to the claims Wittgenstein makes in the Tractatus, and the essay lays out some of the fruitful ways in which the latter work can help shed light on Kant's argument in the Prolegomena.

This is an edited collection devoted to the topic of the role of animals within Kant’s philosophy. It addresses key issues within both his theoretical and practical philosophy. It examines the place of Kant’s model of animal minds in the historical and contemporary contexts. It addresses the question of whether Kant’s philosophy of mind allows for animals to be capable of intentional representations of spatiotemporal objects. It explores how Kant treated the issue of animal nature as it manifests in humans and non-humans alike, and questions how Kant’s scientific theory attempted to accommodate animals within his broader Enlightenment worldview. It also addresses traditional worries about the moral status of animals within Kant’s and Kantian moral theory. Kant notoriously denied that we have direct obligations to animals, and the question persists as to whether Kantian moral theory provides the right account of the moral status of non-human animals. Several papers in this collection address the question and whether Kant’s views can be defended or ought to be rejected altogether on this basis alone. The collection considers the relevance of Kantian theory for our understanding of contemporary challenges facing human beings with regard to our relationship to animals.

I argue that Kant's transcendental idealism and Strawson's descriptive metaphysics are both examples of what I call methodological conservativism. Methodological conservativism involves the claim that a subset of common first-order beliefs is immune to revision. I argue that there are striking differences between their respective commitments to this position, however. For Kant, his conservativism is based upon a commitment to the reliability of particular results of the sciences of his day. For Strawson, in contrast, his conservativism is based upon his attempted liberation of arguments for the necessity of a certain conceptual scheme from any particular scientific commitments. In fact, for Strawson, no change in scientific commitments could displace the conceptual scheme employed to navigate the manifest world of ordinary perceptual experience. Each approach brings with it challenges with regard to how to accommodate potential scientific theory change.

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In his winning submission for the 1763 Berlin Academy prize essay competition, Moses Mendelssohn explained how necessary truths are grasped. All such propositions, in both mathematics and metaphysi...

It is well known that at the heart of Kant's Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity (Vermogen). It is also sometimes maintained that Kant's appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgement. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant's epistemology. A different conception of the role of spontaneity in judgement has clear precedents, I claim, in the works of Cudworth and Rousseau. There the imagined role for the active power of the mind is not to identify criteria that might serve as norms for epistemically responsible judgement. Rather the spontaneous power of the mind is cited as the source of representational contents that secure the truth conditions of our everyday claims to empirical knowledge.

The difference between the method of metaphysics and the method of mathematics was an issue of central concern for Kant in both the Pre-Critical and Critical periods. I will argue that when Kant speaks of the 'philosophical method' in the Doctrine of Method in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), he frequently has in mind not his own methodology but rather the method of conceptual analysis associated with rationalism. The particular target is Moses Mendelssohn's picture of analysis contained in his submission for the 1763 Prize Essay competition. By the time of the first Critique, I argue, Kant wants to maintain his own longstanding commitment to the distinctness of the methods of metaphysics and mathematics. However, Kant wants to use this same analysis of the source of the distinction to diagnose the origins of the dogmatism that is engendered by the method of the rationalists.

AbstractIt is well known that Kant uses the notion of the holy will in theGroundworkso as to contrast it with the finite wills of human beings. It is less clear, however, what function this contrast is supposed to perform. I argue that one role of the holy will is to illustrate transcendental idealism’s account of the relation between moral knowledge and moral practice. The position is one intended to negotiate between ostensibly competing traditions. Kant uses the holy will as a way of endorsing the metaphysical picture of the scholastic tradition’s so-called ‘ethics of freedom’, whereby the ideal of moral perfection is conceived as the perfection of one’s power of freedom to the point where one is constitutively incapable of immoral action. This position is married however with the claim that the holy will’s inaccessibility to human cognition motivates a subject-oriented moral epistemology more usually associated with Enlightenment humanism. I conclude by claiming that the nuanced role for the holy will can be understood as part of Kant’s expansion of the value of religious faith [Glaube] to the domain of practical inquiry in general.

Reviewed by: Kant’s Observations and Remarks: A Critical Guide ed. by Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley John J. Callanan Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley, editors. Kant’s Observations and Remarks: A Critical Guide. Cambridge Critical Guides. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 286. Cloth, $90.00. This collection in the Cambridge Critical Guides series is something of an anomaly. While there are guides on major publications such as the second Critique, Groundwork, and Metaphysics of Morals, it might be wondered whether the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764) and the associated Remarks constitute the kind of important unified text that warrants such a companion piece. Kant himself regarded the Observations as a minor work. The Remarks are thought important not because of their intrinsic philosophical value, but because they function to mark a crucial period in Kant’s intellectual development and to anticipate themes in the critical period. While these points remain true, this volume clearly justifies its own existence, however, and contains some excellent pieces that will be of interest to most Kant scholars. The book comprises an introduction by the editors, Susan Meld Shell and Richard Velkley, and thirteen papers. These are divided into four sections: Kant’s Ethical Thought: Sources and Stages; Ethics and Aesthetics; Education Politics and National Character; and Science and History. The first section begins with Dieter Henrich’s republished essay “Concerning Kant’s early ethics” (translated by Jerome Veith). Henrich outlines the early influence upon Kant’s ethics and perceives a move away from the intellectualism of Wolff and Baumgarten as early as the Prize Essay of 1762. He argues that the primary source of influence in this regard (before Rousseau) is that of Hutcheson. Corey Dyck considers the notion of “chimerical” ethical systems with particular regard to the influence of Baumgarten. Patrick Frierson argues that a change is observable between the Observations and Remarks regarding two notions of universality at play in regard to ethics. The switch that Frierson perceives is from that of a Hutcheson-influenced demand to extend a disinterested benevolence to all of humanity to the ideal of “universalizing the point of view of the deliberating subject” (60). Paul Guyer reviews the evidence in these early notes for different tendencies toward taking freedom as the ground of morality. The second section begins with an extensive examination by Rudolf Makkreel regarding Kant’s early account of sociable and moral feelings. Along with Dyck’s and Ameriks’s contributions, Makkreel provides some helpful context for Kant’s later consideration of both the positive and negative roles of sympathy and honor. Robert Clewis considers the distinction between true and false sublimity and is surprisingly the only one in the collection to focus exclusively on aesthetic themes. Alix Cohen finds in the Observations an account of the natural drives and feelings relating to human nature that is entirely descriptive, and as such in stark contrast to Kant’s later normative considerations. In particular she argues that the account claims that aesthetics standards for whole human species can be achieved independently of moral concerns. The third section begins with G. Felicitas Munzel’s examination of the role of pedagogy and moral education in the Remarks. Munzel situates the development of Kant’s notions of pedagogy against Rousseau’s critique of Locke’s account of education and the rise of the Philanthropin movement. Reinhard Brandt’s contribution (also translated by Jerome Veith) argues that, in contrast to Kant’s public caution, in the Remarks an “indignation blazes” (186) with regard to the social order of his times, though it is perhaps a challenge to read Kant’s attitude so clearly from such meager resources. Robert Louden examines Kant’s reflections on national character, tracing an interesting route from his lectures on geography to the Observations. Louden examines Kant’s response to concern about the elimination of differentiating national characteristics through the progress of globalization, and finds a claim in response that “nature wills progress through diversity and plurality” (216). The fourth section begins with Peter Fenves’s challenging paper on the opening lines of the Observations. Fenves proceeds from the unusual observation regarding the...

It is often maintained that one insight of Kant’s Critical philosophy is its recognition of the need to distinguish accounts of knowledge acquisition from knowledge justification. In particular, it is claimed that Kant held that the detailing of a concept’s acquisition conditions is insufficient to determine its legitimacy. I argue that this is not the case at least with regard to geometrical concepts. Considered in the light of his pre-Critical writings on the mathematical method, construction in the Critique can be seen to be a form of concept acquisition, one that is related to the modal phenomenology of geometrical judgement.

AbstractKant criticizes the so-called ‘preformation’ hypothesis – a nativist account of the origin of the categories – at the end of the B-Deduction on the ground that it entails scepticism. I examine the historical context of Kant's criticism, and identify the targets as both Crusius and Leibniz. There are two claims argued for in this paper: first, that attending to the context of the opposition to certain forms of nativism affords a way of understanding Kant's commitment to the so-called ‘discursivity thesis’, by contrasting the possession conditions for the categories with those for innate ideas; secondly, it provides an insight with regard to Kant's understanding of the dialectic with scepticism. Kant's claim is that a certain explanatory lacuna that attaches to Humean empiricism can be seen to apply equally to any nativist theory. The lacuna concerns the explanation of the modal purport ofa priorinecessity, i.e. how it is that our consciousness can even distinguish contents that are representedasnecessary features of objects.

A step-by-step guide to Kant's first work on moral philosophy Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is considered a standard text in the history of moral philosophy as well as a classic work of moral philosophy in its own right. This guide provides a paragraph-by-paragraph account of the main themes of Kant's moral philosophy and a clear statement of his overall philosophical aims and arguments. Key Features: Written to be read alongside Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Works through the text in the same way that students do, addressing potential problems and confusions as they arise Study Aids section helps students to understand the text and write their essays, including a glossary, example exam questions, common assessment criteria and tips for writing about Kant Identifies what is distinctive about Kantian ethics, compared to other ethical theories

It is quite common when explicating the nature of Kant's break with the preceding Early Modern tradition to cite his attitude towards the acquisition and deployment of concepts. It is claimed that Kant sought to distinguish two tasks that had become unfortunately intertwined and conflated — explaining how we come to acquire our concepts on the one hand and showing how we are justified in deploying them in judgement on the other. This conflation can be expressed in terms of a conflation of the natural and the normative, of descriptive and prescriptive questions. The topic of the conditions of concept-possession, i.e. how we have come to possess the concepts that we do, is an entirely psychological inquiry, involving ‘natural’ descriptive inquiries. The topic of concept-deployment, the story about how we use our concepts in veridical judgements about the world, is an entirely philosophical question, since it involves the question of how we ought to deploy those concepts in judgement. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the normative is drawn by Kant, it is claimed, in order to distinguish these two practices of acquisition and deployment.The manner in which this claim is expressed is through Kant's distinction between the question of fact (quaestio facti) and the question of right (quaestio juris). I want to claim that a proper understanding of this distinction doesn't support this notion of Kant's ‘normative turn’. In fact, the distinction is best understood within an interpretation whereby Kant is understood as continuing to endorse the Early Modern conviction that the provision of a concept's possession-conditions is sufficient to determine that concept's deployment-conditions, and that the task of the Transcendental Deduction is to determine the possession-conditions for the Categories.