Search Results

How does reason create objects of knowledge and ideas that imagine a relationship with the objective world? In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant attributes this role to the synthetic activity of the imagination and the understanding, whereas reason produces ideas of things that cannot be experienced, only thought. This chapter explores reason's attempt to create the idea of the world, an object unavailable to experience, precisely where it fails: in the mathematical antinomy. Through a study of the productivity of negation inspired in David-Ménard's La folie dans la raison pure, it examines reason's failure to form all-encompassing, self-contained totalities. There is only one type of negative idea Kant considers legitimate, negative noumenon. By opening an empty space beyond experience, negative noumena bound the realm of objectivity and provide thinking with a sense of completion. The most productive instance of these boundary concepts is freedom.

This chapter combines an analysis of the structure of Kant's critique of earlier metaphysics with a historical account of how this critique could have had as its fate the remarkable rise of a new kind of metaphysics in the era of German Idealism. It begins with the general observation that the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason does not attempt, let alone accomplish, the kind of complete destruction of metaphysics that many of its readers have supposed. Many traditional transcendent metaphysical ideas are allowed to be not only coherent but also assertable, once the demands of regulative and practical reason are allowed to supplement the thoughts of constitutive theoretical reason. Moreover, the Critique's stress on notions such as idealism, things in themselves, and the ‘unconditioned’ created (as William Hamilton noted) a ‘spectre’ that ‘haunted’ and stimulated German Idealism's new metaphysics of the ‘absolute’. Although Kant offers a radical critique of all earlier systems of a spiritualist or materialist kind, he also believes that something metaphysical should be affirmed beyond the spatiotemporal features of our experience. It is argued that for both Kant and German Idealism, this metaphysics is at least not any kind of subjectivism, and it need not present a special threat to most of our common realist beliefs.

This chapter explains the decisive points of Immanuel Kant's theory of cognition in the light of Gilles Deleuze's interpretation. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the logic/reality distinction undergoes a further diversification, starting from the moves made in the ‘Dissertation’. It is shown that Kant's distinction relies on getting right the parallel distinction between the rights and limits of the understanding and sensibility. He highlights the application of concepts, while suppressing the formation of concepts in the Critique of Pure Reason. The Ideas should not immediately be seen as responding to the ‘law of reason to seek unity’. Kant's tendency to push issues of metacritique on to teleology leads in a startling dénouement in Deleuze's philosophy. Deleuze places himself in the same metaphysical zones that Kant ultimately occupies; but Deleuze's return to Leibnizian and Spinozist issues is ultimately more consistent than Kant's actual resolution of the problems presented.

This chapter addresses and revises a foundational feature of Kant's epistemology, namely the Transcendental Deduction. It shows how Kant's argument attempts to prove that the objective unification of a sensible manifold (achieved through the categories) and the objective unity of self-consciousness (or, as Kant sometimes terms it, the ‘pure’ or ‘original unity’ of ‘apperception’) are reciprocally dependent. One cannot have the one without the other. Kant's arguments on these lines (in the revised ‘B’-version of the Critique of Pure Reason) are analyzed critically. His basic position is then reconstructed in a more viable form. This involves three stages that make use of ideas from Gareth Evans and Shaun Gallagher. Special attention is paid to the role of the categories and productive imagination in the ontogenesis of experience.

This book focuses on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The work of a great historical figure like Kant can be approached in two quite different ways—one fairly austere and the other comparatively relaxed. First approach is called the Apollonian which is marked by an especially close reading of the text, philological attention to nuances of interpretation, a careful tracing of intellectual influences, and a continuous awareness of the border historical, cultural, and socio-political setting within which the work developed and emerged. And the second approach is the Dionysian, which in contrast, aims at depicting what we might call ‘The Living Kant’, a practicing philosopher who is much smarter than most of us and consequently capable of teaching us a great number of interesting things. This is a whole book about Kant's Critique of Pure Reason written from a largely Dionysian perspective.

This chapter explains how Reinhold's Letters took the form of a ‘short’ Critique, which immediately after its publication was much more influential than the complex details of Kant's lengthy original. In the Letters, Reinhold simplified matters hugely by not venturing at all into the complexities of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. He jumped ahead to the moral and historical implications of the end of the Dialectic, arguing that Kant's espousal of a Critical and moral form of rational religion was the ideal solution to the battles between supernaturalism and naturalism that were raging in Germany after Jacobi had ignited the Pantheism Dispute. Admitting that he was not yet tracing Kant's notion of pure practical reason and rational religion back to its ‘grounds’ in the first Critique, Reinhold satisfied himself and his audience with the claim that the ‘results’ of the Critique met the fundamental ‘need’ of the time (fully to satisfy popular Enlightenment morality through a hope in a ‘highest good’ warranted by rational religion) — just as Jesus had satisfied the ‘common sense’ of his time by turning dogmatic religion into rational morality.

This chapter offers a general introductory argument for maintaining an authentically historical perspective on the main issues arising from the key texts of modern philosophy, and for approaching even the briefest subsections of these texts with sensitivity to their full historical context. Without denying the need for developing some kind of corrective to the overly historical approaches that still dominate continental philosophy, it is argued that it is important to counter stereotypical views of Anglophone philosophy and to try to explain why, after decades of neglect, historical considerations have also become central components in the writing of many leading late-20th-century analytic philosophers.

The final step in consolidating the realist reading requires a discussion of the other relevant lesson of the Dialectic: the ontological significance that flows from the transcendental regulative principle of the idea of the systematicity of nature. Principle 4 claims that the intrinsic relations of the phenomenal world can transcend one's experience of them. Clearly, an assessment of the regulative principle of systematicity has a direct bearing on the ontological significance of this principle. In both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgement, Immanuel Kant insists that one's ability to unify diverse phenomena under particular causal laws, and to deploy hierarchical systems of laws, depends on the empirical employment of the transcendental principle. This transcendental principle instructs one to treat nature as a systematically structured whole. The general thrust of the methodological reading poses a serious an obstacle to a unified realist interpretation of empirical realism as did the assertion-condition approach to truth.

In the history of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant is one of the first modern thinkers to take the imagination seriously. This chapter outlines Kant's development of the concept in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Aesthetic judgment. Kaag highlights the difference between the two treatments of the imagination (in its reproductive, productive and creative capacities). In line with many Kant scholars, Kaag suggests that many of the conclusions presented in the third Critique address questions about human knowing and human feeling expressed in the first and second Critiques. In his analysis of Kant, Kaag focuses on the way that aesthetic common sense and genius are developed in the Critique of Aesthetic judgment, paying particular attention to Kant's claim that genius is an ingenium (a gift of nature). Here, Kant is suggesting a point of continuity between human culture and nature, a point that will be vitally important to post-Kantian philosophers, especially C.S. Peirce.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the ninth section of Kant's chapter on the antinomies in the first Critique (Critique of Pure Reason). Inasmuch as Kant discusses the resolution of all four antinomies it was necessary to discuss them all, but the emphasis is on the Third Antinomy, which deals with an apparent contradiction between freedom and causal determinism. The essay analyzes the various steps in Kant's resolution, with special attention to his insistence that the free will problem is “transcendental” rather than “psychological” and the connection between Kant's account of freedom and his conception of rational agency. It argues that Kant is best read as offering a conceptual thesis regarding what is built into the thought of rational agency rather than a metaphysical thesis regarding an inaccessible noumenal self.

This chapter examines the relation between Gilles Deleuze's theory of Ideas and the theme of immanence, particularly with regard to the theory of Ideas found in Immanuel Kant's three critiques. It argues that if the theory of Ideas can be seen as the thread that unites Kant's critical project, Deleuze's own differential and immanent theory of Ideas can similarly be seen as the ‘rhizome’ that gathers together the diverse strands of Deleuze's own philosophical project. It highlights the similarities between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason.

This chapter takes up the theme of problematic Ideas as it is laid out in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of the Power of Judgment. It explores the way in which Ideas count as problems ‘without solution’, and how they can animate our cognitive faculties to transcend their boundaries and elude determining judgements. In this context, Kant’s model of the experience of the sublime will play an important role. The chapter also examines how Deleuze develops Kant’s notion of Ideas into his own theory of Ideas, and analyzes the structure, internal operations, and the movement of actualisation of Deleuzian Ideas. In the elaboration of his ‘dialectics of Ideas’ Deleuze is inspired by the philosopher and mathematician Albert Lautman.

The Analogies, as testified by the sheer volume of secondary literature produced since the original publication of the Critique of Pure Reasons, constitute the heart and soul of Immanuel Kant's account of representation. The Priority-of-Judgement approach leads to a stressing of the positive requirement of an objective, causally integrated empirical domain as a necessary condition for the possibility of determinate inner content. This chapter examines the central role Kant assigns to the Analogies as the basis for the discrimination of objects and events. By characterizing the central concern of the Analogies in terms of the conditions necessary for the original discrimination of the manifold of appearance, this chapter hopes to unmask and marginalize some of the all-too-common empiricist misinterpretations of Kant's analysis. Kant's account of error, and his dismissal of scepticism (the scandal of philosophy), are also addressed. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the progress made thus far towards establishing the five principles of empirical realism introduced in Chapter 1.

This chapter focuses on the aim of this book, namely, to argue for the existence of dialetheias, and to discuss their logic, epistemology, and some issues in their metaphysics. It provides an introduction to dialetheism, via a brief discussion of Kant and Hegel.

This chapter analyzes Kant’s ontology of the soul, his related epistemology, and his rejection of rational psychology in his recorded thought from the 1781 Critique through the late 1790s. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section considers the immediate context for the Paralogism within the (1781 and 1787 editions of the) Critique. The second section examines the broader post-1780 context for the Paralogisms outside the Critique, focusing on Kant’s view that the soul is a substance. The third section considers Kant’s Paralogisms, while the fourth section concludes.