For the last 100 years historians have denigrated the psychology of the Critique of Pure Reason. In opposition, Patricia Kitcher argues that we can only understand the deduction of the categories in ...terms of Kant's attempt to fathom the psychological prerequisites of thought, and that this investigation illuminates thinking itself. Kant tried to understand the "task environment" of knowledge and thought: Given the data we acquire and the scientific generalizations we make, what basic cognitive capacities are necessary to perform these feats? What do these capacities imply about the inevitable structure of our knowledge? Kitcher specifically considers Kant's claims about the unity of the thinking self; the spatial forms of human perceptions; the relations among mental states necessary for them to have content; the relations between perceptions and judgment; the malleability essential to empirical concepts; the structure of empirical concepts required for inductive inference; and the limits of philosophical insight into psychological processes.
In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant's aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant's account of imaginative freedom ...and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant's contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Kant's lectures on anthropology, which formed the basis of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), contain many observations on human nature, culture and psychology and illuminate his ...distinctive approach to the human sciences. The essays in the present volume, written by an international team of leading Kant scholars, offer the first comprehensive scholarly assessment of these lectures, their philosophical importance, their evolution and their relation to Kant's critical philosophy. They explore a wide range of topics, including Kant's account of cognition, the senses, self-knowledge, freedom, passion, desire, morality, culture, education and cosmopolitanism. The volume will enrich current debates within Kantian scholarship as well as beyond, and will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of Kant, the history of anthropology, the philosophy of psychology and the social sciences.
Kant, in his precritical writing Von dem ersten Grunde des Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume (1768), makes a remarkable effort to show that the reality proper to the concept of space is related to ...the live body itself as a system of orientation that would correspond, to some way, to the Husserlian characterization of the Leib as absolute here. Indeed, it is possible to find in Kantian argumentation the idea that we can only distinguish the directions of space insofar as these are determined concerning the sides of our live body. In this work, I will present a phenomenological approximation or reading on this very brief dissertation emphasizing the “own reality” of space and its relationship with our corporality, in other words, between the complementarity of the living own body (Leib) with space.
I want to distinguish between maxims at three levels of ion. At the first level are what I shall call individual maxims, or i‐maxims: maxim tokens as adopted by particular rational beings. At the ...second level are maxims, or a‐maxims: principles distinct from any individual who adopts them. At the third level are maxim kinds, or k‐maxims: sets of various action‐guiding principles that are grouped on the basis of their content. In this paper, I argue for the thesis that i‐maxims are the locus of assessment in Kant's ethics.
The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, and his second work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its systematic account of the ...authority of moral principles grounded in human autonomy unfolds Kant's considered views on morality and provides the keystone to his philosophical system. The essays in this volume shed light on the principal arguments of the second Critique and explore their relation to Kant's critical philosophy as a whole. They examine the genesis of the Critique, Kant's approach to the authority of the moral law given as a 'fact of reason', the metaphysics of free agency, the account of respect for morality as the moral motive, and questions raised by the 'primacy of practical reason' and the idea of the 'postulates'. Engaging and critical, this volume will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars of Kant and to moral theorists alike.
Kant's Transition Project and Late Philosophy is the first study to provide a close reading of the connection between texts written by Kant during 1796 and 1798. Connecting Kant's unfinished book ...project, the Opus postumum, with the Metaphysics of Morals, it identifies and clarifies issues at the forefront of Kant's focus towards the end of his life. Labelled by Kant as the "Transition Project", the Opus postumum generates debate among commentators as to why Kant describes the project as filling a "gap" within his system of critical philosophy. This study argues for a pervasive transition project that can be traced through Kant's entire critical philosophy and is the key to addressing current debates in the scholarship. By showing that there is not only a Transition Project in Kant's theoretical philosophy but also a Transition Project in his practical philosophy, it reveals why an accurate assessment of Kant's critical philosophy requires a new understanding of the Opus postumum and Kant's parallel late writings on practical philosophy. Rather than seeing Kant's late thoughts on a Transition as afterthoughts, they must be seen at the centre of his critical philosophy.
Kant on Sublimity and Morality provides an argument to the essential moral significance of the Kantian sublime and situates this argument within the history of the relationship between sublimity and ...morality.
The Black Box in Stoic Axiology Vazquez, Michael
Pacific philosophical quarterly,
March 2023, 2023-03-00, 20230301, Volume:
104, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The ‘black box’ in Stoic axiology refers to the mysterious connection between the input of Stoic deliberation (reasons generated by the value of indifferents) and the output (appropriate actions). In ...this paper, I peer into the black box by drawing an analogy between Stoic and Kantian axiology. The value and disvalue of indifferents is intrinsic, but conditional. An extrinsic condition on the value of a token indifferent is that one's selection of that indifferent is sanctioned by context‐relative ethical principles. The value of an indifferent that does not meet this condition is normatively silenced, such that it fails to constitute a reason for action.