This is a work in Kantian conceptual geography. It explores issues in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics in particular by appealing to theses drawn from Immanuel Kant’s ...Critique of Pure Reason. Those issues include the nature of the subjective, objective, and empirical; potential scopes of the subjective; what can (and cannot) be said about a subject-independent reality; analyticity, syntheticity, apriority, and aposteriority; constitutive principles, acquisitive principles, and empirical claims; meaning, indeterminacy, and incommensurability; logically possible versus subjectively empirical worlds; and the nature of empirical truth. Part One introduces two theses drawn from the Critique. The first, Empirical Dualism, concerns the subjective, objective, and empirical. The second, Subjective Principlism, concerns principles that might bear on the empirical. Part Two examines work of influential analytic philosophers to reveal how conceptually expansive the territory formed by Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism is. Part Three defends that territory by defending Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism themselves. Part Four discloses two new lands within the territory that have so far remained uncharted. The first is a Kantian account of meaning, which is shown to be superior to other accounts of meaning in the analytic literature. The second are Kantian thoughts on truth, which illuminate the nature of empirical truth itself. Finally Part Five shows how engaging in Kantian conceptual geography enriches epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics generally.
Over the last two decades, Kant's name has become closely associated with the "constitutivist" program within metaethics.
1
But is Kant best read as pursuing a constitutivist approach to ...meta-normative questions? And if so, in what sense?
2
In this essay, I argue that we can best answer these questions by considering them in the context of how Kant understands the proper methodology for philosophy in general. The result of this investigation will be that, while Kant can indeed be read as a sort of constitutivist, his constitutivism is ultimately one instance of a more general approach to philosophy, which treats as fundamental our basic, self-conscious rational capacities. Thus, to truly understand why and how Kant is a constitutivist, we need to consider this question within the context of his more fundamental commitment to "capacities-first philosophy".
„Sapere aude!“ (Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstands zu bedienen!), forderte Kant. Chirurgische Exzellenz fordert diesen Gebrauch des Verstands, weil die Individualität der konkreten ...Behandlungssituation die Anwendung starrer Regel ausschließt. Diese Individualität ergibt sich v. a. aus dem Willen des Patienten. In Anlehnung an Clausewitz sind es aber 3 Tendenzen, die als eigenständige Kräfte die Individualität der Behandlungssituation begründen. Die 1. Tendenz besteht in der Gewaltsamkeit, die als Todesdrohung der Erkrankung das Handlungsfeld unter die Wirkung menschlicher Gefühle stellt. Die 2. Tendenz besteht in der Unsicherheit, die jede Entscheidung zum Kalkül der Wahrscheinlichkeit macht. Die 3. Tendenz besteht in der Politik, die die Medizin zum Instrument ihres Willens macht. Strategisches Denken versteht die Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Tendenzen als ergebnisoffenen Prozess. Dieser Denkstil ist eine hochwirksame Methode, mit der der Chirurg individuelle Zwecke des Patienten mit medizinischer Rationalität verbindet. Strategisches Denken ist damit die Lehre zur Individualisierung ärztlicher Vorgehensweisen und weist den Weg zu chirurgischer Exzellenz.
For Simone Weil the invocation of 'rights' to address extreme human suffering-what she calls 'affliction'-is 'ludicrously inadequate'. Rights, Weil argues, invite a response, whereas what the ...afflicted require is not dialogue but simply to be heard. For Weil, hearing the 'cry' of the afflicted is the basis of all justice. The task of such a hearing is given over to Weil's concept of attention, which demands an ethics of creative silence. This paper will argue that central to Weil's ethics of attention, and thus the way she thinks we should show compassion and act justly, is the Kantian aesthetic concept of disinterestedness. I will argue that whilst Weil is influenced by Kant in multiple ways, it is his aesthetics, rather than his normative moral theory, that is most at play in her own ethical theory of attention.
We shall address from a conceptual perspective the duality between
algebra
and
geometry
in the framework of the refoundation of algebraic geometry associated to Grothendieck’s theory of schemes. To ...do so, we shall revisit scheme theory from the standpoint provided by the problem of recovering a mathematical structure
A
from its representations
A
→
B
into other similar structures
B
. This vantage point will allow us to analyze the relationship between the
algebra-geometry duality
and (what we shall call) the
structure-semiotics duality
(of which the
syntax-semantics duality
for propositional and predicate logic are particular cases). Whereas in classical algebraic geometry a certain kind of rings can be recovered by considering their representations with respect to a unique codomain
B
, Grothendieck’s theory of schemes permits to reconstruct general (commutative) rings by considering representations with respect to a category of codomains. The strategy to reconstruct the object from its representations remains the same in both frameworks: the elements of the ring
A
can be realized—by means of what we shall generally call
Gelfand transform
—as quantities on a topological space that parameterizes the relevant representations of
A
. As we shall argue, important dualities in different areas of mathematics (e.g. Stone duality, Gelfand duality, Pontryagin duality, Galois-Grothendieck duality, etc.) can be understood as particular cases of this general pattern. In the wake of Majid’s analysis of the Pontryagin duality, we shall propose a Kantian-oriented interpretation of this pattern. We shall use this conceptual framework to argue that Grothendieck’s notion of
functor of points
can be understood as a “relativization of the
a priori
” (Friedman) that generalizes the relativization already conveyed by the notion of
domain extension
to more general variations of the corresponding (co)domains.
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