Kant's Quasi‐Transcendental Argument for a Necessary and Universal Evil Propensity in Human Nature

In Part One of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, Kant repeatedly refers to a “proof” that human nature has a necessary and universal “evil propensity,” but he provides only obscure hints at its location. Interpreters have failed to identify such an argument in Part One. After examining relevant passages, summarizing recent attempts to reconstruct the argument, and explaining why these do not meet Kant's stated needs, I argue that the elusive proof must have a transcendental form (called quasi‐transcendental because Kant never uses “transcendental” in Religion). With deceptive simplicity, the section titles of Part One, viewed as components in an architechtonic system of religion, constitute steps in just such a proof.     

Kant, Wittgenstein, and Transcendental Chaos

Wittgenstein sought to uphold ‘realism without empiricism’. This paper identifies in Wittgestein's and in Kant's philosophies a common line of argument that provides a genuinely transcendental argument for (not from) mental content externalism. This line of argument has not been previously recognized in either thinker's work. The common thesis defended by both Wittgenstein and Kant alike is that, if we human beings did not inhabit a natural world structured by a recognizable degree of similarity and variety among the objects or events we perceive, we could not so much as think, so we could not so much as be self‐conscious. (This line of argument is independent of Kant's idealism, and ultimately shows that Kant's transcendental idealism is false and unsupportable.)     

The Role of Evil in Kant's Liberalism

Carl Schmitt distinguishes between political theories in terms of whether they rest on the anthropological assumption that man is evil by nature or on the anthropological assumption that man is good by nature, and he claims that liberal political theory is based on the latter assumption. Contrary to this claim, I show how Kant's liberalism is shaped by his theory of the radical evil in human nature, and that his liberalism corresponds to the characterization of liberalism that Schmitt himself offers. My discussion of this issue will be shown to have certain implications with respect to the view that for Kant evil is the product of society. I show that this view is mistaken insofar as it fails to recognize that Kant's political philosophy implies that human beings require the type of society that best suits their radically evil natures, namely, a commercial one in which the “vices of culture” largely have free play, while the state's role is limited to that of preventing the antagonisms found in society leading to the mutual destruction of its members.     

Kant's transcendental idealism and contemporary anti‐realism

This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti‐realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. The kind of anti‐realism associated with Wittgenstein has it that there is no deep sense in which our concepts are answerable to reality. Associated with Putnam is the rejection of four main ideas: theoryindependent reality, the idea of a uniquely true theory, a correspondence theory of truth, and bivalence. While there are superficial similarities between both views and Kant's, I find more significant differences. Dummettian anti‐realism, too, clearly differs from Kant's position: Kant believes in verification‐transcendent reality, and transcendental idealism is not a theory of meaning or truth. However, I argue that part of the Dummettian position is extremely useful for understanding part of Kant's position – his idealism about the appearances of things. I argue that Kant's idealism about appearances can be expressed as the rejection of experiencetranscendent reality with respect to appearances.     

Derrida's “Antigonanette”: On the Quasi‐Transcendental

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi‐transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi‐transcendental indicates a re(con)striction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi‐transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi‐transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi‐transcendental is not prior to the re(con)striction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi‐transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts.     

Nature,corruption, and freedom: Stoic ethics in Kant's Religion

Kant's account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant does not talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead, Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil and leaves other clues that his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is—by default and yet by our own deed—bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant's account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources.     

Intuition and Nature in Kant and Goethe

Abstract: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how ‘sensible intuition’ becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an ‘intellectual intuition’ for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic achievement and what were taken to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems interpreted to be resolvable only via an appeal to ‘intellectual intuition’. Part three begins with Kant's subsequent return to the question of freedom and nature in his Critique of Judgment. With Goethe's contemporaneous Metamorphoses of Plants as a contrast case, it becomes clear that whereas Goethe can embrace the role of an intuitive understanding in his account of nature and within the logic of polarity in particular, Kant could never allow an intuition of nature that in his system would spell the very impossibility of freedom itself.     

Practical knowledge and the subjectivity of truth in Kant and Kierkegaard: The cover of skepticism

Kant developed a distinctive method of philosophical argumentation, the method of transcendental argumentation, which continues to have contemporary philosophical promise. Yet there is considerable disagreement among Kant's interpreters concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. On ambitious interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to establish certain necessary features of the world from the conditions of our thinking about or experiencing the world; they are world‐directed. On modest interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to show that certain beliefs have a special status that renders them invulnerable to skeptical doubts; they are belief‐directed. This paper brings Kierkegaard's thesis of the “subjectivity of truth” to bear on these questions concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. I focus on Kant's argument for the postulate of God's existence in his Critique of Practical Reason and show that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us construe the argument as both belief and world directed. Yet I also argue that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us understand the source of our dissatisfaction with Kant's transcendental arguments: It can help us understand that dissatisfaction as an expression of what Stanley Cavell calls the “cover of skepticism,” the conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack.     

“THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS”: KANT ON THE HANG ZUM BÖSEN AND THE UNIVERSAL EVIL OF HUMANITY

This paper offers a new interpretation of the propensity to evil and its relation to Kant's claim that the human race is universally evil. Unlike most of its competitors, the interpretation presented here neither trivializes Kant's claims about the universal evil of humanity nor attributes a position to him that is incompatible with his repeated insistence that we are blameworthy for actions only when we could have acted differently. This interpretation also accounts for a number of otherwise bewildering claims in the Religion and makes sense of the analogy Kant draws between the propensity to evil and addiction.     

Intellectual intuition and Kant's epistemology

In order to construct culture‐inclusive theories of psychology to establish an autonomous academic tradition of Confucian humanism, this article provides a commentary on Zongshan Mou's philosophy of intellectual intuition (智的直覺) as well as his systematic bias in translating Kant's epistemology of transcendental idealism (先驗理念論) into Chinese as ‘transcendent idealism’ (超越觀念論). I will demonstrate that his systematic bias in translating Kant's epistemology into Chinese may hinder his followers in developing a comprehensive understanding of the dialectical relationships among various paradigms of the Western philosophy of science, while his philosophy of intellectual intuition not only deviates from the original philosophical stance of pre‐Qin Confucians towards Heaven (天) and Dao (道), but also leads to his misunderstanding of Zhu Xi's philosophy and exploration of human nature (性), which may help us to understand the necessity of a psychodynamic model of cultural psychology with its emphasis on collective unconsciousness instead of the metaphor of Height Psychology.     

Quantifying Inner Experience?—Kant's Mathematical Principles in the Context of Empirical Psychology

This paper shows why Kant's critique of empirical psychology should not be read as a scathing criticism of quantitative scientific psychology, but has valuable lessons to teach in support of it. By analysing Kant's alleged objections in the light of his critical theory of cognition, it provides a fresh look at the problem of quantifying first‐person experiences, such as emotions and sense‐perceptions. An in‐depth discussion of applying the mathematical principles, which are defined in the Critique of Pure Reason as the constitutive conditions for mathematical‐numerical experience in general, to inner sense will demonstrate why it is in principle possible to justify a quantitative structure of psychological judgments on the grounds of Kant's critical thinking. In conclusion, it will propose how Kant's critique could be used in a constructive way to develop first steps towards a transcendental foundation of psychological knowledge.     

Moral Evil,Freedom and the Goodness of God: Why Kant Abandoned Theodicy

Kant proclaimed that all theodicies must fail in ‘On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy’, but it is mysterious why he did so since he had developed a theodicy of his own during the critical period. In this paper, I offer an explanation of why Kant thought theodicies necessarily fail. In his theodicy, as well as in some of his works in ethics, Kant explained moral evil as resulting from unavoidable limitations in human beings. God could not create finite beings without such limitations and so could not have created humans that were not prone to committing immoral acts. However, the work of Carl Christian Eberhard Schmid showed Kant that given his own beliefs about freedom and the nature of responsibility one could not account for moral evil in this way without tacitly denying that human beings were responsible for their actions. This result is significant not only because it explains an otherwise puzzling shift in Kant's philosophy of religion, but also because it shows that the theodicy essay provides powerful evidence that Kant's thinking about moral evil and freedom underwent fundamental shifts between early works such as the Groundwork and later works like the Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason.     

Hegel on Space: A Critique of Kant's Transcendental Philosophy

This paper considers Hegel's views on space and his account of Kant's theory of space. I show that Hegel's discussions of space exhibit a deep understanding of Kant's apriority argument in the first Critique , commit him to the central premise of that argument, and separate his concerns from the familiar problem of the neglected alternative. Nevertheless, Hegel makes two objections to Kant's theory of space. First, he argues that the theory is internally inconsistent insofar as Kant's identification of space with an a priori intuition is incompatible with the doctrine of productive imagination in the transcendental deduction of the categories. Second, Hegel argues that the apriority argument is insufficiently critical insofar as it relies upon an unexamined theory of subjectivity as a set of representational capacities. I conclude by outlining Hegel's strategy for undermining the assumptions concerning subjectivity that give form to Kant's transcendental philosophy. Because Hegel's positive views on space depend upon his articulation of an alternate notion of subjectivity, the account of Hegel's position on space offered here remains incomplete. On the other hand, considering Hegel's discussions of space demonstrates both the nature and the importance of his examination of subjectivity in the Phenomenology.     

Action,interaction and inaction: post-Kantian accounts of thinking,willing, and doing in Fichte and Schopenhauer

This article features the contributions of Fichte and Schopenhauer to a philosophical account of action against the background of Kant's earlier and influential treatment of the topic. The article first presents Kant's pertinent contributions in the areas of general epistemology and metaphysics (“transcendental philosophy”), general practical philosophy (“moral philosophy”), the philosophy of law (“doctrine of right”) and ethic (“doctrine of virtues”). Then the focus is on Fichte's further original work on the issue of action in those same areas. Finally, the article turns to Schopenhauer's radical revision of the Kantian and Fichtean affirmative accounts of acting and willing through the correlated introduction of the irrational will, the self-negated will and ethical inaction.     

Kant and Husserl on the Contents of Perception

This paper focuses on the contents of perception in Kant's first Critique and Husserl's later writings. Both Kant and Husserl are known for their appeal to synthesis in their transcendental accounts of perceptual experience and objective judgment. Especially regarding Kant, the precise nature of perceptual synthesis has recently been the cause of much debate. Whereas some argue that for Kant perception must have nonconceptual content, others believe he is a conceptualist. After offering an alternative solution to this interpretative problem in Kant's philosophy, I turn to Husserl's later theory of perception. My main claims here are that Husserl departs from Kant specifically regarding (i) the sort of synthetic contents that govern affective perception and (ii) the role of conceptual capacities in the contents of attentive perception.     

The Principle of Sufficient Reason,the Ontological Argument and the Is/Ought Distinction

Kant's attack on metaphysics consists in large part in his attack on a principle that he names the Supreme Principle of Pure Reason. This principle, it is not often noticed, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason [PSR]. In interpreting this principle as such, I argue that Kant's attack on the PSR (and thereby his attack on dogmatic metaphysics as a whole) depends on Kant's claim that existence is not a first‐order predicate. If existence isn't what Kant calls a real predicate, the PSR is false. While this constitutes a powerful Kantian argument against dogmatic rationalism, it also poses a problem for Kant. For, as I argue, if the PSR is true, Kant's argument that existence isn't a first‐order predicate is false. In this sense, Kant's attack on the PSR is begging the question vis‐á‐vis radical metaphysicians (e.g. Spinoza). Concluding the paper I suggest relying on Kant's 'is'/'ought' distinction in avoiding this circularity, thereby reinforcing the Kantian critique.     

Does Kant'sMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science fill a gap in theCritique of Pure Reason?

In 1792 and 1798 Kant noticed two basic problems with hisMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MAdN) which opened a crucial gap in the Critical system as a whole. Why is theMAdN so important? I show that the Analogies of Experience form an integrated proof of transeunt causality. This is central to Kant's ‘answer’ to Hume. This proof requires explicating the empirical concept of matter as “the moveable in space”, it requires the specifically metaphysical principle that every physical event has an external cause, and it requires a metaphysical principle regarding the individuation of spatio-temporal things. These three doctrines are not defended in the firstCritique, but only in theMAdN. Kant's transcendental analysis of the conditions of experience thus requires the “special metaphysics” of theMAdN. This marks an important shift in Kant's view of the metaphysical basis of the transcendental philosophy.     

Bolzano and Kant on the Nature of Logic

Here I revisit Bolzano's criticisms of Kant on the nature of logic. I argue that while Bolzano is correct in taking Kant to conceive of the traditional logic as a science of the activity of thinking rather than the content of thought, he is wrong to charge Kant with a failure to identify and examine this content itself within logic as such. This neglects Kant's own insistence that traditional logic does not exhaust logic as such, since it must be supplemented by a transcendental logic that will in fact study nothing other than thought's content. Once this feature of Kant's views is brought to light, a much deeper accord emerges between the two thinkers than has hitherto been appreciated, on both the nature of the content that is at issue in logic and the sense of logic's generality and formality.     

A mereological argument for the non‐spatiotemporality of things in themselves

Kant's published arguments for the non‐spatiotemporality of things in themselves have not been well received. I argue that Kant has available to himself an argument for the non‐spatiotemporality of things in themselves that is premised upon a disparity between the compositional structure of the intelligible world and the structure of space and time. I argue that Kant was unwaveringly committed to the premises of this argument throughout his career and that he was aware of their idealistic implications. I also argue that this argument is consistent with Kant's restrictive mature epistemology. If my argument is successful, then even if Kant's published arguments for transcendental idealism fail, we need not regard his ambitious metaphysical project as a failure.     

Theorising from the Global Standpoint: Kant and Grotius on Original Common Possession of the Earth

The paper contrasts Kant's conception of original common possession of the earth with Hugo Grotius's superficially similar notion. The aim is not only to elucidate how much Kant departs from his natural law predecessors—given that Grotius's needs‐based framework very much lines in with contemporary theorists’ tendency to reduce issues of global concern to questions of how to divide the world up, it also seeks to advocate Kant's global thinking as an alternative for current debates. Crucially, it is Kant's radical shift in perspective—from an Archimedean ’view from nowhere‘, to a first‐personal standpoint through which agents reflexively recognise their systematic interdependence in a world of limited space—that provides him with the more thorough and ultimately convincing global standpoint. This standpoint does not come with ready‐made solutions to shared global problems, but provides a promising perspective from which to theorise them.