Kant's Musical Antiformalism

According to the orthodox view of Kant's philosophy of music, Kant is the founder of musical formalism, the view that music is pure, contentless form, and appreciated as such. On this orthodox view, Kant is an innovator in philosophy of music, though his views are confused and sometimes contradictory. Sometimes, we are told, Kant indicates that music is a fine art and sometimes that it is merely an agreeable art. None of the orthodox position is correct. Kant's views on music are familiar, even a little old fashioned for their time. His views are consistent. He believes that some music is fine art and that the fine arts are imitative arts. Imitative arts have content, and Kant believes that at least some music has content. Our views on Kant's philosophy of music ought to be thoroughly revised.     

Reid, Kant and the Philosophy of Mind

I suggest a possible rehabilitation of Reid's philosophy of mind by a constructive use of Kant's criticisms of the common sense tradition. Kant offers two criticisms, explicitly claiming that common sense philosophy is ill directed methodologically, and implicitly rejecting Reid's view that there is direct epistemological access by introspection to the ontology of mind. Putting the two views together reveals a tension between epistemology and ontology, but the problem which Kant finds in Reid also infects his own system, as his weaker ontological claims are undermined to such an extent by the necessary reintroduction of self-consciousness that the justification he seeks for reason fails to be reached epistemologically. Plausible solutions to these parallel tensions imply that both Reid and Kant have a pre-systematic concept of mind, and may lead to the conclusion that Reid's method is more economical in the elaboration of an ontology for the philosophy of mind.     

Kant on the Emotion of Love

Although recent Kant scholarship has focused on Kant's treatment of various emotions, one that has not received much attention is love. There are three main reasons for this. First, Kant does not have a single, sustained analysis of the emotion of love; what he does say appears scattered throughout his corpus. Second, Kant identifies a number of different kinds of love, and it is not always clear which kinds are emotions or how the different kinds of love are related. Finally, in general Kant is quite critical of the emotion of love, and his critical remarks seem not to fit with the intuitions of some people when it comes to some of the more positive instances of love (e.g., the love a parent has for a child). In this paper I pursue two related aims. First, I identify and sort out the different kinds of love in Kant's writings, and I address a particular difficulty of interpretation, namely the status of love of human beings (Menschenliebe) in Kant's writings. Second, I argue that, despite Kant's criticisms of the emotion of love, he views it as an expression of our unsocial sociability, and it plays a positive and indispensible role in the moral development of human beings.     

The Kant and Race Debate: A Frederick Douglass Intervention

Samuel Fleischacker is interested in two questions that are—what he refers to as—a rephrasing of three implications Charles Mills takes away from his encounter with Kant: (1) Is Kant's moral philosophy racist at its core? and (2) Whether it is or not, how should we respond to the fact that Kant displays open racism in some of his writings when we study, teach, or try to make use of his purportedly egalitarian teachings? Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist who wrestled with similar questions regarding the liberatory and inclusive nature of emancipatory documents like the Constitution. In this essay, I want to consider Douglass's changing views on this issue and reasons behind them to think about how he might offer insights into this current debate concerning Kant and race. In doing so, I will consider to what extent Fleischacker adheres to Douglass's guidelines on this matter as he makes his case. I then offer suggestions on how to move forward.     

The Role of Reflection in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

There are two prevailing interpretations of the status which Kant accorded his claims in the Critique of Pure Reason: 1) he is analyzing our concepts of cognition and experience; 2) he is making empirical claims about our cognitive faculties. I argue for a third alternative: on Kant's account, all cognition consists in a reflective consciousness of our cognitive faculties, and in critique we analyze the content of this consciousness. Since Strawson raises a famous charge of incoherence against such a position, I begin by showing that this charge is misplaced.     

KANTIAN VALUE REALISM

Why should we be interested in Kant's ethical theory? One reason is that we find his views about our moral responsibilities appealing. Anyone who thinks that we should treat other people with respect, that we should not use them as a mere means in ways to which they could not possibly consent, will be attracted by a Kantian style of ethical theory. But according to recent supporters of Kant, the most distinctive and important feature of his ethical theory is not his claims about the particular ethical duties that we owe to each other, but his views about the nature of value. They argue that Kant has an account of the relationship between practical reason and value, known as “Kantian constructivism” that is far superior to the traditional “value realist” theory, and that it is because of this that we should accept his theory. ¹ 1 Korsgaard (1996a, 1996b, 2003 ).
It is now standard for both supporters and critics to claim that Kant's moral theory stands or falls with Kantian constructivism. ² 2 Gaut (1997 ), Regan (2002 ).
But this is a mistake. In this paper, I sketch a rival Kantian theory of value, which I call Kantian value realism. I argue that there is textual evidence that Kant himself accepted value realism rather than constructivism. Whilst my aim in this paper is to set out the theory clearly rather than to defend it, I will try to show that Kantian value realism is preferable to Kantian constructivism and that it is worthy of further study.     

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.     

The Subjective Basis of Kant's Judgment of Taste

Kant claims that the basis of a judgment of taste is a merely subjective representation and that the only merely subjective representations are feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Commentators disagree over how to interpret this claim. Some take it to mean that judgments about the beauty of an object depend only on the state of the judging subject. Others argue instead that, for Kant, the pleasure we take in a beautiful object is best understood as a response to its qualities, and that, accordingly, feelings of pleasure or displeasure are no different from other representations, such as colors or smells. While I agree that the judgment of taste is best understood as asserting a claim about an object's qualities, I argue that the distinction Kant makes between feelings of pleasure or displeasure and other representations should not be ignored. I show that one's liking or disliking for an object is merely subjective in the sense that its significance depends on what one has made of oneself through one's aesthetic education. The judgment of taste, then, is merely subjective because one must first become the kind of person whose feelings have the right significance at the right time before one can determine whether an object's qualities make it beautiful.     

Kant's Commitment to Metaphysics of Morals

A definitive feature of Kant's moral philosophy is its rationalism. Kant insists that moral theory, at least at its foundation, cannot take account of empirical facts about human beings and their circumstances in the world. This is the core of Kant's commitment to ‘metaphysics of morals’, and it is what he sees as his greatest contribution to moral philosophy. The paper clarifies what it means to be committed to metaphysics of morals, why Kant is committed to it, and where he thinks empirical considerations may enter moral theory. The paper examines recent work of contemporary Kantians (Barbara Herman, Allen Wood, and Christine Korsgaard) who argue that there is a central role for empirical considerations in Kant's moral theory. Either these theorists interpret Kant himself as permitting empirical considerations to enter, or they propose to extend Kant's theory so as to allow them to enter. With some qualifications, I argue that these interpretive trends are not supported by the texts, and that the proposed extensions are not plausibly Kantian. Kant's insistence on the exclusion of empirical considerations from the foundations of moral theory is not an incidental feature of his thought which might be modified while the rest remains unchanged. Rather, it is the very centre of his endeavours in moral philosophy. If we disagree with it, I argue, we have grounds for moving to a distinctly different theoretical framework.     

Anti-Realist Interpretations of Plato: Paul Natorp

The paper considers Paul Natorp's Kantian reading of Plato's theory of ideas, as developed in his monumental work, Platos Ideenlehre, eine Einführung in den Idealismus (1903, 1921). Central to Natrop's reading are, I argue, the following two claims: (1) Plato's ideas are laws, not things; and (2) Plato's theory of ideas in the first instance a theory about the possibility and nature of thought - in particular cognitive and indeed scientific or explanatory thought - and only as a consequence is it a theory about the nature of reality. Natrop thus argues that Plato's theory of ideas is at its heart a transcendental theory, and that Plato's metaphysics is built on this basis. The paper considers these claims - and their textual basis in Plato - in some detail, and attempts an initial evaluation of their plausibility as a reading of Plato. I am on the whole sympathetic to Natorp's reading, though a proper assessment goes beyond the present paper. The wider interest of this idealist or anti-realist reading of Plato ought to be obvious, especially in view of the commonly accepted assumption these days that both Plato and Aristotle, and indeed the Greeks in general, took realism entirely for granted (see e.g. M. Burnyeat). Natorp argues that this is true of Aristotle, but quite untrue of Plato. But he is quite clear that the idealism he ascribes to Plato is not Berkeleyan or metaphysical idealism, but a certain kind of transcendental or epistemological idealism. Natorp, however, is no uncritical follower of Kant, and the version of trascendental idealism that he ascribes to Plato is, I argue, very different from Kant's.     

What Dennett can't imagine and why

Woven into Dennett's account of consciousness is his belief that certain possibilities are not conceivable. This is manifested in his view that we are not conscious in any sense in which we can imagine that philosophers’ ‘zombies’ might not be conscious, and also in his claims about ‘Hindsight’, and what possibilities this can coherently suggest to us. If the possibilities Dennett denies none the less seem conceivable to us, then if he does not give us reason to think they are actually incoherent, we ought to reject his theory, since it denies the intelligibility of the very notion we should want a theory of consciousness to discuss. I argue that Dennett does not provide us with convincing reasons of the relevant sort, and I suggest that his difficulty with the concept of consciousness is rooted in questionable epistemological assumptions which he fails to justify.     

Reid on Fictional Objects and the Way of Ideas

I argue that Reid adopts a form of Meinongianism about fictional objects because of, not in spite of, his common sense philosophy. According to 'the way of ideas', thoughts take representational states as their immediate intentional objects. In contrast, Reid endorses a direct theory of conception and a heady thesis of first-person privileged access to the contents of our thoughts. He claims that thoughts about centaurs are thoughts of nonexistent objects, not thoughts about mental intermediaries, adverbial states or general concepts. In part this is because of the common sense semantics he adopts for fictional-object terms. I show that it is reasonable for Reid to endorse Meinongianism, given his epistemological priorities, for he took the way of ideas to imply that his view about first-person privileged access to our mental contents was false.     

Kant and the Pleasure of “Mere Reflection”

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the pleasure that we feel when judging that an object is beautiful as the pleasure of “mere reflection”. Yet Kant never makes explicit what exactly is the relationship between the activity of “mere reflection” and the feeling of pleasure. I discuss several contemporary accounts of the pleasure of taste and argue that none of them is fully accurate, since, in each case, they leave open the possibility that one can reflect without having a feeling of pleasure, and hence allow a possible skepticism of taste. I then present my own account, which can better explain why Kant thinks that when one reflects one must also have a feeling of pleasure. My view, which emphasizes the role of attention in Kant, depicts well what we do when we judge something to be beautiful. It can also suggest a way to explain the relation between judgments of taste and moral feeling, and begin to show how the faculty of feeling fills a gap in the system of our cognitive faculties.     

Merleau‐Ponty’s Reading of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism

The aim of this paper is to explore Merleau‐Ponty’s ambivalent relationship with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. I begin by looking at several points of convergence between Kant and Merleau‐Ponty, focusing on the affinities between Kant’s account of transcendental realism and Merleau‐Ponty’s notion of objective thought. I then show how Merleau‐Ponty’s analysis of Kant’s paradox of asymmetrical objects points to a parallel in Kant’s thought to Merleau‐Ponty’s thesis of the primacy of perception. In the second part of the paper, I show why Merleau‐Ponty believes that, despite the promise of Kant’s thought, he fails to adequately escape from objective thought. After presenting the central claims of the transcendental deduction, I piece together Merleau‐Ponty’s criticism of it by answering three questions: For Merleau‐Ponty, how do we encounter the world prior to reflection? How is experience constituted? And what leads Kant to mischaracterise experience in his own transcendental philosophy?     

Critique,Finitude and the Importance of Susceptibility: A Rossian Approach to Interpreting Kant on Pleasure

In this paper, I take Philip Rossi’s robust interpretation of critique as an interpretive guide for thinking generally about how to interpret Kant’s texts. I reflect first upon what might appear to be a minor technical issue: how best to translate the term Fähigheit when Kant utilizes it in reference to the human experience of pleasure and displeasure. Reflection upon this technical issue will, however, end up being a case study in how important it is when we are interpreting Kant’s texts to have Rossi’s focus on human finitude in the background. The terrain for these reflections on human finitude will be the realm of feelings of pleasure and displeasure. And the result will be that, counter to recent interpreters, like Elizondo (2014), who have suggested that Kant could welcome a thoroughly active conception of rational feeling, we must instead, as guided by Kant’s commitment to human finitude (and really his commitment to Transcendental Idealism itself), remember that every feeling for Kant—even the most rational of feelings, like the moral feeling of respect, or the pleasure he notes that we take in the proper functioning of one’s virtuous rational self—must be understood within the purview and constraints of the finite and sensibly-affected human being. I hope, then, that this brief reflection can be taken as one small piece of that larger story Rossi so aptly describes in his book, the story which answers the question of “What is critique?” in a way that insists upon but also simultaneously celebrates the centrality of finitude in human existence.

     

THE EMOTIONS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard's theory of change is motivated by a robust notion of contingency. His view of contingency is sharply juxtaposed with a strong notion of absolute necessity. I show that how he understands these notions explains certain ambiguous claims he makes about causation. I attempt to provide a coherent interpretation of his view of causality that is consistent with both human choice and the causal sequence of change. I end by suggesting a compatibilist interpretation of Kierkegaard's philosophy.     

Michael Wolff über Kant als Logiker. Eine Stellungnahme zu Wolffs Metakritik

In an earlier article (see J Gen Philos Sci (2009) 40: 357–372) I have discussed the arguments brought forward by Michael Wolff against the interpretation given in the commentary by Ebert and Nortmann on Aristotle’s syllogistic theory (Aristoteles Analytica Priora Buch I, übersetzt und erläutert von Theodor Ebert und Ulrich Nortmann. Berlin 2007) and against the critique of Kant’s adaption of the syllogistic logic. I have dealt with Wolff’s arguments concerning (Ebert/Nortmann’s interpretation of) Aristotle in the paper mentioned and with his attempts to defend his critique in this subsequent article (part 1; see J Gen Phils Sci (2010) 41: 215–231). Part 2 (the paper below) is concerned with Wolff’s renewed attempts to defend Kant as a logician. In particular I point out that if, as Wolff claims, the nota notae relation in Kant is restricted to subordinated concepts, then it can hardly serve as a principle for syllogistic logic, as Kant claims. Against Wolff’s attempts to defend Kant’s claim that o-propositions are simpliciter convertible, I point out two arguments: (1) Even if Kant, following the Vernunftlehre by Meier, has assumed that an o-proposition can be turned into an i-proposition, this conversion is useless for the reduction to first figure syllogisms since we are no longer dealing with three syllogistic terms but with four. (2) It is quite unlikely that Kant has a conversion of this type in mind since the texts of his students always talk of the group of either the particular propositions or else of the negative propositions. Given Kant’s mistakes concerning the convertibility simpliciter of o-propositions, it is no wonder that he overlooks the special status of the moods Baroco and Bocardo. Wolff’s attempts to provide Kant with what he claims are direct proofs for these moods can be shown to rely on a reductio ad impossibile. Kant mistook what are parts of the proofs for the validity of moods in figures two to four as parts of these moods themselves. Wolff—who tries to defend Kant on this point—is forced to an artificial and unconvincing reading of the Kantian texts.     

The Coextensiveness Thesis and Kant's Modal Agnosticism in the ‘Postulates’

In the Critique of Pure Reason, following his elucidation of the ‘postulates’ of possibility, actuality, and necessity, Kant makes a series of puzzling remarks. He seems to deny the somewhat metaphysically intuitive contention that the extension of possibility is greater than that of actuality, which, in turn, is greater than that of necessity (A230/B283). Further, he states that the actual adds nothing to the possible (B284). This leads to the view, fairly common in the literature, that Kant holds that all modal categories, in their empirical applications, are coextensive. I diverge from the common view. First, Kant is not committed to the coextensiveness thesis, understood as above. Instead, he espouses a weaker, epistemological version of the coextensiveness thesis, namely that what we can assert to be really possible is coextensive with what we cognize to be actual. Second, Kant's remarks are not intended to introduce a positive ontological thesis about the extensions of modal categories. Rather, he means to criticize a certain conception of modalities that was prevalent among his rationalist predecessors, i.e., the conception of modalities as various determinations that enter the intensions of concepts of things.     

Rousseau on Sex-Roles,Education and Happiness

Over the last decade, philosophers of education have begun taking a renewed interest in Rousseau’s educational thought. This is a welcome development as his ideas are rich with educational insights. His philosophy is not without its flaws, however. One significant flaw is his educational project for females, which is sexist in the highest degree. Rousseau argues that females should be taught to “please men…and make [men’s] lives agreeable and sweet.” The question becomes how could Rousseau make such strident claims, especially in light of his far more insightful ideas concerning the education of males. This paper attempts to make sense of Rousseau’s ideas on the education of females. While I maintain that Rousseau’s project for Sophie ought to be rejected, I argue that we should try to understand how this otherwise insightful thinker could make such surprising claims. Is it a bizarre inconsistency in his philosophical reasoning or an expression of his unabashed misogyny, as so many have claimed? I argue that it is neither. Rather, it is a product of his conception of human happiness and his belief in the irreducible role human sexual relations has in achieving and prolonging that happiness. For Rousseau, sex, love and happiness are inextricably connected, and he believes that men and women will be happiest when they inhabit certain sex roles—not because sex roles are valuable in themselves, but because only through them can either men or women hope to be happy.     

Forgiveness and Moral Development

Forgiveness is clearly an important aspect of our moral lives, yet surprisingly Kant, one of the most important authors in the history of Western ethics, seems to have very little to say about it. Some authors explain this omission by noting that forgiveness sits uncomfortably in Kant’s moral thought: forgiveness seems to have an ineluctably ‘elective’ aspect which makes it to a certain extent arbitrary; thus it stands in tension with Kant’s claim that agents are autonomous beings, capable of determining their own moral status through rational reflection and choice. Other authors recognise that forgiveness plays a role in Kant’s philosophy but fail to appreciate the nature of this duty and misrepresent the Kantian argument in support of it. This paper argues that there is space in Kant’s philosophy for a genuine theory of forgiveness and hopes to lay the grounds for a correct interpretation of this theory. I argue that from a Kantian perspective, forgiveness is not ‘elective’ but, at least in some cases, morally required. I claim that, for Kant, we have an imperfect duty of virtue to forgive repentant wrongdoers that have embarked on a project of self-reflection and self-reform. I develop a novel argument in support of this duty by drawing on Kant’s theory of rational agency, the thesis of radical evil, Kant’s theory of moral development, and the formula of humanity. However, it must be noted that this is a conditional duty and Kant’s position also entails that absence of repentance on the part of the wrongdoer should be taken as evidence of a lack of commitment to a project of self-reflection and self-reform. In such cases, Kant claims, we have a perfect duty to ourselves not to forgive unrepentant wrongdoers. I argue that this duty should be understood as one of the duties of self-esteem, which involves the duty to respect and recognise our own dignity as rational beings.