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.     

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.)     

Kant's Schematism of the categories: An interpretation and defence

The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the “inhomogeneity” of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls “transcendental schemata,” which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumption Sufficiency (i.e., that subsuming an object under a transcendental schema is sufficient to subsume it under the corresponding category) and Real Possibility (i.e., that it is really possible to subsume objects under each of the transcendental schemata). These two principles, together with a trivial modal one (the Subsumption-Possibility Link), entail that it is possible to subsume objects under categories; in other words, the argument of the Schematism is valid. The main work of the paper consists in reconstructing Kant's arguments for, and explanations of, these premises. I argue that they hinge on Kant's claim that transcendental schemata are “time-determinations,” which I interpret to mean: rules for reflexively representing the temporal relations among our own representational states. On the basis of this reading, I reconstruct Kant's argument for Subsumption Sufficiency, category by category. I also explain why Real Possibility follows almost immediately. Granting Kant the argument up to this point in the Critique, the argument of the Schematism is sound.     

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.     

Language and knowledge in Spinoza

This paper argues against the thesis of Professor Savan, that Spinoza's views about words and about the imagination are such that he could not consistently say, and indeed did not think, that philosophical truths can be expressed adequately in language. The evidence for this thesis is examined in detail, and it is argued that Spinoza should have distinguished between two types of imagination, corresponding roughly to Kant's transcendental and empirical imagination. Finally, it is suggested that the bulk of the argument of the Ethics is conducted on the level of the ‘second kind of knowledge’, reason, but that it also contains examples of the use of the first and third kinds of knowledge.     

Comments on Guyer

Paul Guyer's paper “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant's Moral Philosophy” raises a set of issues about how Kantian ethics should be understood in relation to present day “philosophical naturalism” that are very much in need of discussion. The paper itself is challenging, even in some respects iconoclastic, and provides a highly welcome provocation to raise in new ways some basic questions about what Kantian ethics is and what it ought to be. Guyer offers us an admirably informed and complex argument, both historical and philosophical, that tangles with some of the most difficult problems in Kant's moral philosophy. It begins with some ambitious and controversial claims about Kant's moral philosophy prior to the Groundwork of 1785. It then offers an interpretation, and also a fundamental criticism, of the Groundwork's attempt to establish the moral law based on the idea of freedom of the will. And finally, it raises – and expresses some opinions on – the large and vexed questions of the relationship between transcendental philosophy and philosophical naturalism, and whether Kantian ethics can be made consistent with a naturalistic philosophical outlook. In these comments I will have something to say on each of these three topics, without pretending (any more than Guyer does) to have exhausted what might be said about them.     

Kant's Criticisms of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

According to recent commentators like Paul Guyer, Kant agrees with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1) that physico-theology can never provide knowledge of God and (2) that the concept of God, nevertheless, provides a useful heuristic principle for scientific enquiry. This paper argues that Kant, far from agreeing with Hume, criticizes Hume's Dialogues for failing to prove that physico-theology can never yield knowledge of God and that Kant correctly views Hume's Dialogues as a threat to, rather than an anticipation of, his own view that the concept of God provides a useful heuristic principle for science. The paper concludes that Kant's critique of physico-theology reflects Kant's deep dissatisfaction with Hume's manner of argumentation and suggests that Kant's attempt to provide a more successful critique of physico-theology merits continued philosophical attention.     

Demea’s Dilemmas

This paper considers how Descartes's and Hume's sceptical challenges were appropriated by Christian Wolff and Johann Nicolaus Tetens specifically in the context of projects related to Kant's in the transcendental deduction. Wolff introduces Descartes's dream hypothesis as an obstacle to his account of the truth of propositions, or logical truth, which he identifies with the 'possibility' of empirical concepts. Tetens explicitly takes Hume's account of our idea of causality to be a challenge to the `reality' of transcendent concepts in general, a challenge he addresses by locating the source of this concept in the understanding rather than in the imagination. After considering this background, I turn to Kant's deployment of apparently traditional sceptical concerns at the outset of the transcendental deduction and argue that he does not there intend to introduce a global sceptical challenge and, accordingly, that there are historical grounds for doubting that the transcendental deduction is intended as an anti-sceptical argument.     

Kant's Argument that Existence is not a Determination

In this paper, I examine Kant's famous objection to the ontological argument: existence is not a determination. Previous commentators have not adequately explained what this claim means, how it undermines the ontological argument, or how Kant argues for it. I argue that the claim that existence is not a determination means that it is not possible for there to be non‐existent objects; necessarily, there are only existent objects. I argue further that Kant's target is not merely ontological arguments as such but the larger ‘ontotheist’ metaphysics they presuppose: the view that God necessarily exists in virtue of his essence being contained in, or logically entailed by, his essence. I show that the ontotheist explanation of divine necessity requires the assumption that existence is a determination, and I show that Descartes and Leibniz are implicitly committed to this in their published versions of the ontological argument. I consider the philosophical motivations for the claim that existence is a determination and then I examine Kant's arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason against it.     

A Broken Engagement: Reassessing Barth's Relationship to Kierkegaard on the Grounds of Subjectivity and Preaching

Despite Barth's initial appropriations of Kierkegaard, he famously discarded the Dane from the theological ‘canon’ due to the latter's alleged anthropocentric subjectivism. Yet Kierkegaard was himself a preacher and polemical homiletician, seeking merely to appropriate the objective truth of the proclaimed word. Barth's Basel prison sermons reveal this same endeavour to render the eternally significant message temporally significant for his hearers. In Kierkegaard's Christendom, a corrective focus on subjectivity was the only way to remain faithful to the ‘objective’ truth of the gospel. Barth and Kierkegaard are juxtaposed here not in contrast (as Barth might have preferred) but in affinity, in that both sought to evoke the dialectical subjectivity of objectivity through preaching.     

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.     

Kant,Neo‐Kantians,and Transcendental Subjectivity

This article discusses an interpretation of Kant's conception of transcendental subjectivity, which manages to avoid many of the concerns that have been raised by analytic interpreters over this doctrine. It is an interpretation put forward by selected C19 and early C20 neo‐Kantian writers. The article starts out by offering a neo‐Kantian interpretation of the object as something that is constituted by the categories and that serves as a standard of truth within a theory of judgment (I). The second part explicates transcendental subjectivity as the system of categories, which is self‐referential and constitutes objects (II), in order to then evaluate this conception by means of a comparison with Hegel's absolute subject (III). Rather than delineating the differences between neo‐Kantian writers, the article systematically expounds a shared project, which consists in providing the ultimate foundation for judgments by means of an anti‐psychologist and non‐metaphysical interpretation of transcendental subjectivity.     

Equipment,World, and Language

Contrary to Eckart Förster, I argue that the Opus postumumrepresents more of an evolution than a revolution in Kant's thought. Among other points, I argue that Kant's Selbstsetzungslehre, or theory of self-positing, according to which we cannot have knowledge of the spatio-temporal world except through recognition of the changes we initiate in it by our own bodies, does not constitute a radicalization of Kant's transcendental idealism, but is a development of the realist line of argument introduced by the "Refutation of Idealism" of 1787-90; and I argue that Kant's concept of the highest good, which according to Förster was only revised to connect virtue to collective rather than individual happiness in 1790-93 and was then in any case withdrawn in the Opus postumum, was uninterruptedly focused on collective happiness from the first edition of the first Critique, and that there is no reason to believe that ever Kant retracted it.     

Immediacy ‐ subjectivity ‐ revelation

Kierkegaard's fundamental view of life was negative and Gnostic. It was through his interpretation of life that his vision of the nothingness of existence became positive. What formed the material of Kierkegaard's interpretation was the common experience of existence, what ‘all’ men know. His concept of existence has a threefold content : immediacy, subjectivity, and the Christian Revelation. Immediate reality that is not made content of subjectivity becomes empty changeableness, and subjectivity that does not appropriate immediacy deprives itself of the concrete (as with the mystic). Immediacy's ‘text’ first acquires a qualitative transcendent content through the ‘repetition’ of subjective choice. Kierkegaard takes this appropriation of the immediate to be also the self‐development of subjectivity. Consciousness of guilt is an expression of a God‐relationship. Implicated with this consciousness is the consciousness of the nothingness of everything — echoed in man as dread. Yet even when subjectivity is conscious of guilt the truth remains immanent in subjectivity. In the Christian Revelation truth is outside man: subjectivity is untruth (sin).     

The word of others

Tyler Burge has argued that one has an a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what one takes to have been presented as true by an interlocutor. This thesis, however, is problematic, since the alleged a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of our seeming understanding of things presented as true to us, rests on the possibility of determining assertoric force on a purely intellectual basis. This thesis is not plausible and Burge's analogy from memory does not support it. Two routes for defending Burge's thesis of the a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what has been asserted can be identified: the Transcendental Route and the Intrinsic Rationality Route. David Lewis' account of linguistic convention would serve as a transcendental argument for the a priori prima facie entitlement to believe in the truth of what has been asserted, but flaws in Lewis' theory leave us deprived of any good transcendental argument for such an entitlement. The Intrinsic Rationality Route is in better standing, but we have yet to see an argument for why we should resort to that measure.     

Unity,Objectivity, and the Passivity of Experience

In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences if we are to self‐ascribe them? In the third part of the essay, I use Kant's remarks concerning the passivity of experience to suggest one answer to this question: in self‐ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects. This can be used to provide an alternative route from unity to objectivity.     

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.     

Varieties of Reflection in Kant's Logic

For Kant, ‘reflection’ (Überlegung, Reflexion) is a technical term with a range of senses. I focus here on the senses of reflection that come to light in Kant's account of logic, and then bring the results to bear on the distinction between ‘logical’ and ‘transcendental’ reflection that surfaces in the Amphiboly chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. Although recent commentary has followed similar cues, I suggest that it labours under a blind spot, as it neglects Kant's distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ general logic. The foundational text of existing interpretations is a passage in Logik Jäsche that appears to attribute to Kant the view that reflection is a mental operation involved in the generation of concepts from non-conceptual materials. I argue against the received view by attending to Kant's division between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ general logic, identifying senses of reflection proper to each, and showing that none accords well with the received view. Finally, to take account of Kant's notion of transcendental reflection I show that we need to be attentive to the concerns of applied logic and how they inform the domain-relative transcendental logic that Kant presents in the first Critique.     

SCEPTICISM AND THE JUSTIFICATION OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

In this paper I explore a justification for transcendental idealism that emerges from the dialogue with philosophical scepticism in which Kant is on and off engaged throughout the Critique of Pure Reason. ¹ 1 References to the Critique of Pure Reason are to the translation by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929) of Immanucl Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Page references are given in the usual manner, ‘A’ referring to the first (1791) edition and ‘B’ to the second (1787) edition.
Many commentators, most prominently Strawson, have claimed that transcend- ental idealism is an unfortunate addition to the Critique, one that can profitably be excised in the interests of clarity and coherence. ² 2 I In The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique ofpure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966) P. F. Strawson famously urges that the confused doctrines of transcendental idealism be disentangled from ‘the analytical argument of Kant's positive metaphysics of experience’ (P. 42).
Against this general picture I urge that transcendental idealism is in fact a very natural consequence of some of the central doctrines of the Critical Philosophy. It is in the context of Kant's debate with scepticism that this emerges most clearly. Nonetheless, I argue that Kant's employment of transcendental idealism against the sceptic is seriously compromised by his postulating the existence of unknowable things-in-themselves. As long as he maintains that there are unknowable things-in-themselves which are responsible for our having the experience that we do have, his position seems to collapse into sceptical idealism. In the final section of the paper I suggest that the only possible escape from this difficulty would be to rule out the possibility of affirming that unknowable things-in-themselves exist. I also suggest that an argument to this effect exists in the Critique and that Kant's position would be more consistent had he adhered to it.     

F. A. Trendelenburg and the Neglected Alternative

Despite his impressive influence on nineteenth-century philosophy, F. A. Trendelenburg's own philosophy has been largely ignored. However, among Kant scholars, Trendelenburg has always been remembered for his feud with Kuno Fischer over the subjectivity of space and time in Kant's philosophy. The topic of the dispute, now frequently referred to as the ‘Neglected Alternative’ objection, has become a prominent issue in contemporary discussions and interpretations of Kant's view of space and time. The Neglected Alternative contends that Kant unjustifiably moves from the claim that we have a priori intuitions of space and time to the sceptical conclusion that space and time are exclusively subjective. Most current discussions trace the objection back to Trendelenburg and often use him to motivate the objection. However, to date Trendelenburg's actual arguments and reasons for rejecting the Kantian view of space and time have not been sufficiently uncovered; my goal here is to fill this lacuna. By better understanding what Trendelenburg actually argued, we will be in a better position to assess whether the Neglected Alternative objection against Kant is successful. But in addition, Trendelenburg's own system is of independent philosophical interest, and my work here will shed light on one part of it.