New Kant Journal

There is a new Kant journal, Kant Studies Online, which is peer reviewed and open access. Here are the details:

Kant Studies Online publishes articles written in English on all aspects of Kant’s works including historically informed studies, applications of Kantian thought to contemporary problems, the relationship between Kantian and Neo-Kantian thinking, and detailed scholarly works on interpretation of Kant’s works. It will also include review articles of secondary works on Kant. An issue of the journal will be deemed to exist whenever an accepted article is published. The journal is edited by Gary Banham in association with an editorial board and is published in the spirit of the open access movement. Whilst its target audience is academic philosophers and students it aims to attract non-academic readers by making all its material freely available without restriction.

This is a promising development for Kant scholarship. I imagine as more journals are online and open access, like Philosophers Imprint, they will gain a larger following, more esteem, and publish better scholarship. Four Kant journals come to mind that publish in English: Kantian Review, Kant-Studien, The Kant Yearbook, and now Kant Studies Online. Am I missing any?

Midwestern Study Group of the North American Kant Society (CFP)

Midwestern Study Group of the North American Kant Society
October 23-24, 2010

University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, Canada
Keynote Speaker: Angelica Nuzzo (Brooklyn College, CUNY)

Call for papers: We welcome submissions from all areas of Kant studies, broadly construed to include not only contemporary approaches that are “Kantian” in methodology or content, but also the discussion of Kant's immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and successors.
The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2010. Papers should not exceed 25 double-spaced pages. All submissions should be prepared for blind review and should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers read at any other NAKS meeting may not be submitted.

Send submissions, and direct any enquiries, to Corey W. Dyck (cdyck5@uwo.ca).Program Committee: Corey W. Dyck and Bill Harper (UWO), Brigitte Sassen (McMaster)

Link to conference website: http://publish.uwo.ca/~cdyck5/North_American_Kant_Society/index.html

New SEP Articles

There are some new Kant and Kant related articles up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

Kant's Views on Space and Time

Peter Frederick Strawson

Analytic Kantianism

The new issue of Philosophical Topics is dedicated to Kant and it includes essays by excellent philosophers.

Philosophical Topics, Volume 34, Numbers 1 & 2
Analytic Kantianism

Issue Editor: James Conant

Contributors: Robert Brandom, Eli Friedlander, Michael Friedman, Hannah Ginsborg, Arata Hamawaki, Andrea Kern, Michael Kremer, Thomas Land, Thomas Lockhart, Béatrice Longuenesse, John McDowell, A.W. Moore, Sebastian Rödl, and Clinton Tolley.

Kant Congress (CFP)

Here the CFP for the International Kant Congress is posted. The deadline for papers has been extended to September 15, 2009.

Ameriks on Fichtean Influences

I spent a good bit of this afternoon reading a series of exchanges between Karl Ameriks, Daniel Breazeale, and Charles Larmore published by Inquiry in 2003. The exchange is over Ameriks' book Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge, 2000), a book that takes issue with how Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel understood, interpreted, and appropriated Kant. Ameriks blames the influence of Reinhold and Fichte for muddying the waters of Kant interpretation by taking Kant's starting point in his Transcendental Deduction to be the concept of representation, and not, what Ameriks calls "common sense judgment", that is, judgments about public objects found in space and time. The issue here is that Reinhold and Fichte have set up a shortcut to their idealist conclusions, one that bypasses the complexities of Kant's own argument for Transcendental Idealism. Ameriks is well-known for introducing the short arguments to idealism, and his book is largely an attempt to show why this mode of argumentation obscures the meaning and importance of Kant’s project.

What I find interesting about Ameriks' take on Fichte is that he sees his influence on contemporary philosophy to be more profound than most philosophers and scholars are willing to recognize. The problem with this Fichtean influence, for Ameriks, is that he takes Fichte to be at best a bad Kantian, and at worst a bad philosopher, so his influence can only be deleterious. Breazeale admirably comes to the defense of Fichte, but in doing so he questions Ameriks' assumption that Fichte's work has been influential:

I am deeply gratified—as well as somewhat amused—by Ameriks' undisguised alarm at the 'growing interest' among contemporary philosophers in post-Kant idealism in general and in Fichte in particular. Even if it represents a considerable exaggeration of the actual situation, I am still flattered to read that 'enough has been written in recent years to make this one-exotic strand of thought familiar and even attractive to many English-language readers' (Ameriks, p. 4). Indeed, it seems to be part of Ameriks' rhetorical strategy to exaggerate in this way the threat represented by contemporary interest in the work of the post-Kantians in order thereby to emphasize the timeliness and significance of his effort to vindicate 'orthodox Kantianism'. (Breazeale, "Two Cheers for Post Kantianism", Inquiry, v. 46, p. 240)

Ameriks finds Fichtean influences in the way in which scholars like Robert Pippin interpret Kant. A lot of this criticism from Ameriks is aimed at defending what he takes to be the right interpretation of Kant’s work, one that is not metaphysically deflationary in its orientation. Ameriks takes issue with more than just scholars of Kant and post-Kantianism. He also finds that a certain kind of Fichteanism has begun to take hold in analytic circles. In a footnote he writes, "An impressive recent indication of the 'analytic' trend I have in mind is Susan Hurley aptly titled Consciousness in Action, a work that does not directly invoke Fichte but provides an extensive discussion of 'action-oriented' readings of Kantian apperception, with an insightful critique of 'the myth of the giving'"(Ameriks, 188). Hurley also defends another thesis, one Hector-Neri Castañeda called 'the Fichtean thesis': a necessary condition of consciousness is self-consciousness. Action-oriented theories of apperception, perception, knowledge, and consciousness are becoming more and more influential in certain circles in philosophy of mind. I think Breazeale is probably right to be skeptical about such trends resulting from philosophers having read Fichte. However, Ameriks is, I think, right to insist that there is a post-Kantian influence on contemporary analytic philosophy. This influence should be traced back to the post-Kantianism of Sellars. Post-Kantianism of the Sellarisan variety is quite influential today. Ameriks book was published in 2000, just a few years after the wave making works of McDowell and Brandom. I think in this respect Ameriks is right to see Fichtean influences in contemporary analytic philosophy and Kant interpretation, even when they come by way of Hegel and Sellars rather than directly from Fichte himself. Like Breazeale, I don't, however, takes these influences to be toxic.

Kant and the Early Moderns (Book Review)

Book Review at NDPR:

Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse (eds.), Kant and the Early Moderns, Princeton University Press, 2008.

Kant Yearbook 2010 (CFP)

The Kant Yearbook is now accepting submissions for its second issue in 2010. The Kant Yearbook is an international journal that publishes articles on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It is the Kant Yearbook's goal to intensify innovative research on Kant on the international scale. For that reason, the Kant Yearbook prefers to publish articles in English, however articles in German will also be accepted. Each issue will be dedicated to a specific topic.The second issue's topic is Metaphysics, and the deadline for submissions is May 10, 2009.

The Kant Yearbook practices double-blind review; i.e. the reviewers are not aware of the identity of a manuscript's author, and the author is not aware of the reviewer's identity. Submitted manuscripts must be anonymous. That is, the authors' names and references to their work capable of identifying them are not to appear in the manuscript.

Editor:
Dietmar H. Heidemann (Hofstra University)

Editorial Board:
Henry E. Allison (University of California at Davis)
Karl Ameriks (Notre Dame)
Gordon Brittan (Montana State University)
Klaus Düsing (University of Cologne)
Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Boston University)
Kristina Engelhard (University of Cologne)
Brigitte Falkenburg (University of Dortmund)
Hannah Ginsborg (University of California at Berkeley)
Michelle Grier (University of San Diego)
Thomas Grundmann (University of Cologne)
Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania)
Robert Hanna (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Georg Mohr (University of Bremen)
Angelica Nuzzo (CUNY)
Robert Stern (Sheffield University)
Dieter Sturma (University of Bonn)
Ken Westphal (University of Kent)
Markus Willaschek (University of Frankfurt)

More info here.

Review of Wood's Kantian Ethics

A critical review of Allen Wood's Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, 2007) appeared in the Time Literary Supplement. The review is by Michael Rosen (Harvard). Here is an excerpt to entice you:

Kantian Ethics is an important and challenging book. The position that it presents is original and its argument is supported by an exceptional knowledge of Kant’s thought, of the Kantian literature and of ethical theory more broadly. It is not, however, a particularly attractive one to read. The tone in which Wood criticizes those with whom he disagrees is hectoring and dyspeptic. They show “a deplorable tendency to think in terms of entrenched prejudices”; they commit “whoppers”, have a “tin ear” for Kant, say things that are “strangely arbitrary and nonsensically extreme”, and so on. Philosophical texts are exceedingly complex, and to enter into their world is not easy. When someone feels that they have grasped what others have missed it is perhaps understandable that they should come to think that, as Wood puts it, “what Kant is trying to say is not making it past the censorship of their philosophical prejudices”. I can appreciate this, not least because I found myself thinking similarly about Wood himself. It seemed to me that his grave-robber’s passion for using Kant to support his own moral convictions had sometimes led him to overlook dimensions of Kant’s theory to which, as an archaeologist, he should have given greater weight. But this thought does not diminish the admiration I feel for the seriousness and erudition with which he sets about his task.

New Kant Book on Embodiment

Angelica Nuzzo (Brooklyn College/CUNY Graduate Center) has published a new work titled Ideal Embodiment: Kant's Theory of Sensibility (Indiana University Press, 2008). Here is the publisher's description:

Angelica Nuzzo offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's theory of sensibility in his three Critiques. By introducing the notion of "transcendental embodiment," Nuzzo proposes a new understanding of Kant's views on science, nature, morality, and art. She shows that the issue of human embodiment is coherently addressed and key to comprehending vexing issues in Kant's work as a whole. In this penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled with: How does a body that feels pleasure and pain, desire, anger, and fear understand and experience reason and strive toward knowledge? What grounds the body's experience of art and beauty? What kind of feeling is the feeling of being alive? As she comes to grips with answers, Nuzzo goes beyond Kant to revise our view of embodiment and the essential conditions that make human experience possible.

Some Kant Links

Here are a few Kant links:

James Conant on on "John McDowell's Kant", a recording of a lecture given at the University of Bergen.

A new Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on "Kant's Account of Reason."

A review of Paul Guyer's new book Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume.

Kant, Hume, Causality

Over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a new entry on "Kant and Hume on Causality" was just posted. It is written by Graciela De Pierris and Michael Friedman, who is well known for his work on Kant and the sciences.

On Reason

In his new book Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, 2008), Allen Wood points out that Vernunft, the word Kant uses for 'reason', derives from the German word 'to hear' (vernehmen). Wood writes, "A rational (or reasonable) person is above all someone who 'listens to reason,' who is capable of hearing and understanding others when they offer reasons" (p. 18). Wood thinks that on etymological grounds we see that (this is not a philosophical argument), "Reasons..are essentially to be shared between people--they are never only the private possession of those for whom they are reasons" (19). On this view, when one acts according to reasons, one acts on reasons that are intersubjectively grounded. I think this is a view worked out in some detail in Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right and also in Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint, a book I hope to start posting on soon.

I found the etymological point interesting, especially since I don't remember coming across it before. After a quick glance at Caygill's entry on 'reason' in the Kant Dictionary I found no mention of this point. I thought I would check the OED for any similar connections in English. Granted, the phrases we use like 'He just doesn't listen to reason' make a similar point. This phrase appears to go as far back as 1225, "I heard nu reisuns" and in 1440 we have "new resones speke." Reasons are also seen: 1740 J. Clarke, "I never yet saw reason...to believe."

Fichte's Critique of Reinhold

In his book All or Nothing, Paul Franks makes a very strong claim about how many Anglo-American scholars have misunderstood and wrongly interpreted Schulze and Fichte's understanding of Reinhold's 'Principle of Consciousness' [1]. The Principle of Consciousness says: “[I]n consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is related to both” [2]. The problem many scholars like F. Neuhouser, T. Pinkard and W. Martin note is that this appears to lead into an infinite regress of subjects. Franks convincingly argues that this was never claimed by Fichte or Schulze. I have been thinking about this a good bit, and have wondered why so many scholars seem to have made this so-called mistake. I wonder if there is in Fichte's "Aenesidemus Review" a claim that appears to resemble the idea that Reinhold's principle leads to a regress. Here is one point Fichte makes in his "Aenesidemus Review":

What kind of principle is [the Principle of Consciousness]? Aenesidemus answers: ‘It is (1) a synthetic proposition, one in which to a subject there is added a predicate (viz., consciousness) which is not already included in the concept of the subject, but rather, is first annexed to it in experience.’ It is well know that Reinhold claims that this principle is merely analytic. We will here overlook the fact that Aenesidemus denies the universal validity of the Principle of Consciousness, thereby assuming that there is a type of consciousness for which this principle does not hold. But there is a deeper reason for Aenesidemus’s and Reinhold’s differing assertions regarding this question, one which lies in the difference between two ways of regarding the Principle of Consciousness. If no consciousness is conceivable apart from these three elements, then they are of course all included in the concept of consciousness, and of course the proposition which asserts this is, with respect to its logical validity a proposition based upon reflection, an analytic proposition. Yet since it involves distinguishing and relating, this very action of representing, the act of consciousness itself, is obviously a synthesis, and indeed, the highest synthesis and the foundation of all other possible syntheses. This raises the very natural question: How is it possible to trace all the action of the mind back to an act of connecting? How is synthesis conceivable without presupposing thesis and antithesis? [3]

There is a good bit to say about this quotation. I am wondering how others might read this. It is important to remember that the Principle of Consciousness is meant to be a foundational principle that expresses the necessary conditions or analytic marks that constitute the genus representation found in Kant’s Stufenleiter. Furthermore, the principle is meant to be a principle that expresses the structure of transcendental apperception, the form of apperception that enables self-conscious thought and empirical apperception or empirical self-conscious thought. That being said, if there is something outside the structure of the principle, something conditional for it, then the principle cannot be foundational. Schulze’s critique of the principle is based on his belief that the principle is a synthetic principle. Schulze’s (or Aenesidemus’s) claim is that ‘consciousness’, ‘consciousness of’ ‘a representation being related to a subject’ is not an analytic mark found in the concept ‘subject’ but is added to the subject when there is some experiential data to be synthesized. A subject, it would follow, need not have consciousness. Being consciousness might be a contingent fact about some subjects.

But this point about analytic and synthetic principles does not seem related to how the quotation ends: "Yet since it involves distinguishing and relating, this very action of representing, the act of consciousness itself, is obviously a synthesis, and indeed, the highest synthesis and the foundation of all other possible syntheses." At this point, it appears Fichte has moved on to an issue that concerns a distinction Kant makes in his B-deduction between the synthetic unity of apperception and the analytic unity of apperception. With this distinction, Kant argues that an analytic unity requires a synthesis, which entails that the synthetic unity conditions the analytic unity of apperception. The claim Fichte would appear to be making, and I recognize I am being incredibly quick here, is that what Reinhold's principle does not account for is how consciousness requires the kind of activity involved in the synthetic unity of consciousness.

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[1] Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 221ff.

[2] Karl Reinhold, "The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge" in Between Kant and Hegel, (trans.) George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), p. 70.

[3] Fichte, "Aenesidemus Review" in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, (trans.) Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998), pp. 62-63.

Idealism Texts Online

Recently, I posted about some Hegel material that is online. At the same site there is a good bit of material from other figures:

Kant

Herder

Fichte

Schlegel

Schelling

Book Reviews

There are some new book reviews up at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

1. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Darwall's book has an important chapter on Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right, where Fichte takes up an analysis of the role the second-person standpoint plays in a theory of rationality and self-consciousness, though this is not mentioned in the review.)

2. Kyriaki Goudeli, Pavlos Kontos, and Ioli Patellis (eds.), Kant: Making Reason Intuitive

3. James Phillips, The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant

Guyer on Kant's Moral Philosophy

The new issue of Inquiry (v. 50, Issue 5, 2007) is devoted to an essay by Paul Guyer, "Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant's Moral Philosophy." Allen Wood, Henry Allison and Sebastian Rödl comment on Guyer, and Guyer replies to their comments. Here is Guyer's abstract followed by Allison's, which gives some sense of what the Guyer piece is up to:

Paul Guyer
"Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant's Moral Philosophy"

Abstract: During the 1760s and 1770s, Kant entertained a naturalistic approach to ethics based on the supposed psychological fact of a human love for freedom. During the critical period, especially in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant clearly rejected such an approach. But his attempt at a metaphysical foundation for ethics in section III of the Groundwork was equally clearly a failure. Kant recognized this in his appeal to the "fact of reason" argument in the Critique of Practical Reason, but thereby gave up on any attempt to ground the fundamental principle of morality at all. So it is of interest to see how far we might now proceed along the lines of his original naturalistic approach.

Henry Allison
"Comments on Guyer"

Abstract: Guyer argues for four major theses. First, in his early, pre-critical discussions of morality, Kant advocated a version of rational egoism, in which freedom, understood naturalistically as a freedom from domination by both one's own inclinations and from other people, rather than happiness, is the fundamental value. From this point of view, the function of the moral law is to prescribe rules best suited to the preservation and maximization of such freedom, just as on the traditional eudaemonistic account it is to prescribe rules for the maximization of happiness. Second, in the Groundwork, Kant abandoned this naturalistic approach and while retaining the same substantive thesis as his early moral philosophy, "namely that freedom is the value that is realized by adherence to the moral law" (Guyer 455), attempted to provide a non-naturalistic (transcendental) grounding for this valuation of freedom. Third, this took the form of a transcendental deduction, closely modeled on that of the first Critique, which was intended to demonstrate that we are in fact (noumenally) free and the moral law is the "causal law" of this freedom. Fourth, this deduction is a disaster, indeed, one of Western philosophy's "most spectacular train wrecks" (Guyer 445). I shall discuss each in turn, devoting the bulk of my attention to the last.

Kant Study Group (CFP)

The Eastern Study Group of the North American Kant Society has a Call for Papers for their meeting in New York on April 18th and 19th. Béatrice Longuenesse is the keynote speaker and she is delivering a paper titled "I, Self, Subject".

Videos on Kantian Ethics

Here are some very good videos on Kantian Ethics from a 2003 conference at the University of San Diego. The highlights include Allen Wood on Kant and Fichte and Property, Henry Allison on the Categorical Imperative, Stephen Darwall on Kant, Fichte and the Second-Person Standpoint, Robert Pippin on the Kantian State, and, what looks to be an interesting panel on the categorical imperative. These are not the only talks. There are actually 23 videos in total, all devoted to Kant and ethics. Unfortunately, it does not look like they have the papers online.

Kant's "Refutation of Idealism"

I am curious what people think about the argument of Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” [B274]. I have been sitting in on a Kant course at NYU/Columbia, and recently we discussed Kant’s argument.

I am wondering to what extent people find the argument convincing. I think this must depend on to what degree one finds transcendental arguments (TAs) convincing and what one thinks such arguments can potentially show. If one does find TAs convincing, then with the “Refutation” we are left with questions about what the argument is meant to prove, what form it takes, and whether it is a TA.

I take it that the “Refutation” is meant to counter the external world skeptic. By arguing for the necessary conditions of a premise the skeptic accepts (that we are aware of ourselves as determined in time) Kant revels that the skeptic is committed to the existence of persisting external objects. Insofar as the argument relies on demonstrating the necessary conditions of a certain experience, the argument seems to be a transcendental argument in the sense people like Strawson [1] and Stroud [2] use the term. From some remarks in Paul Frank’s book All or Nothing it appears David Bell has argued that in some respect the “Refutation” is not a transcendental argument, but I have yet to get my hands on this article [3].

Here is how I see the argument running in its most simplistic form:

P1 I am aware of my existence as determined in time.

P2 A necessary condition of time determination or the determination of successive states is something persisting in perception.

P3 A necessary condition of the persisting thing functioning in time determination is that it is not inside me.

C1 A necessary condition of the persisting thing not being inside me is that it is outside me.

The way Kant puts the conclusion is as follows: “Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only be means of the existence of actual things that I perceive outside myself” (B275).

This argument appears to prove Kant’s Theorem: “The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me” (B275).

If my formulation works then it should avoid the objection that that all the argument proves is that we must take ourselves as conscious or aware of objects, regardless of whether or not such objects do exist.

Here are some remarks about the premises of the argument. P1 the skeptic must accept and does accept if the skeptic is Descartes, Berkeley or Hume. P2 is based up the analogies which precede the “Refutation” and depends heavily on the First Analogy on substance. P3 seems to depend on a separate argument:

1. A persisting thing cannot be intuited through inner sense or as in me (i.e., not mental).

2. If the persisting thing were in me then it would be a representation.

3. If it is a representation then it is intuited as in time.

4. If the inner representation is intuited and determined in time then a persisting thing is required.

5. Appeal to a representation is circular. We are trying to determine our inner successive states as in time, so we cannot appeal to a representation as they are what require time determination.

6. The persisting thing cannot be a mere representation, but must be a thing outside me.

7. Therefore, the persisting thing must be external.

Allison thinks the argument of the "Refutation", which I take to have four steps, actually has a fifth step that says something about how consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of objects existing outside me [4]. Kant does makes this point, but it is a mere elucidation of the implications of C1, and not exactly the final conclusion of the argument. This fifth step is perhaps why the argument is sometimes thought to only show that we must take ourselves as aware of objects regardless of their existence. Robert Stern, in his helpful reconstruction of the argument, quotes Nicholas Rescher, who takes the argument to show that physical or external objects must be “assumed by minds” while “the issue of their actual mind-independent existence remain[s] unaddressed” [5].

Any thoughts?
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[1] P.F. Strawson, “Skepticism, Naturalism and Transcendental Arguments” in Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

[2] Barry Stroud, “Transcendental Arguments,” Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968).

[3] Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) p. 202.

[4] Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale, 2004/2^nd Edition) p. 285-298.

[5] Robert Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 143.