Speakers: please email handouts, slides, drafts to [email protected] by Wed Oct 30.
Friday, 1 Nov 2024 | Kant's Theoretical Philosophy | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Curtin Hall 175
09:00–09:30 Breakfast
MORNING sessions Chair, Jay Erkilla, University of wisconsin-milwaukee
09:30–10:40 “Kant and the miracle of freedom”
michael olson, Marquette university
michael olson, Marquette university
In this talk, I argue that, from the vantage of Kant’s Critical theoretical philosophy, human freedom is miraculous in the sense that both free acts and miracles are events that appear within nature in a way that indicates they are grounded in something outside the natural world. To develop this idea, I situate Kant’s analysis of freedom in the Dialectic of Pure Reason within the context of Christian Wolff’s rational cosmology and the controversies instigated by Wolff’s effort to harmonize the possibility of supernaturally-grounded events with the causal determination of the world.
10:50–12:00 “Logic as Self-Knowledge of the Understanding through Reflection”
Seoyeon Park, University of Pittsburgh
Seoyeon Park, University of Pittsburgh
Kant considers logic as self-knowledge of the understanding, where the understanding investigates the form of its own acts, namely thoughts. This conception of logic has an interesting methodological consequence: logic develops through mere reflection. Reflection is a function of the understanding that results in the concept of a common feature of various representations. For Kant, logic produces cognitions through merely the understanding’s reflection, without receiving further objects from intuition. This feature renders logic unique, for cognitions typically result from combining intellectual concepts with sensible intuitions. My goal is to clarify Kant’s conception of logic as self-knowledge of the understanding by elucidating his method of logic through reflection. I first examine what it means that logic is the science of the mere form of thought as such. I suggest there are two forms of thought because a thought essentially involves two types of unity. The first is the synthetic form that determines how a thought ought to relate to its object, without which it cannot have content. The second is the analytic form that constitutes the way a thought ought to be related to each other, to avoid self-contradiction. I propose that Kant’s logic employs the reflection on higher-order representations about thoughts, which are themselves representations of objects, with respect to their forms. Referring to Jäsche Logic, I outline the process of this higher-order reflection for logic. Reflection as to the synthetic form generates transcendental logic, and reflection as to the analytic form yields pure general logic. My account will reveal that these two kinds of reflection correspond to transcendental reflection and logical reflection presented in Amphiboly. Lastly, I argue that Kant himself uses reflection as the method of logic both in Jäsche Logic and the Critique of Pure Reason.
Handout
Handout
12:00–13:00 Lunch
Afternoon sessions Chair, Benjamin Eneman, University of wisconsin-milwaukee
13:00–14:10 “Function: Faculty, Unity and Combination”
TYKE NUÑEZ, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
TYKE NUÑEZ, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA
I examine Kant’s use of ‘function’ in the chapter “On the Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” I first identify four ways that Kant uses ‘function,’ and offer an interpretation of how these interrelate. Using this, I then reconstruct the sense in which Kant thinks that concepts rest on the functions of judgment. Finally, I turn to Kant’s use of ‘function’ with the imagination, and how Kant makes his case that the pure concepts of the understanding rest on the same function of the understanding, both as the “faculty for judging” (A69/B94) and as the faculty for synthesis (A79/B105).
On the three senses of the first section, a function is:
4. A function is a capacity, faculty, or power.
I argue that the exercise of a function(4) in the sense of a capacity is an action (=function(2)). Such an action, I claim, will have a unity (=function(1)). This unity is the way in which its parts are united in the action. Thus, the unity of the action is its form. Finally, because the unity of an action is its form, I then argue that the sense in which there is a function(3) of unity in judgments, is just this sense in which the function is its form. So function(1) = function(3).
On the three senses of the first section, a function is:
- “the unity of the action of ordering different representations under a communal one” (my emphasis, A68/B93). Kant’s primary example of such an action is a judgment.
- a judgment (i.e., an action), whereby “many possible cognitions are thereby drawn together into one” (A69/B94).
- in a judgment, as when Kant speaks of “the functions of unity in judgments” (A69/B94).
4. A function is a capacity, faculty, or power.
I argue that the exercise of a function(4) in the sense of a capacity is an action (=function(2)). Such an action, I claim, will have a unity (=function(1)). This unity is the way in which its parts are united in the action. Thus, the unity of the action is its form. Finally, because the unity of an action is its form, I then argue that the sense in which there is a function(3) of unity in judgments, is just this sense in which the function is its form. So function(1) = function(3).
14:20–15:30 “METAPHYSICS OF TRUST”
FR. BONAVENTURE CHAPMAN, O.P., THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
FR. BONAVENTURE CHAPMAN, O.P., THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
IImmanuel Kant (1724–1804) was not the first 18th-Century German philosopher to develop and defend a metaphysics of synthetic a priori judgments. The Pietist philosophers from Leipzig, Adolph Friedrich Hoffmann (1703–1741) and Christian August Crusius (1715–1775), developed and defended their own version of synthetic a priori metaphysics in response to the seemingly deterministic and Spinozistic metaphysics of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Kant both learned from and criticized this Pietist conception of metaphysics. Learned from, in that his own account of synthetic a priori judgements and corresponding transcendental logic are arguably modifications of the Pietists, making Kant a Neo-Pietist metaphysician. Specifically, the merely negative character of the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) meant that Kant followed the Pietists in looking for first material principles of metaphysical judgments, what would become Kant's categories. But Kant also criticized the Pietist account in its heteronomous grounding of these first material principles. Autonomy of pure reason means reason alone justifies in its highest principles. As Kant says in one of his Metaphysics lectures, Crusius had to place the criterion of truth in God, because he could not trust enough in reason itself (AA 29:959). Sola ratio! Kant’s criticism would not have surprised the Pietists. Hoffmann and Crusius anticipate Kant’s heteronomy objection with an appeal to the primacy of practical reason, something also near and dear to Kant’s own heart. Determining whether their responses are adequate depends on whether theonomy, or a metaphysics of trust, is conceptually distinct from heteronomy. I argue that it is.
Handout
Handout
15:30–16:00 Coffee Break
KEYNOTE SESSION Chair, Nataliya Palatnik, University of wisconsin-milwaukee
16:00–18:00 "Kant under the Bodhi Tree? Anti-Individualism in Kantian Ethics"
KARL SCHAFER, University of Texas, Austin
KARL SCHAFER, University of Texas, Austin
A common complaint about Kantian ethics is that it cannot do justice to the social or intersubjective dimensions of human life – that, unlike Fichte, Hegel, or Marx, Kant remains caught within a fundamentally individualistic perspective on practical or moral questions. In this way, the objection goes, Kantian ethics leaves agents alienated from others around them and their larger community. While not entirely unnatural, I argue here that such concerns rest on a mischaracterization of where the most serious problems in this region for Kant lie. Far from being too individualistic, the real worry about Kantian moral theory is that it may not be individualistic enough. In a contemporary context, where Kantian ethics is associated with the “self-constitution” of agents or the “separateness of persons”, the idea that it is insufficiently concerned with individual persons may come as a surprise. But it would not surprise Kant’s immediate successors like Fichte and Hegel. For this is where they often located the deepest problems facing Kant’s moral philosophy. As we will see, in making such points, they were in some ways closer to Kant’s own views than they recognized. Nonetheless, if this is right, Kantian ethics may in fact more anti-individualistic than many of the ethical systems that followed in his wake. And the most radical elements in Kant’s ethics might point, less to Fichte and Hegel, and more to figures like Schopenhauer who sought to develop a synthesis of Kant and ideas from South Asian philosophy. Perhaps, we might say, Kant has been sitting under the Bodhi tree all along?
Handout
Handout
18:00–18:45 Reception
All welcome. Will take place in the Philosophy Department, 6th floor of Curtin Hall, UWM.