Kant's immediatism, pre-critique

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 44, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 489-532

  Wuerth, Julian ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI   (United States)

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EID: 60949592270     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2006.0074     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Translations from the German are my own, unless a translation of the source is listed here, in which case I often follow the translation. All translations by David Walford are found in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Rant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.).
2. All translations by Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon are found in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
3. Citations to the first Critiqueare to the pagination of the first edition, A, and/or to the second edition, B, as translated in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [CPR], ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (7) [1796-97].
5. Anthropologie-Friedländer (25) [1775/76].
6. Philosophical Correspondence, 1755-99, trans. Arnulf Zweig, of selections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
7. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1956).
8. Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik (2) [1766].
9. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, trans. Walford.
10. DieFahche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren (2) [1762].
11. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, trans. Walford.
12. Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morals, trans. Walford.
13. De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis (2.) [1770].
14. Menschenkunde (25) [1781/82,].
15. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (4) [1786].
16. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis and New York: Hackett Publishing Company, 1970).
17. New Eluci dation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition, trans. Walford.
18. Versuch den Begriff der negativan Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen (2) [1763].
19. M. Immanuel Kant's Announcement of the Programme of his Lectures for the Winter Semester 1765-6, trans. Walford.
20. Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (4) [1783].
21. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977).
22. What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?, trans. Ted Humphrey (New York: Abaris Books, 1983).
23. Danziger Rationaltheologie, 28:1275 [1784];
24. Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology [KTP] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
25. "Kant's Real Self," in Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy, ed. Allen Wood (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1984): 113-48;
26. Thomas Powell, Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);
27. and Wayne Waxman, Kant's Model of the Mind: A New Interpretation of Transcendental Idealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
28. I addressed Ameriks' interpretation of the Paralogisms in "Kant's Immediatism, Post-1781" (Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, 2001),
29. Ameriks sees the claim that the soul is a noumenal substance as irreconcilably at odds with Kant's critique of rational psychology (Kant's Theory of Mind, 67).
30. But unlike Ameriks, Allison, and Pippin, who claim that this position is inconsistent with Kant's rejection of rational psychology, Van Cleve argues that it is inconsistent with the First Analogy (Problems from Kant, 72-74).
31. Vorarbeiten zur Schrift gegen Eberhard, 20:359 [approx. 1790];
32. What Real Progress, Loße Blätter, 20:340 [approx. 1793];
33. Kitcher's "Kant's Real Self" appears to argue not only that Kant's self was not a substance, but also that it had no powers, with mental states causing subsequent mental states: "Kant expressed himself in this way to stress that the content of the resultant state is not merely similar to the contents of the earlier states, but is actually produced from the earlier states and their contents" ("Kant's Real Self," 115).
34. This set of notes, published as Immanuel Kant's Anweisung zur Menschen- und Weltkenntniß. Nach dessen Vorlesungen im Winterhalbjahre von 1790-1, ed. Fr. Ch. Starke (Leipzig, 1831), was also included in Tonelli's 1976 reprint, but was not included in the Akademie collection.
35. While state law mandated that Kant's lectures follow one of a number of texts, from which Kant chose Baumgarten's Metaphysica, which is heavily rationalist, circumstantial evidence speaks strongly against dismissing Kant's lectures as not directly indicative of his own philosophical position. For one, Kant made his willingness to bend or depart from Baumgarten's text clear in many ways. First, in M. Immanuel Kant's Announcement of the Programme of his lectures for the Winter Semester 1765-6 (1765),
36. On this basis, Kitcher dismisses the analysis of the Deduction offered by Robert Paul Wolff in his "Kant's Debt to Hume via Beattie " Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 117-23,
37. [Philosophical Essays Concerning the Human Understanding {Zürich: Georg Olms Verlag, 1986}], 107).
38. This will be discussed in further detail below. Kant also read Leibniz's response to Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding [Essay] (ed. RH. Nidditch [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975]),
39. This last quotation is from Kitcher's comments on my " Nonreductionism and Personal Identity in Kant's Early Philosophy, 1761-1781" ["Nonreductionism and Personal Identity"] (Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, 2001), 2.
40. DSS, 2:321;
41. letter to Mendelssohn, April 8, 1766, 10:72;
42. ML1, 28:225, 272, 280.
43. MFNS, 4:543-44;
44. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 212-14. Guyer also mentions a number of the sources that I have cited in support of the view that where one of the relational categories apply, so too do the others.
45. Editorial note in the Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 418 n.
46. and Leibniz's "A New System of Nature," in Philosophical Essays, eds. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989], 142-44);
47. and from Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, 79, 104, 180-81). These developments speak clearly to Kant's continued attempt to deliver what he saw as accurate philosophical views in his lectures on anthropology and metaphysics.
48. In Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 256-62, Karl Ameriks rightly points out that the account attributed to Kant by Kitcher, according to which necessary connections between mental states result from their contentual interdependence, is for all intents and purposes what Hume has already considered when he examines the relation of causality between mental states as the basis for positing a necessary connection between them.
49. Next, even if we assume that Kitcher's concept of contentual interdependence of mental states succeeds against the skeptic where the concept of causal interdependence fails, we see that, as Kitcher's acknowledgment of the problem of interdependence across persons shows, because Kitcher rejects the view that for Kant unity was tied to an underlying metaphysical self, nothing in her account precludes that this unity would obtain across different substances or persons. Ameriks notes this and then rightly questions why Kitcher does not either stick to her guns and simply accept the lack of true unity in her account and thus accept a Parfitian outcome, or, if she wants more from her account, take the option of a "real, enduring self, a substance" more seriously, granted that it "can still be the natural solution" (Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, 261-62).
50. Kant understands the notion of "identity" in a strict sense, whereby two things are identical only if they are identical in all of their properties. This is consistent with the strict sense of identity presented in Leibniz's notion of the "identity of indiscernables" (E.g., G.W. Leibniz, New Essays, 230-31);
51. see also Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 7:47, 71-75 [1793];
52. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 7:294;