Opinion, belief or faith, and knowledge

Kantian Review

Volumn 7, Issue , 2003, Pages 72-101

  Stevenson, Leslie ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 60950715863     PISSN: 13694154     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S1369415400001746     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. Kant continued to use the trio of meinen, glauben and wissen as a framework in which to organize his thoughts on epistemology. See the Blomberg Logic (24: 148ff, 228ff.), the Vienna Logic (24: 850ff.), the Dohna-Wundlacken Logic (24: 732ff.), and the Jäsche Logic (9: 66ff.) - all in Kant's Lectures on Logic, translated by J. Michael Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
2. These lecture-notes by various hands can hardly be accorded the same authority as Kant's published works, but they provide useful supplementary evidence of the development of his thinking. The Jäsche Logic was prepared for publication by Jäsche with the approval of the ageing Kant, so it can be taken with more confidence as representing how he treated these topics in later years. 'Logic' in eighteenth-century usage covered much more than (Aristotelean) formal logic; it included topics in what we now call epistemology, theory of meaning and philosophy of mind. See Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 1;
3. and the Preface to Logic and the Workings of the Mind, ed. Patricia A. Easton (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1997).
4. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 687 n.
5. Kant's Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p.360, n.75.
6. From the translation by J. M. Young, in Kant's Lectures on Logic.
7. Good starting points are Wilfrid Sellars, 'this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks' (Presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in December 1970), esp. the closing pages; and R. Pippin, 'Kant on the spontaneity of mind', Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 17 (1987), 449-76.
8. I have tried to treat differences between first and third person judgements more systematically in 'First Person Epistemology', Philosophy, 74 (1999), 475-97.
9. In his Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), L. W. Beck remarks that 'subjective' in Kant does not mean arbitrary and contingent; it just means 'dependent upon the nature of the subject' (p. 256). (He goes on to say, obscurely, that this can be interpreted either a priori or posteriori: perhaps he was alluding to the distinction between species-dependence and individual-dependence.)
10. H. E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), ch. 1.
11. Allen Wood, Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 14-16.
12. From the translation by Allen Wood in Kant's Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
13. Allen Wood compares Kant with Kierkegaard and Pascal on the personal nature of faith - see Kant's Moral Religion, p. 16 and p. 252.
14. For further comment on the use of meinen, glauben, wissen and other words in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German epistemic vocabulary, especially for the association of Glaube with religious faith, see the entries on 'belief, faith and opinion' and 'knowledge, cognition and certainty' in M. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell 1992). Inwood makes some connections between Kant and Hegel on these matters.