Band 100, Heft 2

This essay connects the theme of the nature of the world in Kant's pre-critical works (including the published works and the lectures up to the end of the year 1770) with the examination of the problem of causality. Grasping Kant's position from this gradually evolving perspective enables us to present a unified account of the precritical period. It also helps us to see his Critical revolution as an evolutionary turn, in which there is a growing awareness that the connection between substances must emphasize a real connection whose grounding does not depend in an indirect manner on a transcendent being named God.

The thesis of this essay is that Kant's theory of the “forms of intuition” can be regarded as an account of the structure of our embodied perspective. The ideality and subjectivity of space is concluded to be an account of the perspective relative nature of the figure-ground relationship or how it is that objects emerge for us in empirical experience as being orientated in a spatio-temporal field. Time is regarded similarly as the event-series relationship. The significant role of embodiment in Kant's thought on space and time is explored through a textual analysis of all of Kant's writings on the subject. By recovering the importance of the body to Kant's theoretical philosophy, the ontological implications of his theory of space and time and his idealism can be made more plausible.

In a 1798 letter to Christian Garve, Kant claims that without a transition [ Übergang ] from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics there will be a ‘gap’ in the Critical philosophy. He does not make clear, however, exactly what this gap is or how the transition is supposed to fill the gap. The Übergang section of Kant's Opus postumum ( OP ) has received considerable attention of late due to the many drafts it contains of Kant's Ether Deduction. Commentators have also hoped to find a solution there to the gap problem. Little attention has been paid, however, to Kant's project in Convolut 10 of the OP which he began in August 1799 immediately after completing the Übergang section. Assuming that the Ether Deduction is sound and proves a priori the existence of a transcendental material condition for experience, Convolut 10 discusses what changes would have to be made to the transcendental formal conditions of experience (space, time, categories, and apperception) in their empirical function given the addition of this transcendental material condition. Kant claims in Convolut 10 that these changes are necessary to finally effect a transition from the metaphysical foundations of natural science to physics and, as I will argue, such a transition will be tantamount to bridging the gap in the Critical philosophy mentioned in the letter to Garve.

Maimon once described the philosophical project underlying his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy as an attempt “to unify Kantian philosophy with Spinozism ”. But in the only reference to Spinoza in the Essay , he stresses that Spinoza was not the source of his argument. In this paper I will argue that, notwithstanding the disclaimer, Maimon's solution for the problems that in his view haunted Kant's theory of knowledge was indeed significantly influenced by Spinoza, as well as by the medieval Jewish Aristotelian Maimonides. Since the key concept in the solution proposed by Maimon is the metaphysical doctrine of the “infinite intellect”, my focus will be on clarifying how this doctrine is related to Maimonides' doctrine of the divine intellect and to Spinoza's doctrine of Deus sive Natura . My main contention is that important aspects of Maimon's doctrine of the “infinite intellect” are based on a Spinozistic interpretation of Maimonides' doctrine of the divine intellect.

Closed systems (‘calculi’) are mental artefacts whose structure can neither be explained in terms of innate dispositions nor in terms of the mechanism of natural selection and which stands in contradiction to the conditions of the possibility of information transfer. Kant takes the formal structure of pure mathematics as a guarantor for his reconstruction of a closed system of the subject's structures of knowledge a priori, thereby giving rise to the problem of a normative interface between interior system and exterior information – a problem which is, in this form, not to be solved. By tracing the structure of generative grammar and formal logics back to innate modules, respectively, Chomsky and Fodor are creating the same interface problem, whose basic structure has not yet received the necessary attention.