Volume 101, Issue 4

In his later polemical work against Eberhard, Kant uses the concept of “original acquisition” to defend the critical meaning of his own concept of the “a priori”. It is well known that the former has been borrowed from the modern idea of natural law. In this paper, I try to clarify how the former characterizes the latter in Kant's critical epistemology, referring to a certain Kantian transformation of the traditional concept of “innate”. Drawing on the dualism of human cognitive faculties, i.e. of sensibility and understanding, the conception of “original acquisition” can distinguish the apriority of the transcendental imagination from the rest of the a priori apparatus. Thus the concept of “original acquisition” points to one of the central theses in the first Critique.

Kant's response to ‘Hume's problem’ in his analysis of the a priori structure of causality as law-governed succession in the Second Analogy of Experience has unquestionably overshadowed the account of simultaneity ( Zugleichsein ), which follows in the Third Analogy. The analysis of simultaneity in the first Critique relies entirely upon that of succession and is ultimately no more than a more complicated variant of the causal dependence of substances: two objects are experienced as simultaneous only when each of those objects grounds some determination of the other, that is when they are reciprocally determined in dynamic community. By investigating Kant's remark in the third Critique that the experience of the sublime “makes simultaneity intuitable” this paper develops a Kantian analysis of simultaneity that is irreducible to the more prominent analysis of causal succession. This more robust account of simultaneity is then seen to play an essential role in the constitution of the objects of perception (and not only the regulation of their relations) as thematized in the Axioms of Intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason .

After providing a critique of Andreas Engel's neural mechanistic approach to object feature binding (OFB), I develop a Kantian approach to OFB that bears affinity with recent findings in cognitive psychology. I also address the diachronic object unity (DOU) problem and discuss the shortcomings of a purely neural mechanistic approach to this problem. Finally, I motivate a Kantian approach to DOU which suggests that DOU requires the persisting character of the cognizing subject. If plausible, the cognizing subject could make an explanatory contribution to our theory of unified consciousness and thus could not be eliminated on parsimonious grounds alone.

The eminent radiochemist Friedrich Paneth (1887–1958) tried to come to terms with the following epistemological problem: On the one hand chemical elements are characterized empirically as indestructible material species, on the other hand they are characterized theoretically as having the same number of protons in the nuclei of their atoms. Paneth used the dualistic Kantian epistemology (using Eduard von Hartmann's interpretation) in order to describe the combination of these two aspects, applying the terms “Grundstoff”, fundamental matter, to the latter and “einfacher Stoff”, simple matter, to the former. The present paper discusses the applicability of Kant's philosophy – in the interpretation of Paneth – to the (modern) philosophy of chemistry.