Volume 105, Issue 4

Abstract: In this paper I explore Kant’s understanding of a law of nature. I begin by reviewing Kant’s explicit statements about what a law is in general before describing an important challenge to the very idea of a law of nature that emerges from the conjunction of the natural law tradition and laws of nature in the early modern period. I then articulate how Kant can respond to that challenge by noting how he can draw on a univocal concept of law involving necessity and legislation in articulating his accounts of laws of nature and the moral law. In this way, we not only come to a better appreciation of Kant’s views on the laws of nature, but also see more clearly some significant structural similarities between his theoretical and practical philosophies as a whole.

Abstract: This paper traces the early reflections of the pre-Critical Kant on laws of nature back to Newton’s governing conception of laws. Three problems with the Newtonian conception are identified. I argue that in the attempt to provide a solution to them, in 1763 Kant came to forge a novel governing conception of laws. Key to Kant’s novel view are the notions of ground and its determinations. The role of these two notions in delivering the nomological necessity, explanatory power, and unity of the laws of nature is discussed and analysed.

Abstract: In this paper I argue for the following two related claims. First, a successor version of the scholastic ‘forma-non-afficit’ theorem functions as the key to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Second, drawing on the ‘natural right’ tradition which Kant sees himself being part of, the relation between our cognitive spontaneity and the legislation of the understanding is one of acknowledgment (rather than creation) of the laws of the understanding. This interpretation allows us to make sense of pure concepts and principles of the understanding as the fundamental laws of nature. They rationally constrain our empirical concepts and judgments, and thus warrant the ‘lawfulness in the connection of appearances.’ (Prol, AA 04:§ 36)

Abstract: This paper consider the necessity of causal laws of nature in relation to Kant’s works explicitly addressed to natural science (such as the Prolegomena and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science), and also to the second edition of the Transcendental Deduction and the Critique of the Power of Judgement.

Abstract: In the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant seems to present the “transcendental deduction” of the (subjective) purposiveness of nature whose necessity he had denied in the Appendix to the Critique of Pure Reason . The so-called First Introduction to the CJ promised two transcendental deductions of the (objective) purposiveness of nature, which the published text did not deliver. This paper analyzes the arguments of the CPR -Appendix showing that each of its two parts discusses a different sort of deduction. The fact that Kant at various times envisioned at least five very different deductions in the same context is taken as an occasion to rethink the project that Kant sketches in the Appendix to the CPR .

Abstract: My goal in this paper is to show that Kant’s prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge of things-in-themselves is motivated less by his anti-soporific encounter with Hume than by his new view of the distinction between “real” and “logical” modality, a view that developed out of his reflection on the rationalist tradition in which he was trained. In brief: at some point in the 1770’s, Kant came to hold that a necessary condition on knowing a proposition is that one be able to prove that all the items it refers to are either really possible or really impossible. Most propositions about things-in-themselves, in turns out, cannot meet this condition. I conclude by suggesting that the best interpretation of this modal condition is as a kind of coherentist constraint.