Volume 112, Issue 2

This article has two aims. First, I offer a philological analysis of a key passage from Kant’s Logic : § 6. § 6 is widely regarded as the locus classicus for Kant’s theory of concept formation. However, I show that the part of this section that is most cited and discussed by scholars should not be attributed to Kant, as it is not corroborated by any of his Reflexionen . Second, I attempt to identify Jäsche’s source for this unsupported passage. Ultimately, I conclude that the unsupported passage in § 6 was based on a set of student notes that was similar to the Wiener and Warschauer logic notebooks. However, I also argue that it would be a mistake to regard this passage as the final or definitive statement of Kant’s views about concept formation.

According to Kant’s lectures on logic, the formation of empirical concepts consists in the logical acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction. This paper defends the tenability of Kant’s account by solving two prominent difficulties identified by commentators. Firstly, I justify Kant’s chronological presentation of the three acts by clarifying two meanings of ‘comparison’ in his writings: while comparison-1 refers to apprehension in relation to apperception and precedes reflection, comparison-2 refers to a twofold operation comprising both comparison-1 and reflection, such that its completion presupposes reflection. Secondly, to unravel an alleged ‘circularity’ in Kant’s account, I propose multiple interactions between comparison-1, which can be entirely arbitrary, and reflection, which examines the compared representations according to the imagination’s free agreement with the understanding, namely, a lawfulness without law. By means of such interactions, we experiment back and forth and lawfully generate an empirical concept without relying on conceptual guidance.

In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science , Kant claims that perception of force through touch is fundamental to our knowledge of substance in space. However, he also holds that perception cannot have modal content. Causation is a modal notion, so how can Kant allow perception of causal force? In response to this puzzle, I provide a new reading of Kant’s theory of touch. Touch does not involve perception of the necessity of a cause, but it does involve awareness of the activity of our body in relation to other bodies. Human embodied activity has a hitherto unrecognized central role in Kant’s accounts of empirical cognition of substance in space, the science of such a substance, and the irreducibility of its causal forces.

Wolff’s relation to Leibniz and Kant’s relation to both are notoriously vexed questions. First, this paper argues that Wolff’s most serious departure from Leibniz consists in his (so far overlooked) rejection of the latter’s infinitism. Second, it contends that the controversies that surrounded Wolff’s early acceptance of infinite causal regress and prompted his conversion to finitism played a prominent role in shaping the theses of Kant’s Antinomies. Whereas Leibniz and the early Wolff considered infinite regress to provide support for the contingency of the world and the existence of God, Wolff’s enemies condemned it as Spinozistic. After Wolff, the claim that an infinite chain of causes is impossible became the standard view among both Wolffian and anti-Wolffian metaphysicians.

Time and again, one finds in the literature the view that Kant held a pre-critical or semi-critical moral philosophy in the canon chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason. This is shown, firstly, by the fact that practical freedom is understood as cognized through experience and, secondly, by the fact that Kant not only allows a sensuous incentive for the observance of the moral law, but considers it necessary. Against that, it is argued in this essay that, firstly, moral philosophy as such is not addressed in the canon at all and, secondly, that the canon by no means approves of sensuous incentives with regard to the morally required promotion of the highest good. What is indeed addressed, although only in the second section of the canon, is moral theology.

My goal in this piece is to show that there is a problem lurking in the shadows of recent attempts to derive positive duties from Kant’s so-called universalizability tests and, further, to show that the most obvious way of fixing these attempts renders them unable to fulfill their function. I shall begin by motivating and explaining such an attempt.