Volume 7, Issue 1

Although one may hope to gain a better understanding of Kantianism through a discussion of Kantian arguments against empiricism, my paper will rather be devoted to the study of the ‘images’ of Kant which were spread in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Those images did not faithfully depict Kantianism but they described what French philosophers knew about Kant and they had some influence on the development of French philosophy at the time. Actually, I will show that the study of this reception of some images of Kant contributes to reveal what I call a ‘French empiricism’ but also a renewal of the attitude of some French philosophers toward experience. This French empiricism (which was in my opinion defended by the French Ideology and especially by its leaders: Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis) was characterised by a legacy from English philosophers (especially Bacon and Locke) and from Condillac’s sensualism. It was influenced by the genetic approach in order to explain all our ideas from experience, by the interpretation of experience as conscious effects of senses and also by the necessity of making and classifying experimentations. French empiricism was then especially characterised by a physiological and medical approach very interested in conscious efforts which were regarded as the beginning of the genesis of human intelligence. The French reception of Kantianism and its opposition to it reveal those characteristics of a French empiricism. However, this reception of Kantian philosophy was not only made of oppositions. Degérando, for instance, used some images of Kant and especially the idea of the activity of the subject in order to criticise what he saw as a traditional empiricism and to defend a ‘true’ ‘philosophy of experience

While Kant does not address the problem of induction often attributed to Hume, he does, by way of a transcendental deduction of an a priori principle of reflecting empirical judgment, address a distinct problem Hume raises indirectly. This problem is that induction cannot be justified so long as it presupposes some empirical concept applying to or some empirical principle true of more than one object in nature, a presupposition neither determined by nor founded on reason. I draw on Hume’s positive account of induction to motivate the following objection to Kant: in so far as induction can be justified, there is reason to doubt that it would be so in virtue of any a priori feature

This paper attempts to shed light on three related issues that bear directly on our understanding of Locke and Kant. The first is whether Kant believes Locke merely anticipates his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or also believes Locke anticipates his notion of synthetic a priori cognition. The second is what we as readers of Kant and Locke should think about Kant’s view whatever it turns out to be, and the third is the nature of Kant’s justification for the comparison he draws between his philosophy and Locke’s. I argue (1) that Kant believes Locke anticipates both the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori cognition, (2) that the best justification for Kant’s claim draws on Locke’s distinction between trifling and instructive knowledge, (3) that the arguments against this claim developed by Carson, Allison, and Newman fail to undermine it, and (4) that Kant’s own justification for his claim is quite different from what many commentators have thought it was (or should have been)

In Two Dogmas of Empiricism W.V. Quine begins his attack on the analytic/ synthetic dogma by criticizing Immanuel Kant’s conception of analyticity. After dismissing Kant’s interpretation as well as others, he articulates a view of the analytic/synthetic distinction that connects it to the other dogma of empiricism, reductionism. Ultimately, Quine rejects both dogmas in favor of a new form of empiricism which subscribes to neither one. Just as Quine believes it is possible to accept empiricism without the dogmas, I will argue that the Kantian can accept both dogmas while avoiding the forms of empiricism that Quine considers in his article. The paper is broken into four sections. First, I offer a brief overview of the two dogmas and their relationship to one another before examining Quine’s argument against ‘radical reductionism’, i.e., the position that every meaningful sentence is translatable into a sentence about immediate experience that is either true or false. The second section shows how one of Kant’s arguments from the Critique of Pure Reason anticipates the crux of Quine’s argument against radical reductionism. What is left after this argument is only an ’attenuated form’ of reductionism that Quine believes is identical to the analytic/synthetic distinction. In the third section, I explain how Kantians can draw the analytic/ synthetic distinction in a way that is consistent with this attenuated form of reductionism while avoiding the objections that Quine lodges against the two dogmas. I argue that this allows the Kantian to accept the dogmas while avoiding both the radically reductive form of empiricism as well as the form of empiricism that Quine endorses (web-of-belief holism). Finally, I will consider how this Kantian version of the analytic/synthetic distinction can be extended beyond the theoretical domain to practical and aesthetic sentences

In the Second Analogy of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), Kant attempts to address Hume’s causal skepticism. Kant argues that the concept of cause must be employed in order to identify objective changes in the world, and that, therefore, all events are caused. In this paper, I will challenge Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy, arguing that we can identify objective changes without using the concept of cause, but by using the concept of logical condition instead. Rather than objectively ordering our perceptions through the idea that one thing that was perceived is the cause of the next thing that was perceived, the first necessitating the second, we can objectively order our perceptions through the idea that the first thing perceived is the logical condition of the second. In terms of Kant’s debate with Hume, I find that, though my objection undermines some of Hume’s own conclusions, it does allow Hume to avoid Kant’s argument against his causal skepticism

Kant’s synthesis of empiricism and rationalism is often considered to be one of his most important contributions to philosophy. In this article I investigate the reception of this synthesis in the late 1780s and early 1790s. I show that during this early reception Kant’s attempt at a synthesis, and its empiricist side in particular, proved to be a failure when it was confronted with a powerful challenge from the side of Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Salomon Maimon and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. This failure, I argue, resulted in a break within the Kantian movement itself between a rationalist and an empiricist Kantianism

This paper re-evaluates the relation between Kant and some of the most important philosophers traditionally labelled ‘empiricists’ on the topic of the unity of the self. Although Kant was familiar with at least some of the writings of the philosophers dealt with here, this paper’s concern is not with the question of influence or development, but with systematic aspects of Kant’s relation to the empiricist tradition. It is argued that Kant’s relationship to empiricist thought on this issue is more complex than one might be tempted to think. There are several different notions of unity within the empiricist tradition. Moreover, the philosophers considered here, thinkers as diverse as Locke, Condillac, Hume, Feder, Priestley, Reid and Tetens, work with more than one notion of the unity of the self, as does Kant. Locke’s contribution at the beginning of early modern thought about unity turns out to be closer to Kant’s account than that of other empiricists in that Kant develops further the Lockean idea of consciousness as a unifying activity. In general terms Kant’s account can be seen as continuous with the debate about unity among empiricist thinkers, it does not constitute a simple break with that tradition.