Paul Guyer

I argue that Kant's claim in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of the Critique of Pure Reason that space and time are immediately given in intuition as infinite magnitudes is undercut by his general theory of mathematical knowledge. On this general theory, pure intuition does not give objects of any determinate magnitude at all, but only forms of possible objects. Specifically, what pure intuition itself yields is the recognition that any determinate space or time is part of a larger one, but it requires an inference of reason to go from that to the claim that space and time are infinite. I further argue that this result is consistent with Kant's claim in the second-edition “Transcendental Deduction” that the unity of space and time are the products of synthesis, but also means that the unity of space and time as objects cannot be used a premise in the Deduction but can only be regarded as a conclusion of the deduction and the following “System of Principles.”

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural sciences are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant 's writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognized team of Kant scholars explore Kant 's conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. The volume also traces the historical origins and consequences of Kant 's work

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, first published in 1781, is one of the landmarks of Western philosophy, a radical departure from everything that went before and an inescapable influence on all philosophy since its publication. This Companion is the first collective commentary on this work in English. The seventeen chapters have been written by an international team of scholars, including some of the best-known figures in the field as well as emerging younger talents. The first two chapters situate Kant's project against the background of continental rationalism and British empiricism, the dominant schools of early modern philosophy. Eleven chapters then expound and assess all the main arguments of the Critique. Finally, four chapters recount the enormous influence of the Critique on subsequent philosophical movements, including German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and twentieth-century Anglo-American analytic philosophy. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography.

this paper was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Bounds of Sense by Peter Strawson, in 1966. My own engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason began a few months later, with a course in the spring semester of 1967 taught by Robert Nozick. The Critique had not been regularly taught at Harvard since the retirement of C. I. Lewis a dozen years before, and Nozick, then a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor, started the course disarmingly by telling us that he was offering the course because he had never read the Critique before and thought that teaching it would be a good way to learn it. Whether he was putting us on, I will never know, but it was...

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant is the watershed of modern thought, which irrevocably changed the landscape of the field and prepared the way for all the significant philosophical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This 2006 volume, which complements The Cambridge Companion to Kant, covers every aspect of Kant's philosophy, with a particular focus on his moral and political philosophy. It also provides detailed coverage of Kant's historical context and of the enormous impact and influence that his work has had on the subsequent history of philosophy. The bibliography also offers extensive and organized coverage of both classical and recent books on Kant. This volume thus provides the broadest and deepest introduction currently available on Kant and his place in modern philosophy, making accessible the philosophical enterprise of Kant to those coming to his work for the first time.

There have been more articles on Kant's aesthetics in the history of the Journal than on the next four leading figures in the history of aesthetics combined. I argue that this is because Kant's aesthetic theory consists of multiple levels of theory that makes it accessible to and important for multiple approaches to the subject itself. Continuing issues for both Kant interpretation and for aesthetics in general arise at each of these levels, including the plausibility of the claim to universal validity in judgments of taste, the nature of the free play of the imagination in aesthetic experience, the character of aesthetic pleasure, the proper objects of aesthetic judgment, and the moral significance of aesthetic experience.

Stanley Cavell’s “ontology of film” is his way of expressing that in our experience of movies, we are both aware that we are perceiving nothing but flickering light on a screen yet also respond intellectually and emotionally as if we are experiencing real people, although in a world in which we cannot intervene. In his discussions of “comedies of remarriage” and “the melodrama of the unknown woman,” he argues that these movies are about what it is to grow into adult human beings who are free to love and who can accept the risks of loving another free human being.

In Klas Roth’s essay in this issue of JAE, “Making Ourselves Intelligible—Rendering ourselves Efficacious and Autonomous, without Fixed Ends,” his invocation of Stanley Cavell’s remark that “we should avoid or resist becoming … the ‘slaves of our slavishness’” (31) makes clear why he and I are both so deeply attracted to Kant as well as to Cavell, for it was none other than Kant, not, for example, Nietzsche, who introduced the term “slavish” for everything that is to be avoided in morality. (This was in his footnote to Part I in the second edition of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, in which he was essentially arguing that Schiller’s conception of dignity in Grace and Dignity was too Kantian!) So..

Schiller’s essay “On Grace and Dignity” has been taken by many, including Kant himself, to be an attack on Kant’s moral philosophy, understood as requiring that moral motivation must always be a struggle between duty and inclination. Actually, Schiller conceives of harmony between inclination and duty, or grace and dignity, as an aesthetic requirement, and agrees with Kant that when grace and dignity conflict, dignity must prevail. Kant does not see this, but nevertheless in his own, late, account of the “aesthetic preconditions of the mind’s susceptibility to concepts of duty” he describes how feeling and duty are actually to be brought together.

Schopenhauer presents his moral philosophy as diametrically opposed to that of Kant: for him, pure practical reason is an illusion and morality can arise only from the feeling of compassion, while for Kant it cannot be based on such a feeling and can be based only on pure practical reason. But the difference is not as great as Schopenhauer makes it seem, because for him compassion is supposed to arise from metaphysical insight into the unity of all being, thus from pure if theoretical reason, while for Kant pure practical reason works only by effecting a feeling of respect (in the works) or by cultivating, i.e. affecting, natural dispositions to moral feeling (in the works). I argue that Kant's is the more realistic theory on this point.