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1Kantian Minds and Humean Minds: How to Read the Analogies of Experience in Reverse: Série 2Kant E-Prints 5 27-48. 2010.It is nowadays a commonplace of Kant-interpretation that Kant's response to Hume in the Analogies of Experience is not strictly speaking a refutation of Hume but in fact only an extended critical response to Hume's skeptical accounts of object-identity and causation, that also accepts many of Hume's working assumptions. But this approach can significantly underestimate the extent to which Kant's conception of the representational mind is radically distinct from Hume's. In particular, Kant's conc…Read more
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The Nature and Philosophical Significance of Empirical JudgmentDissertation, Yale University. 1989.Simple or "standard" empirical judgments--as expressed in such statements as "The rose is red" or "Socrates is mortal"--are logically basic for theoretical rationality. All the more complex forms of judgment presuppose the existence and tenability of judgments of the "standard" type. The overall aim of this study is twofold: to show how the traditional theory of standard empirical judgments--as represented by Kant's doctrine of judgment--is subject to a through-going form of skepticism that I en…Read more
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137If God's Existence is Unprovable, Then is Everything Permitted? Kant, Radical Agnosticism, and MoralityDiametros 39 29-69. 2014.This essay is about how four deeply important Kantian ideas can significantly illuminate some essentially intertwined issues in philosophical theology, philosophical logic, the metaphysics of agency, and above all, morality. These deeply important Kantian ideas are: (1) Kant’s argument for the impossibility of the Ontological Argument, (2) Kant’s first “postulate of pure practical reason,” immortality, (3) Kant’s third postulate of pure practical reason, the existence of God, and finally (4) Kan…Read more
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94Review: Förster, Eckart, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy (review)Kantian Review 18 (2): 301-315. 2013.
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93Embodied minds in actionOxford University Press. 2009.In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitutio…Read more
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128Mathematics for humans: Kant's philosophy of arithmetic revisitedEuropean Journal of Philosophy 10 (3). 2002.In this essay I revisit Kant's much-criticized views on arithmetic. In so doing I make a case for the claim that his theory of arithmetic is not in fact subject to the most familiar and forceful objection against it, namely that his doctrine of the dependence of arithmetic on time is plainly false, or even worse, simply unintelligible; on the contrary, Kant's doctrine about time and arithmetic is highly original, fully intelligible, and with qualifications due to the inherent limitations of his …Read more
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130A Kantian critique of scientific essentialismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (3): 497-528. 1998.According to Kant in the Prolegomena, the natural kind proposition (GYM) "Gold is a yellow metal" is analytically true, necessary, and a priori. Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam have argued that on the contrary propositions such as (GYM) are neither analytic, nor necessary, nor a priori. The Kripke-Putnam view is based on the doctrine of "scientific essentialism" (SE). It is a direct consequence of SE that propositions such as (GE) "Gold is the element with atomic number number 79" are metaphysical…Read more
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101Kant, truth and human natureBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (2). 2000.This Article does not have an abstract
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78Kant and the Human Sciences: Biology, Anthropology, and HistoryInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (5). 2011.
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79Truth in Virtue of Meaning: A Defence of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction, by G. Russell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, xv + 232 pp (review)Kantian Review 14 (2): 158-165. 2010.
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38cognitive psychology; given the connection between rationality and logic that Hanna claims, it follows that the nature of logic is significantly revealed to us by cognitive psychology. Hanna's proposed "logical cognitivism" has two important consequences: the recognition by logically oriented philosophers that psychologists are their colleagues in the metadiscipline of cognitive science; and radical changes in cognitive science itself. Cognitive science, Hanna argues, is not at bottom a natural …Read more
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32Kant's Transcendental Psychology (review)Review of Metaphysics 45 (1): 132-134. 1991.Of all the well-known doctrines in Kant's first Critique, the transcendental psychology is perhaps the most notorious. Frege's and Husserl's famous fin de siècle critiques of "logical psychologism," together with Strawson's withering scorn in The Bounds of Sense, have combined to make Kant's explicitly psychological approach to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning seem old-fashioned at best and simply embarrassing at worst. Patricia Kitcher's Kant's Transcendental Psych…Read more
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426Kantian non-conceptualismPhilosophical Studies 137 (1). 2008.There are perceptual states whose representational content cannot even in principle be conceptual. If that claim is true, then at least some perceptual states have content whose semantic structure and psychological function are essentially distinct from the structure and function of conceptual content. Furthermore the intrinsically “orientable” spatial character of essentially non-conceptual content entails not only that all perceptual states contain non-conceptual content in this essentially di…Read more
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17The Realm of Rhetoric (review)Review of Metaphysics 37 (2): 412-414. 1983.The nebulous area between natural language and formal logic has always puzzled philosophers. The connections between informal logic, rhetoric, dialectic, and metaphor along with the other tropes, have not been made conceptually perspicuous. The theoretical tendency on the part of philosophers has generally been to label the whole field "logically ill-behaved" and to turn over its keeping to Sophists, composition-masters, and literary scholars. Recently, this trend of philosophical neglect has be…Read more
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215Non-Conceptualism and the Problem of Perceptual Self-KnowledgeEuropean Journal of Philosophy 19 (2): 184-223. 2009.In this paper we (i) identify the notion of ‘essentially non-conceptual content’ by critically analyzing the recent and contemporary debate about non-conceptual content, (ii) work out the basics of broadly Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content in relation to a corresponding theory of conceptual content, and then (iii) demonstrate one effective application of the Kantian theory of essentially non-conceptual content by using this theory to provide a ‘minimalist’ solution to the prob…Read more
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187Beyond the Myth of the Myth: A Kantian Theory of Non-Conceptual ContentInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (3). 2011.In this essay I argue that a broadly Kantian strategy for demonstrating and explaining the existence, semantic structure, and psychological function of essentially non-conceptual content can also provide an intelligible and defensible bottom-up theory of the foundations of rationality in minded animals. Otherwise put, if I am correct, then essentially non-conceptual content constitutes the semantic and psychological substructure, or matrix, out of which the categorically normative a priori super…Read more
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