Christian Onof

This collection of papers, Consciousness and its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?, edited by Anthony Freeman presents seventeen responses to Galen Strawson’s keynote paper which claims that the only plausible way to be a real physicalist is to accept that the intrinsic properties of the physical are experiential in character, i.e., the doctrine of panpsychism. The book concludes with Strawson’s reply to these responses. This “real physicalism” is, according to Strawson, the only way of dealing with what Chalmers calls the “hard problem of consciousness.” This problem lies in the fact that the experiential nature of our conscious experience is a puzzling phenomenon for the materialist. It is of an apparently fundamentally different nature from the rest of the physical world, hence the problem of integrating it into a satisfactory naturalistic world-picture

Kant’s account of objective knowledge famously uses a dualism of types of representation: intuitions and concepts. This dualism came under renewed criticism from many of his followers. By eliminating intuition, the a priori judgements of mathematics were no longer viewed as requiring syntheses. This means that mathematical knowledge had to be analytic. As a result, its derivability from logic became a major focus of interest at the end of the 19th century. Frege’s proposal for this logicist programme however led to a paradox identified by Russell. This paper claims that this can be seen as a direct consequence of the discarding of intuition in epistemology. The paper proposes a Kantian solution to the paradox, and offers a diagnosis which identifies in what sense this paradox can be viewed as an antinomy. In this way, the paper seeks to illustrate the scope of the Kantian conception of antinomy against a background of post-Kantian developments in logic.

This paper examines Kant’s account of the compatibility of transcendental freedom and psychological determinism in the Third Antinomy, and confronts it with contemporary deterministic accounts of agency. I argue that Kant’s solution requires paying due attention to the nature of the empirical character as law of nature, but also relies upon a role for inner sense in agency that can be questioned in the light of contemporary empirical psychology. The paper outlines ways of complementing Kant’s solution so as to address such criticisms.

In his argument for the possibility of knowledge of spatial objects, in the Transcendental Deduction of the B-version of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes a crucial distinction between space as “form of intuition” and space as “formal intuition.” The traditional interpretation regards the distinction between the two notions as reflecting a distinction between indeterminate space and determinations of space by the understanding, respectively. By contrast, a recent influential reading has argued that the two notions can be fused into one and that space as such is first generated by the understanding through an act of synthesis of the imagination. Against this reading, this article argues that a key characteristic of space as a form of intuition is its nonconceptual unity, which defines the properties of space and is as such necessarily independent of determination by the understanding through the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. The conceptual unity that the understanding prescribes to the manifold in intuition, by means of the categories, defines the formal intuition. Furthermore, this article argues that it is the sui generis, nonconceptual unity of space, when takenas a unity for the understanding by means of conceptual determination, that first enables geometric knowledge and knowledge of spatially located particulars.

To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex communities of knowers as its subject matter, then its third party character is essentially stigmergic. In its most generic formulation, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Extending this notion one might conceive of social stigmergy as the extra-cranial analog of an artifcial neural network providing epistemic structure. This paper recommends a stigmergic framework for social epistemology to account for the supposed tension between individual action, wants and beliefs and the social corpora. We also propose that the so-called "extended mind" thesis offers the requisite stigmergic cognitive analog to stigmergic knowledge. Stigmergy as a theory of interaction within complex systems theory is illustrated through an example that runs on a particle swarm optimization algorithm.

I argue that the two parts of the B Transcendental Deduction (TD) exhibit inter-dependence in both directions. Two part one claims depend upon the givenness of a unified intuition, thus calling for an account of the unity of sensible intuitions in part two. But the necessity of the synthetic unity of apperception for the unity of representations (part one) is applicable to sensible intuitions in part two. The Transcendental Synthesis of the Imagination in part two is key to showing that the understanding’s spontaneity introduces unity into the sensible manifold, and that this manifold does not already have a unity independent of that of apperception. I clarify the nature of this synthesis and the key role played by inner sense in unifying sensible intuitions. I explain the roles of the forms of time and space and their unicities, as well as the reason why Kant examines selfknowledge in part two.

What does Kant claim to have shown in the Resolution of the Third Antinomy (RTA)? A recent publication by Bernd Ludwig shows the shortcomings of a fairly broad interpretative consensus around the claim that all that is at stake in the RTA is the mode of logical possibility. I argue that there is a lack of clarity as to what logical possibility, and that the real possibility of transcendental freedom (TF) is examined in much of the RTA. Ludwig’s own proposal that Kant shows the real possibility of TF however faces major problems. I formulate an alternative proposal that pays due attention to the claim of the antinomy’s thesis, the evolution of the argument of the RTA, and Kant’s later textual references to it. This also deals with the thorny issue of the relation between practical and TF.

The article proposes an interpretation of Kant’s notions of form of, and formal intuition of space to explain and justify the claim that representing space as object requires a synthesis. This involves identifying the transcendental conditions of the analytic unity of consciousness of this formal intuition and distinguishing between it and its content. On this reading which builds upon recent proposals, footnote B160–1n. involves no revision of the Transcendental Aesthetic: space is essentially characterized by non-conceptual features. The article also addresses worries about the infinite magnitude and the unicity of space, by considering the characteristics and requirements of geometric constructions.