Riccardo Martinelli

In his first two Critiques, Kant makes a distinction between the empirical and the intelligible character. Yet, in his Pragmatic anthropology Kant adds the human beings’ “natural aptitude” to the customary dichotomy of “way of sensing” and “way of thinking”. In this paper, I investigate Kant’s concept of natural aptitude in his Pragmatic anthropology and in his Lectures on anthropology. Most probably, Kant’s sources lie in the Scholastic doctrine of the “character of scholars”. The “good mind” that Kant associates with the human beings’ natural aptitude – in sharp contrast with the autonomy implied by moral character – nevertheless reveals its significance in compensating for the human species’ “pragmatic predisposition”. To some extent, then, natural aptitude contributes to the pursuit of nature’s providential goals.

Peirce’ s intellectual debt to Kant’ s transcendentalism has been long recognized. In this essay I investigate Kant’ s thoughts on “what is pragmatic” as a source of inspiration for him. Peirce was well acquainted with this often neglected facet of Kant’ s philosophy, that influenced both the core idea and the lexical coinage of his pragmatism. Both thinkers drew attention to the consequences of cognition for human actions. Pointing at the definition of the meaning of a defined notion, however, Peirce narrows remarkably the domain of Kant’ s “pragmatic horizon”. Accordingly, Kant cannot be truly considered a forerunner of Peirce’ s pragmatism.

Stumpf’s doctrine of the categories is of great importance for our understanding of his philosophy. This theme had been widely discussed among German thinkers after Kant; Brentano himself had repeatedly dealt with it since his early works. However, Stumpf considerably diverges from Brentano on this crucial philosophical topic. Although a systematic discussion can be found only in Stumpf’s posthumous Erkenntnislehre, his core ideas on the categories can be traced to his early work on space of 1873. In fact, Stumpf claims that the peculiar relationship between extension and color is analogous to the relationship that holds between substance and accidents. Thus, like any other category, substance empirically stems from perception. Sensory experience, for Stumpf, is made up of perceptual wholes, whose attributes are typically bound to each other, rather than separately given in bundles, as Hume and other associationists used to assume. Thus, the achievements of Stumpf’s holist psychology effectively contributes a solution to this classic metaphysical problem.

Together with other influential psychologists of the time, Wundt considers internal data as absolute evidence, grounding psychology on this assumption. In opposition to his former mentor, Külpe aims at rehabilitating Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. Yet, he is far from embracing transcendentalism and rejects Kant’s skepticism as to the possibility of a scientific psychology. Nevertheless, Külpe believes that Kant is right in considering internal data as unreliable for scientific purposes: accordingly, psychology should share the same scientific methodology of any other science.