-
749Review: Dicker, Georges, Kant's Theory of Knowledge (review)Philosophical Review 116 (2): 307-309. 2007.A review of Georges Dicker's primer on Kant's theoretical philosophy.
-
801Kant between the wars: A reply to HohendahlPhilosophical Forum 41 (1-2): 41-49. 2010.A critique of Peter Hohendahl's account of the fate of Kantianism and Neo-Kantianism in the interwar period.
-
1210Causal refutations of idealismPhilosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 487-507. 2010.In the ‘Refutation of Idealism’ chapter of the first Critique, Kant argues that the conditions required for having certain kinds of mental episodes are sufficient to guarantee that there are ‘objects in space’ outside us. A perennially influential way of reading this compressed argument is as a kind of causal inference: in order for us to make justified judgements about the order of our inner states, those states must be caused by the successive states of objects in space outside us. Here I cons…Read more
-
259The problem of infant sufferingReligious Studies 34 (2): 205-217. 1998.The problem of infant suffering and death is often regarded as one of the more difficult versions of the problem of evil (see Ivan Karamazov), especially when one considers how God can be thought good to infant victims by the infant victims. In the first section of this paper, I examine two recent theodicies that aim to solve this problem but (I argue) fail. In the second section, I suggest that the only viable approach to the problem rejects the idea that the suffering of such unfortunates must…Read more
-
390Corrigendum to: Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, and CoherenceKant Studien 00-00. 2015.Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Heft: Ahead of print
-
321Ockham on Mind-World Relations: What Sort of Nominalism?Eidos: The Canadian Graduate Journal of Philosophy 14 (1): 11-28. 1997.(Warning: juvenalia from a grad student journal!). On whether Ockham's nominalism is really nominalistic and whether it faces some of the same problems as later nominalisms.
-
859Knowledge, Discipline, System, Hope: The Fate of Metaphysics in the Doctrine of MethodIn O'Shea James (ed.), Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 259-279. 2019.In this chapter I highlight the apparent tensions between Kant’s very stringent critique of metaphysical speculation in the “Discipline of Pure Reason” chapter and his endorsement of Belief (Glaube) and hope (Hoffnung) regarding metaphysical theses in the subsequent “Canon of Pure Reason.” In the process I will examine his distinction between the theoretical and the practical bases for holding a “theoretical” conclusion (i.e. a conclusion about “what exists” rather than “what ought to be”) and …Read more
-
118Kant on Cognition, Givenness, and IgnoranceJournal of the History of Philosophy 55 (1): 131-142. 2017.Eric Watkins and Marcus Willaschek provide a valuable service to people working on Kant’s epistemology and philosophy of mind by laying out a synoptic picture of Kant’s view of theoretical cognition. Their picture incorporates admirably clear accounts of the familiar building blocks of cognition—sensation, intuition, concept, and judgment—as well as some innovative interpretive theses of their own. Watkins and Willaschek’s basic claim is that, for Kant, theoretical cognition is “a mental state […Read more
-
1201On going back to KantPhilosophical Forum 39 (2): 109-124. 2008.A broad overview of the NeoKantian movement in Germany, written as an introduction to a series of essays about that movement. -/- .
-
943Beauty as a symbol of natural systematicityBritish Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4): 406-415. 2006.I examine Kant's claim that a relation of symbolization links judgments of beauty and judgments of ‘systematicity’ in nature (that is, judgments concerning the ordering of natural forms under hierarchies of laws). My aim is to show that the symbolic relation between the two is, for Kant, much closer than many commentators think: it is not only the form but also the objects of some of our judgments of taste that symbolize the systematicity of nature.
-
2032Real Repugnance and Belief about Things-in-Themselves: A Problem and Kant's Three Solutions (including one about Symbols)In Benjamin J. Bruxvoort Lipscomb & James Krueger (eds.), Kant's Moral Metaphysics: God, Freedom, and Immortality, De Gruyter. pp. 177-209. 2010.Kant says that it can be rational to accept propositions on the basis of non-epistemic or broadly practical considerations, even if those propositions include “transcendental ideas” of supersensible objects. He also worries, however, about how such ideas (of freedom, the soul, noumenal grounds, God, the kingdom of ends, and things-in-themselves generally) acquire genuine positive content in the absence of an appropriate connection to intuitional experience. How can we be sure that the ideas ar…Read more
-
1104Rational Hope, Possibility, and Divine ActionIn Gordon E. Michalson (ed.), Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 98-117. 2014.Commentators typically neglect the distinct nature and role of hope in Kant’s system, and simply lump it together with the sort of Belief that arises from the moral proof. Kant himself is not entirely innocent of the conflation. Here I argue, however, that from a conceptual as well as a textual point of view, hope should be regarded as a different kind of attitude. It is an attitude that we can rationally adopt toward some of the doctrines that are not able to be proved from within the bounds of …Read more
-
1172Leibniz and Kant on Empirical Miracles: Rationalism, Freedom, and the LawsIn Brandon C. Look (ed.), Leibniz and Kant , Oxford University Press. pp. 320-354. 2021.Leibniz and Kant were heirs of a biblical theistic tradition which viewed miraculous activity in the world as both possible and actual. But both were also deep explanatory rationalists about the natural world: more committed than your average philosophical theologian to its thoroughgoing intelligibility. These dual sympathies—supernaturalist religion and empirical rationalism—generate a powerful tension across both philosophers’ systems, one that is most palpable in their accounts of empirical m…Read more
-
1394Kant's concepts of justificationNoûs 41 (1). 2007.An essay on Kant's theory of justification, where by “justification” is meant the evaluative concept that specifies conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence. Kant employs both epistemic and non-epistemic concepts of justification: an epistemic concept of justification sets out conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence and a candidate (if true an…Read more
-
774Causal refutations of idealism revisitedPhilosophical Quarterly 61 (242): 184-186. 2011.Causal refutations of external-world scepticism start from our ability to make justified judgements about the order of our own experiences, and end with the claim that there must be perceptible external objects, some of whose states can be causally correlated with that order. In a recent paper, I made a series of objections to this broadly Kantian anti-sceptical strategy. Georges Dicker has provided substantive replies on behalf of a version of the causal refutation of idealism. Here I offer a f…Read more
-
82The Problem of Particularity in Kant’s Aesthetic TheoryIn Kevin A. Stoehr (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Philosophy Documentation Center. pp. 197-208. 1999.An early version of "Kant on the Normativity of Taste" above. Original abstract: In moving away from the objective, property-based theories of earlier periods to a subject-based aesthetic, Kant did not intend to give up the idea that judgments of beauty are universalizable. Accordingly, the “Deduction of Judgments of Taste” aims to show how reflective aesthetic judgments can be “imputed” a priori to all human subjects. The Deduction is not successful: Kant manages only to justify the imputation…Read more
-
1074'As Kant Has Shown:' Analytic Theology and the Critical PhilosophyIn Oliver D. Crisp & Michael C. Rea (eds.), Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, Oxford University Press. pp. 116--135. 2009.On why Kant may not have shown what modern theologians often take him to have shown.
-
176Prolegomena to any future non-doxastic religionReligious Studies 49 (2): 195-207. 2013.A discussion of the relationship between religion and belief, in the context of an engagement with J.L. Schellenberg's recent "Prolegomena." I suggest that there may be an authentic way of being "religious" without having full-blown religious belief.
-
115Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2013.A review of a volume on Neo-Kantianism edited by Rudolf Makkreel and Sebastian Luft. -/- .
-
1379Kant on the normativity of taste: The role of aesthetic ideasAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 85 (3). 2007.For Kant, the form of a subject's experience of an object provides the normative basis for an aesthetic judgement about it. In other words, if the subject's experience of an object has certain structural properties, then Kant thinks she can legitimately judge that the object is beautiful - and that it is beautiful for everyone. My goal in this paper is to provide a new account of how this 'subjective universalism' is supposed to work. In doing so, I appeal to Kant's notions of an aesthetic idea …Read more
-
126Infant suffering revisitedReligious Studies 37 (4): 475-484. 2001.I respond to two sets of objections to my characterization of infant suffering and the problem that it presents to traditional theism. My main theses were that infant suffering to death is not ‘horrendous’ in the technical sense defined, but that a good God still needs to "balance off" rather than "defeat" such suffering. David Basinger, on the other hand, claims that some infant suffering should be considered horrendous, while Nathan Nobis suggests that such suffering must be defeated rather th…Read more
-
1973Belief in KantPhilosophical Review 116 (3): 323-360. 2007.Most work in Kant’s epistemology focuses on what happens “upstream” from experience, prior to the formation of conscious propositional attitudes. By contrast, this essay focuses on what happens "downstream": the formation of assent (Fuerwahrhalten) in its various modes. The mode of assent that Kant calls "Belief" (Glaube) is the main topic: not only moral Belief but also "pragmatic" and "doctrinal" Belief as well. I argue that Kant’s discussion shows that we should reject standard accounts of …Read more
-
522The Devil, The Virgin, and the Envoy: Symbols of Moral Struggle in Religion II.2In Otfried Hoeffe (ed.), Klassiker Auslegen: Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen, Akademie Verlag. pp. 111-129. 2010.Part of a group commentary on Kant's Religion book. This chapter focuses on Part 2, section 2 on "The Evil Principle's Rightful Claim to Dominion over the Human Being, and the Struggle of the Two Principles with One Another"
-
816Review: Saving God from Saving God (review)Books and Culture 15 (3). 2012.Mark Johnston’s book, Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2010) has two main goals, one negative and the other positive: (1) to eliminate the gods of the major Western monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) as candidates for the role of “the Highest One”; (2) to introduce the real Highest One, a panentheistic deity worthy of devotion and capable of extending to us the grace needed to transform us from inwardly-turned sinners to practitioners of agape. In this review, we argue that Jo…Read more
-
1148Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, and CoherenceKant Studien 105 (4): 573-597. 2014.My goal in this paper is to show that Kant’s prohibition on certain kinds of knowledge of things-in-themselves is motivated less by his anti-soporific encounter with Hume than by his new view of the distinction between “real” and “logical” modality, a view that developed out of his reflection on the rationalist tradition in which he was trained. In brief: at some point in the 1770’s, Kant came to hold that a necessary condition on knowing a proposition is that one be able to prove that all the i…Read more
-
1Kant's Ethics of Assent: Knowledge and Belief in the Critical PhilosophyDissertation, Yale University. 2004.Most accounts of Kant's epistemology focus narrowly on cognition and knowledge . Kant himself, however, thought that there are many other important species of assent : opinion, persuasion, conviction, belief, acceptance, and assent to the deliverances of common sense. ;My goal in this dissertation is to isolate and motivate the principles of rational acceptability which, for Kant, govern each of these kinds of assent, instead of focusing merely on cognition and knowledge. Some of the principles …Read more
-
162Descartes on Sensation: A Defense of the Semantic-Causation ModelPhilosophers' Imprint 9 1-22. 2009.Descartes's lack of clarity about the causal connections between brain states and mental states has led many commentators to conclude that he has no coherent account of body-mind relations in sensation, or that he was simply confused about the issue. In this paper I develop what I take to be a coherent account that was available to Descartes, and argue that there are both textual and systematic reasons to think that it was his considered view. The account has brain states serving as occasions fo…Read more
APA Eastern Division
Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Immanuel Kant |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Religion |
Food Ethics |
Hope |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Aesthetics |
19th Century Philosophy |
European Philosophy |
Immanuel Kant |
PhilPapers Editorships
1 more
Hope |
Immanuel Kant |
Kant: Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Kant: Skepticism |
Kant: Aesthetic Judgment |
Neo-Kantianism |