Mark Glouberman

SummaryLeft wing interpreters of Kant's transcendental idealism argue that the doctrine must be excised in order to disclose the viable philosophical content of the first Critique. For right wing interpreters, this leaves a Hamlet without the prince. I chart and defend a middle path. Transcendental idealism, while essential to Kant's position, renders that position philosophically indefensible. Constant misinterpretation of the doctrine results from a failure to appreciate the inter‐theoretic relations between Kant's conceptualisation of sense‐involving experience and the output of ‘Cartesian theory of error'

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:32. HUME ON MODES As thorough a critic as Norman Kemp Smith states in his investigation of the Treatise that "Hume's treatment of... the complex ideas of modes... need not detain us." Whatever is interesting in this brief treatment, Smith suggests, rests on remarkable features of Humean doctrine, elsewhere expounded at length. This is true, I would agree, as a descriptive comment to the following degree. The category of modes is officially regarded by Hume as highly marginal, even dispensible. But it is not in fact the case that, intrasystematically, the work of modes can be duplicated in non-modal materials. In this discussion I will show that Hume mistakes the case, and attempts to diagnose the error's deep sources. To the naked eye, the mistake seems perhaps small and reparable. Placed under the microscope, we find an important philosophical conception is at stake. Our raw material comprises the explanations of modality provided by Locke and Hume. Modes, according to Locke, are complex ideas which, however compounded, contain not in them the supposition of subsisting by themselves, but are considered as dependences on, or affections of, substances; such are the ideas signified by the words, triangle, grati2 tude, murder, etc. (2.12.4). Hume's account is similar in appearance. The idea... of a mode... is nothing but a collection of simple ideas.... The simple ideas of which modes are formed, either represent qualities, which are not united by contiguity and causation, but are dispers ' d in different subjects ; or if 33. they be all united together, the uniting principle is not regarded as the foundation of the complex idea. The idea of a dance is an instance of the first kind of modes; that of beauty of the second (I. I. VI). The appearance of harmony is capped by the uniformity in examples: Locke also mentions 'beauty' (2.12.5) as a modal term, and between his 'murder' and Hume's 'dance' there is nothing to choose. One small difference remains. The idea of dependence, prominent in Locke's sketch, is absent from the Treatise passage quoted. This disparity is eliminated by the following remark, temporarily withheld above: the difference betwixt [substances and modes] consists in this, that the particular qualities, which form a substance, are commonly referr'd to an unknown something, in which they are supposed to inhere (I. I. VI). Superficially then, both Locke and Hume might be thought to subscribe to the following theses. The designata of modal terms, but not of substantial terms, lack independence (I will call this 'the Modal Dependence Thesis' or 'MDT'). Modal terms designate complex ideas in the same way as do those substantial terms which designate complex ideas (this will be referred to as 'the Modal Complexity Thesis' or 1MCT'). But while Locke supports MDT, Hume rejects it, and whereas Hume advocates MCT, Locke — when pressed — will be found to disagree with it. Let us start with MDT. To establish that the category of modes is regarded, intrasystematically, as superfluous by Hume is to confirm the disagreement here between the two theorists. Hume categorically dismisses what Locke describes by the phrase 'a something I know not what' as contributing 34. to any particular idea of a substance. Accordingly, the designata of modal as well as substantial terms resolve identically under analysis, i.e. into combinations of simple ideas. Hume mentions a differentiating factor: the principle of union of simple ideas in the case of a substance scores higher in naturalness than in the case of a mode. The components of a substantial idea are "closely and inseparably connected by the relations of contiguity and causation" (I. I. VI), which are 'natural'. But Hume's own examples expose this as an ineffective device of differentiation, one to which Hume himself attaches little importance. Where is the unnaturalness in the case of the (modal) designata of 'beauty' and 'dance'? How — more pointedly — is the complexity involved in the (substantial) designata of 'dog' and 'table' more natural? Any difference here is one that Hume does well to play down and neutralise of all but sentimental significance. In adducing the idea of naturalness to explain the difference felt by the common...

A potential proselyte asks the great rabbi Hillel to explain the Torah to him while he stands ‘on one leg.’ Hillel responds with, essentially, the Golden Rule. This Talmudic anecdote is invariably read as critical of anyone who wants a Torah for Dummies. I offer a different interpretation. The Torah-based position, theologically speaking, rests on one principle and one principle alone, God. ‘How can an account of the creation as a whole rest on one principle only? Won’t such a structure stand unsteadily, like a person on one leg?’ Hillel’s response to the request for a distillation of the Torah does home in on the Bible’s novelty. It homes in on what God does and what pagan deities cannot do. But God’s contribution, while needed to account for the human sector of the creation, cannot manage the extra-human sector. For that, a principle that belongs to paganism is required. The whole can stand steadily, as can the proselyte, only on two legs. So his conversation must be with reservations. He might not be able to intone the main creedal profession of the Torah-based religion, the Shema. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord [alone] is our God, the Lord is one’ (Deuteronomy 6:4). The Torah’s defenders have more of a case to make.

In what respect, if any, is Kant a distinctively “critical” thinker? How does Kant’s “transcendentalism” differentiate his practice in metaphysics from that of the philosophers of the Cartesian tradition? How much does the success of Kant’s enterprise depend on the viability of the idea of the synthetic a priori? The issues that these questions raise came to a head for Kant in the attack on his novelty by the Leibnizean Johann August Eberhard, an attack to which Kant responded at length in the sarcastically titled On a discovery according to which any new critique of pure reason has been made superfluous by an earlier one. Unfortunately, Kant’s apology is quite inconclusive. In this discussion, in an effort to shed some light on the murk, I supply text-sensitive analyses of the various key notions. It emerges that while, as Eberhard complained, the “critical” turn is not at all a methodological novelty, Kant’s procedure does mark a departure from traditional metaphysics, though not one that he himself describes at all clearly. Kant’s “transcendentalism” ultimately constitutes an open-ended and ever-widening interrogation of logical possibility; hence an interrogation that, contrary to what Kant himself claims, can never furnish what legitimately counts as “proof.”

Matter, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, plays a prototypical version of a rôle that recurs, refracted through the domestic preoccupations of each age, in metaphysical analyses of the constitution of the real. After identifying the rôle, I shall trace a developmental arc of philosophical treatment from Aristotle through the Cartesian period to Kant. The mature Kantian view of the rôle—the ‘critical’ view—is, I maintain, a reversion to the Aristotelian position. It is not however a simple reversion. It is reversion mediated through the Cartesian view. Arguably, the mediation is more than merely historical. Arguably, the Kantian treatment is conceptually or theoretically indebted to the Cartesian. This ‘dialectical’ indebtedness, if it can be established, has important, and as I see them negative, implications for the integrity of the Kantian stand.

Though, in view of Descartes' challenge to the epistemological credentials of "reason" early in the Meditations, one expects him to resist the claim that the professedly invulnerable cogito argument works through the suppressed premise "Everything that thinks, exists," interpreters have been hard-pressed to convert comprendre here into pardonner. Loath to convict Descartes of confusing a psychological point about inferential process with a logical one about the conditions for validity, many are driven to implausible construals, for example, the ingenious performative construal, on which "cogito" does not express a premise. In this fast-paced study Jerrold Katz, calling on his Chomsky-inspired theorising about natural languages, offers a via media. At the core is the thesis that validity is not always a matter of logical form--hence a rejection of the view whose contemporary prestige derives from Frege. According to Katz, the validity of analytic entailments is a function not of logical form but of the senses of the contributing linguistic elements. The cogito argument, Katz maintains, falls into this class. Thus, comprendre avec pardonner: Descartes is not being evasive when he holds that there is an argumentational move from "cogito" to "sum" while denying that the argument, as presented, is enthymematic.

1. The distinction between the functions of sense and intellect in cognition is first given its modern form by Kant. According to one influential commentator, Jonathan Bennett, “Kant’s breakthrough” in fact consists precisely in liberating himself from his predecessors’ misconceptions in this regard. It is true that the categorial duality of receptivity and spontaneity—of intuition and concept—is not to be found in the major classical writings prior to Kant. In its place, one encounters a relativized distinction. The empiricist Hume, for example, describes a conceptual element or “idea” as differing only in “vivacity” from an item of sensory intake or “impression,” and the rationalist Leibniz says of a state of “pure” intellection that it differs from a perceptual state in being clear of the residuum of cognitive “confusion” which taints the latter.

Unhappy with a recent submission of mine, a referee for a journal specialising in the history of philosophy wagged a finger at what he or she called my ‘hermeneutical principles’. Though I am no stranger to the collegial woodshed, my initial reaction was nonetheless one of surprise. For had I then been asked about interpretive methodology I would have scoffed. The construer’s best course, I would have said, is to nose about the texts until some rough shape begins to emerge from the murk, and to inch forward in an effort to block in details, frequently doubling back for more nosing about. Isn’t this —fill, back, adjust, refill, back again, re-adjust—a counsel of anti-method?

For placing the contrast of certainty and uncertainty at the philosophical center, Descartes is charged with Michael Dummett with mistakenly subordinating the study of language and meaning to epistemology. But Dummett's knowledge-theoretic reading of the certainty/uncertainty duality is as erroneous as the tradition it inherits is long. The Cartesian demand for certainty and critique of uncertainty in mature writings like the Meditations has a definite semantic character. Cartesian uncertainty, construed aright, anticipates Dummett's putatively original idea of a non-reductive yet non-realist semantics for standard factual claims asserted on the basis of sense-evidence. There is an internal relation, in Descartes' philosophy, between a repudiation of uncertainty and a repudiation of a non-realist conception of the world.