Marcus Willaschek

Recently, there has been some discussion about the relationship between Kant's conception of right (the sphere of juridical rights and duties) and his moral theory (with the Categorical Imperative as its fundamental norm). In section 1, I briefly survey some recent contributions to this debate and distinguish between two different questions. First, does Kant's moral theory (as developed in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason ) imply , or validate, a Kantian conception of right (as developed in the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals , the Doctrine of Right)? In other words, is the Categorical Imperative sufficient to show that the fundamental principles of right are normatively valid? Second, does Kant's conception of right presuppose his moral theory? In other words, is the Categorical Imperative necessary to show that the basic principles of right are normatively valid? In this paper, I will be primarily concerned with defending a negative answer to the first of these questions. In section 2, I will discuss Paul Guyer's attempt to vindicate a positive answer to the same question. In section 3, reasons will be given why any attempt to derive Kant's conception of right from the Categorical Imperative must fail because of the analytic connection between right and coercion.

Contextualist accounts of free will recently proposed by Hawthorne and Rieber imply that the same action can be both free and unfree (depending on the attributor's context). This paradoxical consequence can be avoided by thinking of contexts not as constituted by arbitrary moves in a conversation, but rather by (relatively stable) social practices (such as the practices of attributing responsibility or of giving scientific explanations). The following two conditions are suggested as each necessary and jointly sufficient for free will: (i) the agent is able to form considered practical judgements and to act accordingly, and (ii) the agent (or some agent‐involving event) is the original cause of her actions. A contextualist reformulation of the second condition is developed according to which only contexts in which responsibility is attributed are relevant for the kind of original causation required for free will, which allows for a non‐relativist contextualism about free will.

In his book Willensfreiheit , Geert Keil argues against the compatibility of free will and determinism by starting from the claim that the possibility to do otherwise than one actually does is an „analytic component“ of the concept of action. This he takes to imply that at no point in time prior to the action it is determined whether the action will take place. I argue against the move from to by pointing out that the kind of possibility mentioned in should best be understood as a „practical possibility“ that requires no more than the agent's ability, and opportunity, to do the kind of action in question. I argue that it is extremely implausible to deny that agents can have the relevant abilities and opportunities in a deterministic universe and that Keil's arguments for such a denial already presuppose the incompatibilism they are meant to establish

This paper develops a non-relativist version of contextualism about knowledge. It is argued that a plausible contextualism must take into account three features of our practice of attributing knowledge: (1) knowledge-attributions follow a default-and-challenge pattern; (2) there are preconditions for a belief's enjoying the status of being justified by default (e.g. being orthodox); and (3) for an error-possibility to be a serious challenge, there has to be positive evidence that the possibility might be realized in the given situation. It is argued that standard "semantic" versions of contextualism (e.g. those of Lewis, Cohen, DeRose) fail to take these features into account, which makes them overly hospitable to the sceptic, and that Williams' version of contextualism, although incorporating (1), fails to do justice to (2) and (3). According to the contextualism developed here, although epistemic standards vary with the context, the truth-value of particular knowledge-attributions does not. Contexts here are understood as being constituted by two elements: an epistemic practice (a rule-governed social practice such as a scientific discipline, the law, a craft etc., in which knowledge-claims are evaluated according to specific standards) and the "facts of the matter" (i.e. those facts which, together with the epistemic standards in question, determine which error-possibilities are relevant and thus have to be eliminated for a knowledge-claim to be true). If there are several epistemic practices, and thus several contexts, in which a knowledge-claim can be evaluated, it is the "strictest" practice that counts. In this way, the counterintuitive consequence of other versions of contextualism that the same knowledge-claim can be true in one context, but false in another, can be avoided. At the same time, scepticism can be resisted since even in the "strictest" epistemic practices, error-possibilities become relevant only when backed by positive evidence that they might in fact obtain.

Does perception provide us with direct and unmediated access to the world around us? The so-called 'argument from illusion ' has traditionally been supposed to show otherwise: from the subject's point of view, perceptual illusions are often indistinguishable from veridical perceptions; hence, perceptual experience, as such, cannot provide us with knowledge of the world, but only with knowledge of how things appear to us. Disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, first proposed by John McDowell and Paul Snowdon in the early 1980s and at the centre of current debates in the philosophy of perception, have been proposed to block this argument. According to the traditional view, a case of perception and a subjectively indistinguishable illusion or hallucination can exemplify what is fundamentally the same kind of mental state even though they differ in how they relate to the non-mental environment. In contrast, according to the disjunctive account, the concept of perceptual experience should be seen as essentially disjunctive, encompassing two distinct kinds of mental states, namely genuinely world-involving perceptions and mere appearances. This book presents seven recent essays on disjunctivism first published in two special issues of Philosophical Explorations: An International Journal for the Philosophy of Mind and Action

" John McDowell is one of the most influential philosophers writing today. His work, ranging from interpretations of Plato and Aristotle to Davidsonian semantics, from ethics to epistemology and the philosophy of mind, has set the agenda for many recent philosophical debates. This volume contains the proceedings of the third Münsteraner Vorlesungen zur Philosophie which McDowell delivered in 1999: A lecture, entitled ""Experiencing the World"", introduces into the set of ideas McDowell developed in his groundbreaking book Mind and World. The lecture is followed by ten brief essays, both interpretative and critical, in which students and faculty from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Münster discuss various aspects of McDowell's philosophy. The volume ends with responses by John McDowell. "

In der "Transzendentalen Ästhetik" der KrV will Kant zeigen, daß Raum und Zeit Anschauungsformen und daher keine Eigenschaften der Dinge an sich sind. Es scheint jedoch, als übersehe er dabei die Möglichkeit, daß Raum und Zeit Anschauungsformen und zugleich Eigenschaften der Dinge an sich sein könnten. Dagegen soll hier gezeigt werden, daß Kants Beweis durchaus schlüssig ist. Dabei kommt es zunächst darauf an, die genaue Struktur des Kantischen Beweises zu verstehen. Darauf folgt eine Diskussion der Kantischen Begriffe Anschauung sowie Form der Anschauung und reine Anschauung, in der sich unter anderem herausstellt, daß Kants Anschauungsbegriff im Sinne der aktuellen Philosophie des Geistes "externalistisch" konzipiert ist. Dies erlaubt es dann, den Schluß auf die Idealität von Raum und Zeit tatsächlich als Folgerung aus Kants vorhergehenden Ausführungen zu verstehen. Abschließend geht es um einige der Konsequenzen, die sich aus dieser Interpretation für das Verständnis des transzendentalen Idealismus ergeben

kant’s critique of pure reason undertakes a systematic investigation of the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori so as to determine whether this kind of cognition is possible in the case of traditional metaphysics.1 While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments as well as to that between the a priori and the a posteriori, less attention has been devoted to understanding exactly what cognition is for Kant. In particular, it is often insufficiently clear what kind of mental state cognition is, what the exact nature of the conditions on cognition is, and how they are satisfied in the case of human beings. To bring greater clarity to...