Marcus Willaschek

This chapter argues that Kant does not provide an answer to his question “What is a human being?”, as long as it is understood as a descriptive question about the essential and defining features of human beings. After introducing the three famous Kantian questions “What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?” in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant later adds a fourth question, namely “What is the human being?”. As will be argued, this question is ultimately aimed not at something like the “essence” of human beings but at what in Kant's time was called the “vocation of the human being”. This “vocation” consists in the final ends of humankind, which, according to Kant, are moral. Thus, Kant's fourth question is not so much about what human beings are as about what they ought to be.

Defeasibility, most generally speaking, means that given some set of conditions A, something else B will hold, unless or until defeating conditions C apply. While the term was introduced into philosophy by legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart in 1949, today, the concept of defeasibility is employed in many different areas of philosophy. This volume for the first time brings together contributions on defeasibility from epistemology, legal philosophy and ethics and the philosophy of action. The volume ends with an extensive bibliography.

Wie paßt der menschliche Geist in eine physische Welt? Diese Grundfrage der Philosophie steht im Mittelpunkt des Buches "Feld-Zeit-Ich" (1996), mit dem Peter Rohs den Entwurf einer “feldtheoretischen Transzendentalphilosophie” vorgelegt hat. Rohs betrachtet die Zeit als ontologisches Bindeglied zwischen Subjekt und Welt. Das erlaubt es ihm, eine Vielzahl von Phänomenen (vom Selbstbewußtsein über sprachliche Kommunikation bis zur lebendigen Natur) in einem einheitlichen philosophischen Ansatz zu erklären. Der vorliegende Band enthält vierzehn Beiträge, die sich kritisch und zugleich konstruktiv mit der feldtheoretischen Transzendentalphilosophie auseinandersetzen (von M. Esfeld, V. Gerhardt, B. Gesang, H. Hoppe, Chr. Jäger, W. Kuhlmann, G. Meggle, S. Mischer, G. Mohr, M. Quante, B. Recki, A. Rosas, L. Siep und Chr. Suhm). Rohs erläutert, verteidigt und ergänzt seine Position in ausführlichen Erwiderungen.

In this contribution, I respond to articles published in a Topical Issue of Open Philosophy on Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic by Mario Caimi, Gabriele Gava, and Michael Lewin, who criticize some of the views I put forward in my book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2018). In particular, I discuss the “real use” of reason (in response to Caimi), the “regulative use” of principles and ideas of reason (in response to Gava), and Kant’s conception of reason (in response to Lewin).

stefanie grüne takes issue with our claim that for an object to be given, this object must exist. On her view, givenness, according to Kant, does not require the existence of the object, but only its real possibility. She develops her critique in three steps. First, she argues that the reason why Kant requires objects to be given in intuition is that otherwise our concepts would not have ‘objective reality’ and would thus not constitute cognitions. But since the objective reality of a concept corresponds to the real possibility of its object, this is supposed to show that givenness does not require existence. Second, she challenges our remarks on mathematical cognition, claiming that in the...

This paper offers a partial defence of the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies. Unlike Epicurus and his present-day advocates, this defence relies not on a hedonistic or empiricist conception of value but on the concept of ‘existential’ value. Existential value is agent-relative value for which it is constitutive that it can be truly self-ascribed in the first person and present tense. From this definition, it follows that death (post-mortem non-existence), while perhaps bad in some respects, cannot be an existential harm for the one who dies. This paper argues that existential goods are central to any explanation of why life appears good to us from a self-interested perspective, which means that death is not bad in the very respect in which life is most saliently good (from that perspective). A corresponding error theory shows why this truth is easily overlooked and explains why we tend to think that death is significantly worse than it really is.

The ‘Introduction’ to Naturrecht Feyerabend is the transcript of a lecture Kant held at the very time he began writing the Groundwork. It contains the first securely dated occurrence of the term ‘autonomy’ (and its first occurrence in the context of moral philosophy) in Kant’s work. It argues that moral imperatives are categorical and asks how they are possible. Kant’s attempts to answer this question circle around the idea that freedom must be ‘a law to itself’ and lead him to the claim that the form of universal lawfulness, independently of any inclination, can determine the will. Thus various central elements of the Groundwork conception of autonomy are already present in this text. Other elements, most notably the universal law formulation of the categorical imperative and the emphasis on reason as both source and addressee of moral commands, are conspicuously absent. Following a reconstruction of Kant’s overall argument for autonomy of the will in the notes, the paper offers a detailed interpretation of central passages concerning autonomy in order to identify both similarities and differences between the conceptions of autonomy in the ‘Introduction’ and in the Groundwork.

Even though Kant’s theory of cognition (Erkenntnis) is central to his Critique of Pure Reason, it has rarely been asked what exactly Kant means by the term “cognition”. Against the widespread assumption that cognition (in the most relevant sense of that term) can be identified with knowledge or if not, that knowledge is at least a species of cognition, we argue that the concepts of cognition and knowledge in Kant are not only distinct, but even disjunct. To show this, we first (I) investigate Kant’s explicit characterizations of the nature of cognition. As it turns out, he introduces several different notions that must be carefully distinguished before identifying the one that is central to his project in the first Critique. We then (II) consider the basic features of Kant’s conception of knowledge, indicating both how it involves assent and objective justification and how it relates to our contemporary conception. Next (III), we compare and contrast Kant’s understanding of cognition and his conception of knowledge in a way that allows us to present their fundamental differences and connections. We argue that while cognition, in the most relevant sense, is a species of representation that differs from other representations in that it involves the conceptual determination of a sensibly given object, knowledge (for Kant) is a kind of assent to a judgment that requires consciousness of a sufficient epistemic ground. Finally (IV), by appreciating the differences between cognition and knowledge, we explain several of the implications this conception of cognition has for some of Kant’s main claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as a whole. Among other things, we show how Kant can deny cognition of specific things in themselves while allowing philosophical knowledge about things in themselves in general (e.g. that they exist, are not in space and time, etc.).