Eric Watkins

It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that there has been a plethora of work on Neo-Kantianism in recent years. There has, however, been a modest increase, due not only to Köhnke's work but also to Hans-Ludwig Ollig's Der Neukantianismus and Materialien zur Neukantianismus-Diskussion, Thomas Willey's Back To Kant, and Werner Flach's and Helmut Holzey's Erkenntnistheorie und Logik in Neukantianismus. On several counts there is reason to suspect, or at least to hope, that this tendency will continue. For much remains to be done. The paucity of literature on Neo-Kantianism, especially in English, is apparent and stands in need of rectification. Also, the complexity of the historical situation in Germany during the relevant period may have implications that force a revision of the standard picture of nineteenth century European philosophy. Finally, it is far from obvious that the Neo-Kantians had no independent philosophical insight relevant to issues in a wide range of contemporary areas: epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, ethics and Kant scholarship, to mention but a few.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kants Philosophic des Subjekts. Systematische und entuncklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Selbstbewusstsein und Selbslerkennlnis by Heiner F. KlemmeEric WatkinsHeiner F. Klemme. Kants Philosophic des Subjekts. Systematische und entuncklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Selbstbewusstsein und Selbslerkennlnis. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1996. Pp. ix + 430. Cloth, DM 148.In this impressive work Klemme provides a detailed historical account of the development of Kant’s views on self-consciousness from the early 1770s to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the first part of his book Klemme considers Kant’s views [End Page 471] in the 1770s as presented in his Inaugural Dissertation, newly available transcripts from his anthropology lectures, the so-called Duisburg Nachlass, and transcripts from his metaphysics lectures. Klemme first (Chapter 1) indicates briefly the place of psychology and anthropology in metaphysics in eighteenth-century Germany and identifies two general types of processes through which it was thought that self-knowledge might be attained. He then (Chapter 2) turns to a discussion of Kant’s project in the early 1770s—basing his philosophy on a spontaneous, free, and self-conscious I—and how it is developed against the background of (i) Kant’s “great light” of 1769, (ii) the awakening out of his “dogmatic slumber,” and (iii) the discovery of antinomial conflict. Klemme’s original thesis is that Moses Mendelssohn’s Phädon (1767) and especially Marcus Herz’s Betrachtungen aus der spekulativen Weltweisheit (1771), as well as Kant’s personal correspondence with these figures, are crucial to understanding how Kant comes to see the deficiencies of his view as presented in the Inaugural Dissertation. Klemme discusses Kant’s “remedy” (in Chapter 3): a new theory of the self, documented in the anthropology transcripts, according to which one has direct intuition of oneself as a simple, spontaneous, immaterial substance. Later in the 1770s (especially as documented in the Duisburg Nachlass) Kant finds himself unable to derive the categories from the self in either rational or empirical psychology and is thus forced to revise his theory in his first Critique.In the second part of his book Klemme discusses Kant’s account of self-consciousness in his Critical period. Accordingly, he presents interpretations of the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms in both editions of the first Critique as well as some of the central theses of Transcendental Idealism. Fundamental to Kant’s theory of self-consciousness in the Critical period is a distinction between self-knowledge and self-awareness. The former is knowledge of the empirical self, whereas the latter is knowledge of the self considered “not as appearance nor as thing in itself” (B423) but rather pre-categorically as an indeterminate existence. With respect to self-knowledge, Klemme argues that Kant adheres to three distinct models from 1781 to 1787. In the first edition of the first Critique Kant endorses the analogy model, according to which the regulative use of reason allows one to connect all of the self’s mental states in inner sense “as if it were a simple substance” (A 672/B 700). By the time of the second edition he adopts the mediation model, according to which “the categories can be applied to inner sense because we can represent time to ourselves only through recourse to outer sense as a line” (240). In the transcripts from his anthropology lectures (as well as in his published Anthropology) Kant seems to adopt a third model of self-knowledge, according to which the categories cannot be applied to inner representations at all; such knowledge amounts to nothing more than a mere history of our representations.Klemme concludes his discussion by considering Kant’s account of self-awareness. Kant is often thought (e.g., by Dieter Henrich) to hold a reflection model, according to which the self literally reflects on itself in self-awareness, giving rise to problems of circularity. Klemme argues against such an interpretation (as well as Manfred Frank’s “intellectual intuition” interpretation) in favor of a view, according to which the self can be determined practically “as a mere intelligence according to the moral law” (395). Such a view is consistent with Kant’s theoretical assertions about...

This volume provides English translations of texts that form the essential background to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Presenting the projects of Kant's predecessors and contemporaries in eighteenth-century Germany, it enables readers to understand the positions that Kant might have identified with 'pure reason', the criticisms of pure reason that had developed prior to Kant's, and alternative attempts at synthesizing empiricist elements within a rationalist framework. The volume contains chapters on Christian Wolff, Martin Knutzen, Alexander Baumgarten, Christian Crusius, Leonhard Euler, Johann Lambert, Marcus Herz, Johann Eberhard, and Johann Tetens. Each chapter includes a brief introduction that provides succinct biographical and bibliographical information on these authors, a concise account of their projects, and information on the importance of these projects to Kant's First Critique. Extensive references to the First Critique, brought together in a concordance, highlight the potential relevance of each text.

Sellars and McDowell, among others, attribute a prominent role to the Myth of the Given. In this paper, I suggest that they have in mind two different versions of the Myth of the Given and I argue that Kant is not the target of one version and, though explicitly under attack from the other, has resources sufficient to mount a satisfactory response. What is essential to this response is a proper understanding of (empirical) concepts as involving unifying functions that can take sensations as input and deliver normative representations as outputs. By understanding concepts in this way, one need not, as the second version of the Myth of the Given maintains, take sensations to be both natural and normative. Instead, they can be understood as the natural effects of external objects on us, but natural effects that can nonetheless play a role in a normative process because the concepts that are responsible for the normativity of the results can require that such natural effects be present as inputs into the process.

Regardless of one’s particular philosophical interests and convictions, it is evident that the notion of autonomy is an important one. However, agreement about the nature of autonomy and about what it requires has proven elusive in contemporary discussions. In Kant and the Fate of Autonomy Karl Ameriks addresses this impasse by going back to the historical roots of this notion in Kant and arguing that many contemporary conceptions of autonomy are based on misunderstandings of Kant’s position, misunderstandings that first arose in his immediate successors, Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel. However, Ameriks does not aim merely to set the historical record straight; he wants to suggest that Kant’s actual position on autonomy is much more attractive philosophically than either what he refers to as “pure Kantian” conceptions or positions that are similar in basic respects to those of Rorty, Taylor, Larmore, and other post-Kantians. That Ameriks is able to combine remarkable sensitivity toward an extremely broad range of obscure texts with striking clarity and philosophical sophistication in evaluating the positions and arguments laid bare by his exegetical analyses makes his book an extraordinarily rich contribution to our contemporary philosophical landscape.

During the last twenty years, Kant's theory of biology has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars and developed into a field which is growing rapidly in importance within Kant studies. The volume presents fifteen interpretative essays written by experts working in the field, covering topics from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century biological theories, the development of the philosophy of biology in Kant's writings, the theory of organisms in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, and current perspectives on the teleology of nature.

ABSTRACTIn this paper I argue that Kant’s complex argument against materialism involves not only his generic commitment to the existence of non-spatio-temporal and thus non-material things in themselves, but also considerations pertaining to reason and the subject of our thoughts. Specifically, I argue that because Kant conceives of reason in such a way that it demands a commitment to the existence of the unconditioned so that we can account for whatever conditioned objects we encounter in experience, our thoughts, which are also conditioned, require something unconditioned that, because it is unconditioned, cannot be material. In this way, Kant’s attitude towards materialism is based not only on abstract features of his metaphysics and epistemology, but also on specific features that were under serious discussion in the early modern period.

This is a book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context. Specifically, Eric Watkins argues that a grasp of Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian thought in eighteenth-century Germany helps one to see how the critical Kant argued for causal principles that have both metaphysical and epistemological elements. On this reading Kant's model of causality does not consist of events, but rather of substances endowed with causal powers that are exercised according to their natures and circumstances. This innovative conception of Kant's view of causality casts a light on Kant's philosophical beliefs in general, such as his account of temporality, his explanation of the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, and his response to the skeptical arguments of Hume.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 127-128 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant: A Biography Manfred Kuehn. Kant: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxii + 544. Cloth, $34.95. Kuehn's biography of Kant is an extraordinary scholarly and literary accomplishment. In nine masterful chapters (along with a prologue), Kuehn draws on an incredibly comprehensive and varied repository of historical evidence in painting a detailed, yet also widely accessible picture of the successive stages of Kant's life and of how his major and minor writings emerge from them, a picture that is both more accurate and more informative than what could ever be pieced together from existing biographies, even those written in German or at a time much closer to Kant's own.What is distinctive about Kuehn's methodology--and part, but only part, of what makes his work superior to other Kant biographies--is the way in which he focuses on Kant's intellectual context. For Kuehn, to understand Kant requires understanding him not just in the global context of modern European philosophy or even German philosophy, but also in his local context of Prussia and Königsberg. Accordingly, in the first chapter Kuehn does not merely list the biographical details of Kant's family and the name of the school he attended, but rather explains what it would have meant for Kant's father to be a member of a guild in eighteenth-century Prussia, what values that guild incorporated, what consequences his parents' Pietism would have for him, and what the intellectual and social life of the Collegium Fridericianum was like. Kuehn's proper emphasis on figures and events in Königsberg runs throughout the book. Thus in the second chapter, Kuehn describes the various faculty members Kant would have encountered as a student, what philosophical [End Page 127] views they held, how Kant's own activities as a student deviated from those of the "typical" student, what religious movements became influential at what time in the university, and what political consequences they would have had on a student's intellectual life. In the third chapter (devoted to 1755-64), Kuehn reveals how Kant, forming a wide circle of friends that would include Hamann, Herder, Hippel, and the family of Count Keyserlingk, "became a person of elegance during this period, someone who shone at social events with his intelligence and wit" (115). In chapter 4 (1764-69), Kuehn describes how Kant developed a close friendship with Green that would radically change his life. In fact, Kuehn claims that it was at the age of forty and due to the influence of Green that Kant underwent a conversion or rebirth by coming to understand the centrality of character and the role that maxims play in it. Moreover, in describing the radical changes of position initiated in his inaugural dissertation and completed in the three Critiques, Kuehn connects biography and philosophy by positing that Kant saw these works as providing "his newfound character with a philosophical justification and defense" (187).While one might think that chapter 5, which covers the 1770s, would have to be very short, given Kant's sparse publications during this period, Kuehn describes at length the rich set of interactions that Kant had with Mendelssohn, Herz, Lambert, Kraus, Herder, and Hamann, exchanges that would be crucial in the final articulation of his mature view. Kuehn devotes chapters 6 and 7 to the period during which Kant published his mature theoretical and practical works, most notably the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and it is here that Kuehn's contextualism has perhaps its greatest philosophical payoff. For the close attention Kuehn has paid to Kant's interactions with his immediate contemporaries reveals that he did not understand Hume's position as we might today, namely as advocating global skepticism about knowledge of the external world. Rather, Kant saw Hume's skepticism as being local and methodological in combating rationalism and dogmatism. As a result, Kant saw Hume mainly as an ally, not an adversary. Kuehn...