Anna Tomaszewska

How can Kant's philosophy inspire us to search for new solutions to problems in contemporary debates? Which Kantian ideas, if any, are still relevant? Should we re-evaluate Kantian ideas from the perspective of the current state of philosophy, and if so, in what way? Written in the year of his 300th birthday, this collection addresses these questions and examines the topicality of Kant's thought and its impact on the development of contemporary philosophy. With renowned scholars approaching Kant's philosophy from multiple perspectives spanning across Science and Metaphysics, Perspectives on Mind, Moral Faith and Rational Religion, and Enlightenment, the essays here demonstrate a still-live intertwinement of Kant's thought and ongoing philosophical debates. They shed new light on Kant's major influence on key thinkers of the 20th century, from Heidegger to Rawls, from Sellars to McDowell, and how his ideas continue to inform issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, political and moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Speaking to the enduring relevance of Kant's legacy, this collection affirms Kant not only holds historical value as a philosopher of the past, but his ideas are still fruitful and offer valuable insights into philosophical problems today.

SPINOZA AND KANT ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN MIND In the paper I try to compare the Spinozian and the Kantian accounts of the mind, underlining their relevance to contemporary debates in the area. I also discuss the problem of the nature of consciousness, in particular whether, on the basis of both Spinoza’s and Kant’s theories, one can claim that consciousness, or mentality, can be regarded as specifically distinctive of human beings. My suggestion is that one cannot. Keywords: SPINOZA, KANT, MIND, NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

This book examines the importance of the Enlightenment for understanding the secular outlook of contemporary Western societies. It shows the new ways of thinking about religion that emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries and have had a great impact on how we address problems related to religion in the public sphere today. Based on the assumption that political concepts are rooted in historical realities, this collection combines the perspective of political philosophy with the perspective of the history of ideas. Does secularism imply that individuals are not free to manifest their beliefs in public? Is secularization the same as rejecting faith in the absolute? Can there be a universal rational core in every religion? Does freedom of expression always go hand in hand with freedom of conscience? Is secularism an invention of the predominantly Christian West, which cannot be applied in other contexts, specifically that of Muslim cultures? Answers to these and related questions are sought not only in current theories and debates in political philosophy, but also in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Collins, Adriaan Koerbagh, Abbé Claude Yvon, Giovanni Paolo Marana, and others.

The first part of the article discusses one of the more important issues in the contemporary philosophy of perception and mind, i.e. the problem of the relation between experience and concepts, and that against the background of the conceptualism vs. nonconceptualism debate. On the conceptualist account of empirical cognition, perceptual contents are (throughout) conceptual in the sense that concepts constitute (through and through) the contents of perceptual experience. It is a necessary condition of the ascription of an experience and an empirical belief to a subject that he or she possessed concepts figuring in the characteristic of his or her experience. The relation between experience and belief is described as rational (or logical) rather than causal. I suggest a critical approach towards the conceptualist view in that I spell out some of its inconsistencies. Further, I focus on some selected kinds of nonconceptualism supported by such theorists as Ch. Peacocke, F. Dretske and J. L. Bermúdez.In the second part of my paper, I criticize McDowell’s conceptualist reading of Kant, on which the author of the Critique of Pure Reason is considered as representing the originally conceptualist position. Some of the theses Kant argues for in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” and earlier on in his 1770 Inaugural Dissertation allow us to conclude that, on a certain interpretation of the forms of empirical cognition (space and time), perception, on Kant’s theory, could be regarded as an active but not a concept-involving cognitive process.

The article makes an attempt at comparing two perspectives from which philosophical cognition starts – a perspective which can be encountered in Spinoza’s Ethics and a perspective which can be encountered in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the first case, a finite subject of the philosophical cognition embarks on the cognition of the substance, that is, reality in its comprehensiveness; in the second case, a finite subject of philosophical cognition reflects upon the totality of the field of possible experience, uncovering the conditions of its possibility. Both kinds of cognition consist in a pursuit to comprehend what is necessary and strictly universal. I claim that as much as the source of the cognition at stake is, on Spinoza’s account, provided by the intuitive grasp of the ontological identity of the subject and the whole of the reality, on Kant account, indicating the source or the ground of the transcendental cognition proves more difficult, even though it might be granted that as in Spinoza’s cognition of the substance, also in the cognition which furnishes the judgments of the Critique of Pure Reason, intuition plays the decisive role.

The paper focuses on a discussion about McDowell’s "conceptualist" interpretation of Kant’s theory of experience, as one in which all representational content is identified with conceptual content. Both in Mind and WorldM and in his Woodbridge Lectures, McDowell furthers a reading on which the "picture of visual experiences as conceptual shapings of visual consciousness is already deeply Kantian", supporting it with Kant’s famous claim from the A51/ B75 passage of the Critique of Pure Reason, which can be called a Cooperation Thesis. However, much indicates that McDowell’s reading is, if not altogether false, then at least one-sided. In the "Transcendental Aesthetic", as well as in some of the pre-Critical writings , Kant presented a range of arguments for a subjective, non-discursive character of space and time, i.e. the forms of sensible intuition and pure intuitions themselves, underlying all conceptual cognition, and providing a non-conceptual basis for a special kind of synthetic a priori cognition . This allows us to conclude that he would rather take the side of the contemporary “nonconceptualists”, and could be regarded as their predecessor, to use R. Hanna’s formulation. On this reading of the Kantian theory of empirical cognition, intentionality is independent of and prior to any application of concepts to the objects of experience

John McDowell claims that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs. Perceptual reasons, according to the author of Mind and World, can be identifiedwith passively “taken in” facts. Concepts figure in the acts of acquiring perceptual reasons, even though the acts themselves do not consist in judgments. Thus,on my reading, McDowell’s account of the acquisition of reasons can be likened to Descartes’ account of the acquisition of ideas, rather than to Kant’s theory ofjudgment as an act by means of which one’s cognition comes to be endowed with objective validity. However, unlike Descartes, McDowell does not acknowledgethe skeptical challenge which his conception of the acquisition of reasons might face. He contends that perception is factive without arguing for the backgroundassumption (about a “perfect match” between mind and world) on which it rests. Hence, as I suggest in my article, the McDowellian claim that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs is not sufficiently warranted.