Clinton Tolley

This chapter explores the metaphysics of powers as articulated in the modern German idealist tradition, running from the Leibniz-Wolffians, through Kant’s “transcendental” idealism, to Hegel’s “absolute” idealism. These various forms of idealism are shown to share a common understanding of the nature of powers in general, as metaphysically distinct from what is merely ideal, and as possessing real existence over and above any mental ideas or representations—not least so as to serve as both the cause of, and the support for, the real existence of ideas themselves. Beyond these broad points of convergence on the ontology of powers as such, the chapter also traces out developments in the accounts of powers given in the various branches of _metaphysica specialis_ (cosmology, psychology, theology). More generally, the chapter aims to revisit the question of the precise significance of the idealisms in this tradition upon the metaphysics of powers in particular.

Many have seen in Kant an attempt to “humanize” philosophy, in the sense that Kant is taken to argue that we should ground our philosophical theses (e.g., a transcendental idealist metaphysics) on principles derived from prior reflection on what it is to be human. The essay argues against this _foundationalist_ construal of Kant’s humanism, first by highlighting the difficulties Kant himself raises concerning the possibility of providing anything like a foundational or even unified concept of being human, let alone deducing any philosophical principles therefrom, and then by bringing to the fore Kant’s skepticism that anthropology itself could ever achieve the standing of a science. In addition to clarifying the distinctions Kant takes to obtain between the concept of humanity and related concepts (animality, personality), the essay emphasizes instead Kant’s view that the philosophical articulation of being human is one of the key _goals_ that philosophy seeks after.

I aim to develop a new framework for thinking about several of the key distinctions in play in Kant’s discussions of freedom in relation to reason, particularly the discussions found in the Third Antinomy of the first Critique, the Groundwork, and the second Critique. Kant’s discussions here have seemed at best puzzling and at worst incoherent: in the Third Antinomy and the Groundwork, for example, Kant seems to both affirm and deny that we can have cognition of the freedom of our reason; in the second Critique, he seems to both affirm that we can know that our reason is free (in the ‘fact of reason’) but then also insist that we can only ‘postulate’ that we have the requisite freedom. My aim here will be to develop a novel version of the idea that, at crucial points in these writings, Kant is distinguishing between several different senses of ‘freedom’, and that it is important to keep track of these different senses if we are to avoid ascribing to Kant a contradictory or otherwise incoherent position on freedom, whether across the key Critical writings from the 1780s or even within the same text. The main distinction that I myself will draw attention to is that between what I will call (drawing on Aristotelian traditions) merely practical freedom, on the one hand, and genuinely productive freedom on the other. As will emerge below, the freedom specific to the ‘practical’ use of reason, in the classical sense of ‘practical’, is the freedom that pertains specifically to reason in its determination of our ‘power of choice [Willkür]’, and hence is something whose cause (reason) and effect (choice) both lie entirely within our soul. Productive freedom, on the other hand, is the freedom that pertains (or would pertain) to a causality of reason whose cause (as reason) is in the soul, but whose effect lies outside our soul, in ‘outer’ nature (for Kant: in physical space).

I present an argument for an interpretation of Kant's views on the nature of the ‘content [Inhalt]’ of ‘cognition [Erkenntnis]’. In contrast to one of the longest standing interpretations of Kant's views on cognitive content, which ascribes to Kant a straightforwardly psychologistic understanding of content, and in contrast as well to the more recently influential reading of Kant put forward by McDowell and others, according to which Kant embraces a version of Russellianism, I argue that Kant's views on this topic are of a much more Fregean bent than has traditionally been admitted or appreciated. I conclude by providing a sketch of how a better grasp of Kant's views on cognitive content in general can help bring into sharper relief what is, and what is not, at stake in the recent debates over whether Kant accepts a particular kind of cognitive content—namely, non‐conceptual content.

Friedman, Richardson, and others have helpfully foregrounded the neglected presence of Kantian and neo-Kantian influences on the early Carnap. Here, however, I sound a cautionary note, highlighting a dimension along which early Carnap departs directly from Kant and neo-Kantianism, swinging much closer to Russell – namely, in his conception of logic’s subject-matter. For while Kant and neo-Kantians conceive of logic as a science concerned primarily with mental activity and its (ideal) contents (concepts, Fregean ‘Sinne’), Carnap (mostly) follows Russell in seeing logic as primarily concerned with the objectivities represented by such contents through such acts – i.e., with the objects, properties, states of affairs, facts (and so on) that together constitute the world’s most general or universal features. But then, because Carnap also follows Russell in placing logic at the very basis of his own constitution programme, I conclude that Russellian doctrines lie at the heart of Carnap’s Aufbau project, which means that we must also orient our understanding of early Carnap on central points by reference to decidedly non-Kantian threads.

As many readers have noted, Kant strategically appeals to the results of logic to justify the systematicity of his own doctrines at key points in the Critical philosophy – perhaps most infamously in his “metaphysical deduction” of the categories of metaphysics at the outset of the first Critique's “Transcendental Logic.” Here I focus on two important respects in which Kant takes logic itself to relate to the property of being a system: on the one hand, insofar as logic (qua science) itself constitutes a system of cognitions; on the other hand, insofar as logic is about a system, due to the fact that the object of its cognitions itself forms a system – namely, a system of activities (viz. thinking) which define the nature of the faculty of the understanding. Having highlighted two distinct “systems” pertaining to logic, I then argue that Kant takes the system inherent in the activities of the understanding (logic's subject-matter) to have a priority in relation to logic itself, qua system of cognitions which constitutes the science (scientific cognition) of this faculty. I conclude by considering worries which might be thought to arise on the resulting picture, not least due to the fact that the kind of thing that logic itself is – a science, the result of a complex activity of forming a system of cognitions – belongs to logic itself as part of its subject-matter (in its “doctrine of method”), since this might seem to force the allegedly prior system of the activities of the understanding to anticipate too closely (or perhaps even already “contain”) the subsequent system of the science of logic.

I begin by distinguishing, in Hegel’s writings, between the subject-matter of the science of logic, and the science of logic itself. I then argue for an interpretation of the subject-matter of logic in terms drawn from the ancient Greek discussions of logos, discussions which Hegel himself exposits at length and applauds in his lectures on the history of philosophy, and which Hegel directly alludes to, at key moments, in the course of presenting the subject-matter of logic in his own voice. Drawing on the fact that logos, in this tradition, is at once ontologically pervasive while also something which in itself does not involve consciousness or self-consciousness (and so is not essentially ‘psychological’ or ‘spiritual’, in Hegel’s sense of these terms), I argue against recent attempts to cast Hegel’s logic as about something which is first, foremost, and essentially self-conscious (‘apperceptive’), and in favor of a more straightforwardly metaphysical interpretation of logic, one according to which logic treats its subject-matter (logos) in a way that is ‘neutral’ with respect to whether it is realized in spirit or in nature. I conclude by returning to the significance of distinction between logos itself and the philosophical science of this subject-matter for Hegel’s broader system.

Kraus’s book is a rich and systematic examination of Kant’s account of the different dimensions of the metaphysics, epistemology and phenomenology of the ‘self’ that pertains to human subjectivity. Here I explore some of the different meanings that Kraus associates with the term ‘self’ on Kant’s behalf, asking for further clarification as to her interpretation of the terms ‘subject’ (‘the I’), ‘soul’ and ‘person’, in particular. I also raise some critical questions concerning Kraus’s account of the nature and limitations of the ‘real’ use of the concept of the soul in particular, in light of passages throughout the Critical period in which Kant seems to allow for a relatively unproblematic application of the term to whatever being it is that possesses the various psychical faculties – a being which he also seems to allow is an object of experience (and hence cognition).

I argue for a new delimitation of what Kant means by ‘cognition [Erkenntnis]’, on the basis of the intermediate, transitional place that Kant gives to cognition in the ‘progression [Stufenleiter]’ of our representations and our consciousness of them. I show how cognition differs from mental acts lying earlier on this progression—such as sensing, intuiting, and perceiving—and also how cognition differs from acts lying later on this progression—such as explaining, having insight, and comprehending. I also argue that cognition should not be confused with ‘knowledge [Wissen]’, insofar as knowledge represents the culmination of a separate orthogonal progression of acts of ‘holding-true’. Along the way, I show how having in focus the specific progression from representation, to consciousness, to cognition allows us to better appreciate the architectonic significance of the progression of Kant’s analysis in the first Critique, and also helps to illuminate the unity of Kant’s account of cognition itself across its variety of forms.

In this chapter I will argue against both of these interpretations and will begin to develop an alternate account of imagination in experience. Against those who minimize imagination’s role, I will highlight the distinctive contribution of the imagination to experience. In particular, I will foreground the specific role that the imagination plays in making possible the distinct mental act, intermediate between intuition and experience, that Kant calls “perception [Wahrnehmung]” as the “empirical consciousness [Bewußtsein]” of appearances (cf. B207). Because perception involves images essentially (cf. A120), and because Kant understands experience itself to be a “synthesis of perceptions” (cf. B218), this strongly suggests (against minimalists) that experience, too, will incorporate images into the manner in which it allows us to cognize physical objects. By highlighting the contribution of imagination prior to experience, my own account, therefore, overlaps in part with the readings that seek instead to maximize the role of imagination. Against maximalists, however, I will argue that imagination contributes only in (and after) the transition from intuition to perception, rather than already being at work in the stage of intuition itself. More specifically, I will argue that Kant takes the activity of imagination to make perception possible by acting on already-formed intuitions in order to bring about the consciousness of them, rather than to bring the intuitions about in the first place. I will also argue that this synthesis of intuitions should be kept distinct from the activity of understanding.

We survey the development of “California Phenomenology”, both as a philosophical movement originating with Dagfinn Føllesdal’s formulation of a Fregean, analytic reading of Husserl in the late 1950s and 1960s, and as an evolving network of philosophers working throughout California, who have met under the auspices of several groups in a more or less continuous way since that time. We trace the history of these groups in detail, provide an overview of debates that occurred between “West Coast” approaches to Husserlian phenomenology and other approaches, and survey the broad panorama of more recent work.

There has been a tendency in some of the most influential recent interpretations of Hegel to downplay (or simply ignore) the theological characterizations that Hegel gives to the subject-matter of logic, and to emphasize, instead, certain continuities taken to exist between Hegel’s conception of logic and that of Kant. In the work of Robert Pippin and others, this has led to an ‘apperception’-oriented interpretation of Hegel’s logic, according to which Hegel follows Kant in taking logic to be primarily concerned with the nature of human self-conscious subjectivity. Here I put pressure on this interpretation—first, by foregrounding textual and systematic evidence for taking the theological characterizations to accurately convey Hegel’s considered position on logic, as the science of the ‘absolute idea’, and then, secondly, by showing how Hegel’s arguments for the absolute formality and universality of logic point instead to a more fully-fledged rejection of Kant’s conception as too specifically psychological.

This chapter spells out in detail how Kant’s thinking about logic during the critical period shapes the account of philosophy that he gives in the Critiques. Tolley explores Kant’s motivations behind his formation of the idea of a new “transcendental” logic, drawing out in particular how he means to differentiate it from the traditional “merely formal” approaches to logic, insofar as transcendental logic investigates not just the basic forms of the activity of thinking but also its basic contents. Kant’s understanding of both of these logics directly factor into the first Critique’s more general project of the critique of reason in particular, as not just a capacity for a certain kind of thinking (inferring), but as a possible source of a priori cognition.

It is shown in this paper how reflection on the views of Kant’s predecessors on the relation between ontology (the science of being in general) and logic (the science of the intellect or understanding in general) can help illuminate Kant’s own “Critical” reconception of the relationship between ontology and logic. The paper begins by focusing especially on the question of what sort of ontological cognition is involved in Kant’s new “transcendental” logic, understood as the science of “concepts of objects in general”. The paper concludes with a sketch of how Kant’s account of intuitive understanding sets the stage for Hegel’s more speculative conception of logic. In diesem Aufsatz wird gezeigt, wie die Betrachtung der Meinungen von Kants Vorgängern über das Verhältnis zwischen Ontologie (der Wissenschaft vom Sein überhaupt) und Logik (der Wissenschaft von Verstand überhaupt) dazu beitragen kann, Kants eigene „Kritische“ Konzeption der Beziehung zwischen Ontologie und Logik zu erhellen. Der Fokus richtet sich besonders auf die Frage, welche Art ontologischer Erkenntnis bei Kants neuer „transzendentaler“ Logik, verstanden als Wissenschaft von „Konzepten von Objekten überhaupt“, gemeint ist. Abschließend wird skizziert, wie Kants Betrachtung von intuitivem Verstand die Voraussetzung für Hegels spekulativere Konzeption von Logik schafft.

I present an argument for an interpretation ofKant's views on the nature of the ‘content [Inhalt]’ of ‘cognition [Erkenntnis]’. In contrast to one of the longest standing interpretations ofKant's views on cognitive content, which ascribes toKant a straightforwardly psychologistic understanding of content, and in contrast as well to the more recently influential reading ofKant put forward byMcDowell and others, according to whichKant embraces a version ofRussellianism, I argue thatKant's views on this topic are of a much moreFregean bent than has traditionally been admitted or appreciated. I conclude by providing a sketch of how a better grasp ofKant's views on cognitive content in general can help bring into sharper relief what is, and what is not, at stake in the recent debates over whether Kant accepts a particular kind of cognitive content—namely, non‐conceptual content.