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2369Kant and Rational PsychologyOxford University Press UK. 2014.Corey W. Dyck presents a new account of Kant's criticism of the rational investigation of the soul in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in light of its eighteenth-century German context. When characterizing the rational psychology that is Kant's target in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason chapter of the Critique commentators typically only refer to an approach to, and an account of, the soul found principally in the thought of Descartes and Leibniz. But Dyck argues that to do so is to overloo…Read more
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1424While there is good reason to think that Mendelssohn's Morgenstunden targets some of the key claims of Kant’s first Critique, this criticism has yet to be considered in the appropriate context or presented in all of its systematic detail. I show that far from being an isolated assault, Mendelssohn’s attack in the Morgenstunden is a continuation and development of his earlier criticism of Kant’s idealism as presented in the Inaugural Dissertation. I also show that Mendelssohn’s objection was more…Read more
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1203Empirical consciousness explained: Self-affection, (self-)consciousness and perception in the B deductionKantian Review 11 29-54. 2006.Few of Kant’s doctrines are as difficult to understand as that of self-affection. Its brief career in the published literature consists principally in its unheralded introduction in the Transcendental Aesthetic and unexpected re-appearance at a key moment in the Deduction chapter in the B edition of the first Critique. Kant’s commentators, confronted with the difficulty of this doctrine, have naturally resorted to various strategies of clarification, ranging from distinguishing between empirical…Read more
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933Beyond the Paralogisms: The Proofs of Immortality in the Lectures on MetaphysicsIn Robert R. Clewis (ed.), Reading Kant's Lectures, De Gruyter. pp. 115-134. 2015.Considered in light of the readers expectation of a thoroughgoing criticism of the pretensions of the rational psychologist, and of the wealth of discussions available in the broader 18th century context, which includes a variety of proofs that do not explicitly turn on the identification of the soul as a simple substance, Kants discussion of immortality in the Paralogisms falls lamentably short. However, outside of the Paralogisms (and the published works generally), Kant had much more to say…Read more
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836The Principles of ApperceptionIn Udo Thiel & Giuseppe Motta (eds.), Immanuel Kant: Die Einheit des Bewusstseins (Kant-Studien Ergänzungshefte), Degruyter. pp. 32-46. 2017.In this paper, I argue that there are multiple principles of apperception which jointly constitute the foundation of Kant's argument in the transcendental deduction.
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741A Wolff in Kant’s Clothing: Christian Wolff’s Influence on Kant’s Accounts of Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and PsychologyPhilosophy Compass 6 (1): 44-53. 2011.In attempts to come to grips with Kant’s thought, the influence of the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) is often neglected. In this paper, I consider three topics in Kant’s philosophy of mind, broadly construed, where Wolff’s influence is particularly visible: consciousness, self-consciousness, and psychology. I argue that we can better understand Kant’s particular arguments and positions within this context, but also gain a more accurate sense of which aspects of Kant’s accounts derive…Read more
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667Early Modern German Philosophy (1690-1750)Oxford University Press. 2019.Early Modern German Philosophy (1690-1750) makes some of the key texts of early German thought available in English, in most cases for the first time. The translations range from texts by the most important figures of the period, including Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff, Christian August Crusius, and Georg Friedrich Meier, as well as texts by consequential but less familiar thinkers such as Dorothea Christiane Erxleben, Theodor Ludwig Lau, Friedrich Wilhelm Stosch, and Joachim Lange. The t…Read more
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647Power, Harmony, and Freedom: Debating Causation in 18th Century GermanyIn Frederick Beiser & Brandon Look (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth Century German Philosophy, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.As far as treatments of causation are concerned, the pre-Kantian 18th century German context has long been dismissed as a period of uniform and unrepentant Leibnizian dogmatism. While there is no question that discussions of issues relating to causation in this period inevitably took Leibniz as their point of departure, it is certainly not the case that the resulting positions were in most cases dogmatically, or in some cases even recognizably, Leibnizian. Instead, German theorists explored a ra…Read more
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572Between Wolffianism and Pietism: Baumgarten's Rational PsychologyIn Courtney D. Fugate & John Hymers (eds.), Baumgarten and Kant on Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 78-93. 2018.In this paper, I consider Baumgarten’s views on the soul in the context of the Pietist critique of Wolff’s rational psychology. My primary aim is to account for the largely unacknowledged differences between Wolff’s and Baumgarten’s rational psychology, though I also hope to show that, in some cases, the Pietists were rather more perceptive in their reading of Wolff than they are typically given credit for as their criticisms frequently succeed in drawing attention to significant omissions in Wo…Read more
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568Review essay: Paul Guyer's, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) (review)Philosophy and Social Criticism 35 (5): 613-619. 2009.
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543The Priority of Judging: Kant on Wolff's General LogicEstudos Kantianos 4 (2): 99-118. 2016.In this paper, I consider the basis for Kant's praise of Wolff's general logic as "the best we have." I argue that Wolff's logic was highly esteemed by Kant on account of its novel analysis of the three operations of the mind (tres operationes mentis), in the course of which Wolff formulates an argument for the priority of the understanding's activity of judging.
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527Leibniz's Wolffian PsychologyIn Wenchao Li (ed.), Vorträge des X. Internationalen Leibniz-Kongress, vol. 2, G. Olms. 2016.In this paper, I attempt to trace the broader contours of a putative Leibnizian psychology by adopting the rather unusual, and perhaps historically dubious, strategy of outlining the continuities between Leibniz’s discussion of the soul and the much more detailed and systematic psychological writings of his German successor, Christian Wolff.
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509Tetens as a Reader of Kant's Inaugural DissertationIn Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 857-66. 2018.In this paper I consider Tetens' reaction to Kant's Inaugural Dissertation in his two most important philosophical works, the essay “Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie” of 1775 and the two-volume Philosophische Versuche of 1777. In particular, I focus on Tetens’ critical discussion of Kant's account of the acquisition of concepts of space and time.
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442The Function of Derivation and the Derivation of Functions: A Review of Schulting’s Kant’s Deduction and Apperception (review)Studi Kantiani 13-19. 2014.In this review essay, I raise three principal concerns relating to Schulting’s project of deriving the categories from apperception as elaborated in his recent book Kant’s Deduction and Apperception (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). First, I claim that Schulting overlooks a key ambiguity relating to ‘ableiten’ and which contrasts with his strictly logical understanding of that term. Second, I dispute on textual and philosophical grounds Schulting’s characterization of the subject’s consciousness of it…Read more
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401In this paper, I provide an account of the role of the associative function of the imagination in causal cognition for Kant. I consider, first, Kant’s treatment of the imaginative faculty in the student notes to Kant’s lectures on anthropology in the 1770s, with the aim of working up a more-or-less comprehensive taxonomy of its various sub-faculties. I then turn to Kant’s account of the activity of the imagination, particularly in accordance with the law of association, in the theory of cognitio…Read more
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395Spontaneity before the Critical Turn: Crusius, Tetens, and the Pre-Critical Kant on the Spontaneity of the MindJournal of the History of Philosophy 54 (4): 625-648. 2016.Kant’s introduction in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (KrV) of a spontaneity proper to the understanding is often thought to be one of the central innovations of his Critical philosophy. As I show in this paper, however, a number of thinkers within the 18th century German tradition in the time before the KrV (including the pre-Critical Kant himself) had already developed a robust conception of the spontaneity of the mind, a conception which, in many respects lays the groundwork for Kant’s later,…Read more
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395The Spinozan-Wolffian Philosophy? Mendelssohn’s Philosophical Dialogues of 1755Kant Studien 109 (2): 251-269. 2018.: Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Gespräche, first published in 1755, represents his first philosophical work in German and rather surprisingly for a debut, in the first two dialogues of that work Mendelssohn attempts nothing less than a defense of the legacy of the most controversial philosopher of his day, Benedict de Spinoza. In this paper, I attempt to enlarge the context, and if possible to raise the stakes, of Mendelssohn’s discussion in order to bring out what I take to be a much more ambiti…Read more
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392Kant and His German Contemporaries : Volume 1, Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2017.This collection of new essays, the first of its kind in English, considers the ways in which the philosophy of Immanuel Kant engages with the views of lesser-known eighteenth-century German thinkers. Each chapter casts new light on aspects of Kant's complex relationship with these figures, particularly with respect to key aspects of his logic, metaphysics, epistemology, theory of science, and ethics. The portrait of Kant that emerges is of a major thinker thoroughly engaged with his contemporari…Read more
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371Kant's Canon, Garve's Cicero, and the Stoic Doctrine of the Highest GoodIn Stefano Bacin & Oliver Sensen (eds.), Kant's Moral Philosophy in Context, . forthcoming.The concept of the highest good is an important but hardly uncontroversial piece of Kant’s moral philosophy. In the considerable literature on the topic, challenges are raised concerning its apparently heteronomous role in moral motivation, whether there is a distinct duty to promote it, and more broadly whether it is ultimately to be construed as a theological or merely secular ideal. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the context of a doctrine that had enjoyed a place of promi…Read more
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360The Proof-Structure of Kant’s A-Edition Objective DeductionIn Giuseppe Motta, Dennis Schulting & Udo Thiel (eds.), Kant's Transcendental Deduction and the Theory of Apperception: New Interpretations, De Gruyter. pp. 381-402. 2022.Kant's A-Edition objective deduction is naturally (and has traditionally been) divided into two arguments: an " argument from above" and one that proceeds " von unten auf." This would suggest a picture of Kant's procedure in the objective deduction as first descending and ascending the same ladder, the better, perhaps, to test its durability or to thoroughly convince the reader of its soundness. There are obvious obstacles to such a reading, however; and in this chapter I will argue that the arg…Read more
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356In this chapter, I consider the largely overlooked influence of E. W. von Tschirnhaus' treatise on method, the Medicina mentis, on Wolff's early philosophical project (in both its conception and execution). As I argue, part of Tschirnhaus' importance for Wolff lies in the use he makes of principles gained from experience as a foundation for the scientific enterprise in the context of his broader philosophical rationalism. I will show that this lesson from Tschirnhaus runs through Wolff's earlies…Read more
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341The Thesis Argument of Kant’s Third AntinomyIn Camilla Serck-Hanssen & Beatrix Himmelmann (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress, De Gruyter. pp. 475-484. 2021.The Thesis of Kant’s Third Antinomy asserts that, because it is “necessary to assume another causality through freedom” in order to derive all the appearances of the world, “causality in accordance with the laws of nature is not the only one” (A444/B472). The argument Kant supplies in support of this, however, has been the subject of interpretative disagreement since at least Schopenhauer, with the most plausible reconstructions being dismissed as question-begging, resting on a conflation relati…Read more
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339Kant's Transcendental Deduction and the Ghosts of Descartes and HumeBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (3): 473-496. 2011.This paper considers how Descartes's and Hume's sceptical challenges were appropriated by Christian Wolff and Johann Nicolaus Tetens specifically in the context of projects related to Kant's in the transcendental deduction. Wolff introduces Descartes's dream hypothesis as an obstacle to his account of the truth of propositions, or logical truth, which he identifies with the 'possibility' of empirical concepts. Tetens explicitly takes Hume's account of our idea of causality to be a challenge to t…Read more
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330Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (edited book)Olms. 2018.Meier’s Gedancken von dem Zustande der Seele nach dem Tode (Gedancken) deserves a prominent place among treatments of the immortality of the soul in 18th century German philosophy, both within and without the Wolffian tradition of rational psychology. It does not wilt next to Mendelssohn’s Phädon in its quality of expression, and might even be compared with Kant’s discussion in the Paralogisms chapter of his Kritik der reinen Vernunft in terms of the boldness of its argument and its philosophica…Read more
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327Towards a more inclusive Enlightenment : German women on culture, education, and prejudice in the late eighteenth centuryIn Kristin Gjesdal (ed.), The Oxford handbook of nineteenth-century women philosophers in the German tradition, Oxford University Press. 2023.When attempting to capture the concept of enlightenment that underlies and motivates philosophical (and political and scientific) developments in the 18th century, historians of philosophy frequently rely upon a needlessly but intentionally exclusive account. This, namely, is the conception of enlightenment first proposed by Kant in his famous essay of 1784, which takes enlightenment to consist in the “emergence from the self-imposed state of minority” and which is only possible for a “public” t…Read more
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288Israel Gottlieb Canz’s Uberzeugender Beweiß, first published in 1741 and reprinted here in its second, expanded edition stands as his most influential discussion of the soul’s immortality, with one contemporary pronouncing it to be “one of the best [treatments of immortality] that we have.” In this text, Canz seeks to augment and supplement traditional Wolffian proofs by considering, first, the grounds for the soul’s immortality that are contained in its own nature and, second, the grounds for t…Read more
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277Amalia Holst on the Education of the Human RaceIn Isabel Karremann, Anne-Claire Michoux & Gideon Stiening (eds.), Women and the Law in the Eighteenth-Century, J. B. Metzler. forthcoming.Amalia Holst (1758-1829) has had a rather conflicted reception within the history of feminism. Her Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung (On the Vocation of Woman to the Higher Education of the Mind, 1802) is a strident defense of women’s right of access to education; however her case relies on the presuppostion of woman's traditional threefold role as "mother, spouse, and housewife." In this essay, in addition to disclosing new details about Holst's life, I contend that a clo…Read more
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243The divorce of reason and experience: Kant's paralogisms of pure reason in contextJournal of the History of Philosophy 47 (2). 2009.I consider Kant's criticism of rational psychology in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason in light of his German predecessors. I first present Wolff's foundational account of metaphysical psychology with the result that Wolff's rational psychology is not comfortably characterized as a naïvely rationalist psychology. I then turn to the reception of Wolff's account among later German metaphysicians, and show that the same claim of a dependence of rational upon empirical psychology is found in the publi…Read more
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242The Aeneas Argument: Personality and Immortality in Kant’s Third ParalogismKant Yearbook 2 (1): 95-122. 2010.In this paper, I challenge the assumption that Kant’s Third Paralogism has to do, first and foremost, with the question of personal identity.
London, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Immanuel Kant |
17th/18th Century German Philosophy |
Moses Mendelssohn |
Christian Wolff |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century German Philosophy |
Immanuel Kant |
Moses Mendelssohn |
Christian Wolff |