Damian Melamedoff-Vosters

In this article, I take on a classic objection to Kant’s arguments in the Antinomy of Pure Reason: that the arguments are question-begging, as they draw illicit inferences from claims about representation to claims about reality. While extant attempts to vindicate Kant try to show that he does not make such inferences, I attempt to vindicate Kant’s arguments in a different way: I show that, given Kant’s philosophical backdrop, the inferences in question are not illicit. This is because the transcendental realists that Kant was arguing against have certain philosophical commitments about the nature of ground which, if true, warrant the inferences that Kant draws. This historical corrective not only allows us to better understand Kant’s own thinking in the Antinomies but it also has important upshots for our understanding of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

This paper provides a novel reconstruction of Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. This reconstruction relies on two main contentions: first, that Kant accepts the then-ubiquitous view that all cognition is either from grounds or consequences, a view he props up by drawing a distinction between logical and real grounds; second, that Kant, like most of his contemporaries, holds that our representations are the most immediate grounds of our cognition. By stressing these elements, the most threatening objection to Kant’s argument can be avoided, namely, the claim that Kant ignores the possibility that our representations of space and time are subjective in origin, but objective as regards their applicability. My reconstruction shows that this so-called neglected alternative objection is based on a conceptual confusion about the nature of a priori cognition.

ABSTRACT One of the core issues where interpreters of Kant disagree concerns his alleged Noumenalism—the claim that the objects of our experience, which are in space and time, are underpinned by entities that are not spatio-temporal and that non-spatio-temporally cause our representations of empirical objects. Although there is much textual evidence in favour of Noumenalism, non-Noumenalists have also gathered a significant number of philosophical and exegetical challenges to such a reading of Kant. I present a novel way of understanding the Noumenalist view, which characterises the distinction between appearances and things in themselves as the distinction between referents and truthmakers. I show that, on this interpretation of Kant, the most pressing problems for the Noumenalist reading are primarily based on equivocations between features of reference and features of truthmaking.

Existential grounding is the thesis that all existential generalizations are grounded in their particular instances. This paper argues that existential grounding is false. This is because it is inconsistent with two plausible claims about existence: the claim that singular existence facts are generalizations and the claim that no object can be involved in a fact that grounds that same object's existence. Not only are these claims intuitively plausible, but there are also strong arguments in favour of each of them.