•  424
    Three kinds of rationalism and the non-spatiality of things in themselves
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 47 (3). 2009.
    In the transcendental aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims that space and time are neither things in themselves nor properties of things in themselves but mere subjective forms of our sensible experience. Call this the Subjectivity Thesis. The striking conclusion follows an analysis of the representations of space and time. Kant argues that the two representations function as a priori conditions of experience, and are singular "intuitions" rather than general concepts. He also c…Read more
  •  349
    Noumenal Affection
    Philosophical Review 118 (4): 501-532. 2009.
    A central doctrine of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason holds that the content of human experience is rooted in an affection of sensibility by unknowable things in themselves. This famous and puzzling affection doctrine raises two seemingly intractable old problems, which can be termed the Indispensability and the Consistency Problems. By what right does Kant present affection by supersensible entities as an indispensable requirement of experience? And how could any argument for such indispensabili…Read more
  •  227
    Metaphysical Motives of Kant’s Analytic–Synthetic Distinction
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (2): 267-307. 2013.
    Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (KrV) presents a priori knowledge of synthetic truths as posing a philosophical problem of great import whose only possible solution vindicates the system of transcendental idealism. The work does not accord any such significance to a priori knowledge of analytic truths. The intelligibility of the contrast rests on the well-foundedness of Kant’s analytic–synthetic distinction and on his claim to objectively or correctly classify key judgments with respect to it. Th…Read more
  •  138
    Kant on Foreknowledge of Contingent Truths
    Res Philosophica 91 (1): 47-70. 2014.
    The paper examines Kant’s views on divine foreknowledge of contingent truths, in particular truths concerning free actions of creatures. It first considers the shape this traditional philosophical problem takes in the transcendental idealist context. It then situates Kant’s views relative to three competing theories of foreknowledge discussed by Leibniz. These are Molina’s theory of middle knowledge, the Thomist theory of foreknowledge through divine predeterminations, and Leibniz’s own ‘possibl…Read more
  •  117
    Handedness, Idealism, and Freedom
    Philosophical Review 130 (3): 385-449. 2021.
    Incongruent counterparts are pairs of objects which cannot be enclosed in the same spatial limits despite an exact similarity in magnitude, proportion, and relative position of their parts. Kant discerns in such objects, whose most familiar example is left and right hands, a “paradox” demanding “demotion of space and time to mere forms of our sensory intuition.” This paper aims at an adequate understanding of Kant’s enigmatic idealist argument from handed objects, as well as an understanding of …Read more
  •  41
    Kant on Freedom and Spontaneity ed. by Kate A. Moran
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (1): 152-153. 2021.
    This fine collection of essays is dedicated to Paul Guyer. It includes work by distinguished experts and younger scholars across a range of topics in Kant’s theoretical, moral, and political philosophy.Karl Ameriks’s “On the Many Senses of ‘Self-Determination’” responds to two misreadings of Kantian autonomy. One dismisses its notion of self-determination, the source of the auto-in autonomy, as an excessively subjective basis for morality; the other interprets its nomos as involving excessive de…Read more
  •  18
    Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 56 (1): 185-186. 2002.
    Langton’s study is a powerful new interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of the thing in itself. It offers an illuminating and thoughtful resolution of Kant’s allegedly inconsistent theses that things in themselves exist, they are the causes of appearances, and we cannot know them. The interpretation draws on central pre-Critical doctrines regarding the nature of substance and world, and finds in them the metaphysical grounds of the Critique of Pure Reason’s “humility” with regard to our knowledge of…Read more