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13The Subjective Deduction and Kant’s Methodological SkepticismIn Giuseppe Motta, Dennis Schulting & Udo Thiel (eds.), Kant's Transcendental Deduction and the Theory of Apperception: New Interpretations, De Gruyter. pp. 341-360. 2022.
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274Slavery and Kant's Doctrine of RightHistory of Modern Philosophy. forthcoming.In the 1780s through the end of 1790s, Kant made various references to slavery (in its different forms) and the transatlantic slave trade in the context of his political philosophy or philosophy of right; he thereby had opportunities to speak in favor of abolitionism, which was gaining momentum in parts of Europe, or at least to articulate a normative critique of the race-based chattel slavery or Atlantic slavery and the associated slave trade qua (legalized) INSTITUTIONS; but he did neither. Wh…Read more
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445Kant, Race, and Racism: Views from SomewhereOxford University Press. 2023.Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notio…Read more
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3797Kant and Slavery—Or Why He Never Became a Racial EgalitarianCritical Philosophy of Race 10 (2): 263-294. 2022.According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and “Toward Perpetual Peace”. On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery o…Read more
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359Not Those Who "all speak with pictures": Kant on Linguistic Abilities and Human ProgressIn Luigi Filieri & Konstantin Pollok (eds.), Kant on Language, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.Kant ascribes two radically different kinds of language—symbolic or pictorial (qua intuitive) and discursive languages—to the “Oriental” and “Occidental” peoples respectively. By his analysis, having a merely symbolic language suggests that the “Orientals” lack understanding—and hence the ability to form concepts and think in abstracto—as well as genius and spirit. Meanwhile, he establishes discursive language as a sine qua non of the continued progress of humanity, primarily because only by mea…Read more
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1377Kant on Language and the (Self‐)Development of ReasonKant Yearbook 15 (1): 109-134. 2023.The origin of languages was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. This paper reconstructs a distinctively Kantian account according to which the origination, progression, and diversification of languages is at bottom reason’s self-development under certain a priori constraints and external environments. The reconstruction builds on three sets of materials. The first is Herder’s famous prize essay on the origin of languages. The second includes Kant’s explicit remarks about language – …Read more
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301The Subjective Deduction and Kant’s Methodological SkepticismIn Giuseppe Motta, Dennis Schulting & Udo Thiel (eds.), Kant's Transcendental Deduction and the Theory of Apperception: New Interpretations, De Gruyter. pp. 341-60. 2022.The deduction of categories in the 1781 edition of the Critique of the Pure Reason (A Deduction) has “two sides”—the “objective deduction” and the “subjective deduction”. Kant seems ambivalent about the latter deduction. I treat it as a significant episode of Kant’s thinking about categories that extended from the early 1770s to around 1790. It contains his most detailed answer to the question about the origin of categories that he formulated in the 1772 letter to Marcus Herz. The answer is that…Read more
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423Kant on Lazy Savagery, RacializedJournal of History of Philosophy 60 (2): 253-75. 2022.Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the…Read more
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699Kant's Use of Travel Reports in Theorizing about Race -A Case Study of How Testimony Features in Natural PhilosophyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 91 (C): 10-19. 2022.A testimony is somebody else’s reported experience of what has happened. It is an indispensable source of knowledge. It only gives us historical cognition, however, which stands in a complex relation to rational or philosophical cognition: while the latter presupposes historical cognition as its matter, one needs the architectonic “eye of a philosopher” to select, interpret, and organize historical cognition. Kant develops this rationalist theory of testimony. He also practices it in his own wor…Read more
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530Locke on Scientific MethodologyIn Jessica Gordon-Roth & Shelley Weinberg (eds.), The Lockean Mind, Routledge. pp. 277-89. 2021.This chapter brings some much-needed conceptual clarity to the debate about Locke’s scientific methodology. Instead of having to choose between the method of hypothesis and that of natural history (as most interpreters have thought), he would resist prescribing a single method for natural sciences in general. Following Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle, Locke separates medicine and natural philosophy (physics), so that they call for completely different methods. While a natural philosopher relies o…Read more
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1187Kant and the Principle of Sufficient ReasonReview of Metaphysics 74 (3). 2021.Leibniz, and many following him, saw the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) as pivotal to a scientific (demonstrated) metaphysics. Against this backdrop, Kant is expected to pay close attention to PSR in his reflections on the possibility of metaphysics, which is his chief concern in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is far from clear, however, what has become of PSR in the Critique. On one reading, Kant has simply turned it into the causal principle of the Second Analogy. On a different reading…Read more
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39The Poverty of Conceptual Truth: Kant's Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and the Limits of Metaphysics by R. Lanier Anderson (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 56 (4): 761-763. 2018.This book is a masterpiece on Kant's theory of analyticity. It culminates in a new story of how Kant arrived at his mature view. Here is the chief lesson of this story: "the logical conception of the analytic/synthetic distinction is the fundamental idea of analyticity involved in Kant's distinctive, critical project. … [H]is critique of metaphysics crucially depends on the logical conception and cannot be supported by its merely methodological and epistemological ancestors". This passage consol…Read more
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978Ontology as Transcendental PhilosophyIn Courtney D. Fugate (ed.), Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 53-73. 2019.How does the critical Kant view ontology? There is no shared scholarly answer to this question. Norbert Hinske sees in the Critique of Pure Reason a “farewell to ontology,” albeit one that took Kant long to bid (Hinske 2009). Karl Ameriks has found evidence in Kant’s metaphysics lectures from the critical period that he “was unwilling to break away fully from traditional ontology” (Ameriks 1992: 272). Gualtiero Lorini argues that a decisive break with the tradition of ontology is essential to Ka…Read more
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705Kant on the Logical Form of Singular JudgmentsKantian Review 19 (3): 367-92. 2014.At A71/B96–7 Kant explains that singular judgements are ‘special’ because they stand to the general ones as Einheit to Unendlichkeit. The reference to Einheit brings to mind the category of unity and hence raises a spectre of circularity in Kant’s explanation. I aim to remove this spectre by interpreting the Einheit-Unendlichkeit contrast in light of the logical distinctions among universal, particular and singular judgments shared by Kant and his logician predecessors. This interpretation has a…Read more
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892Between Du Châtelet’s Leibniz Exegesis and Kant’s Early Philosophy: A Study of Their Responses to the vis viva ControversyHistory of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 21 (1): 177-94. 2018.This paper examines Du Châtelet’s and Kant’s responses to the famous vis viva controversy – Du Châtelet in her Institutions Physiques (1742) and Kant in his debut, the Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1746–49). The Institutions was not only a highly influential contribution to the vis viva controversy, but also a pioneering attempt to integrate Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian physics. The young Kant’s evident knowledge of this work has led some to speculate about his indebt…Read more
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46Konstantin Pollok, Kant’s Theory of Normativity Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017 Pp. xvi +350 ISBN 9781107127807 $99.99 (review)Kantian Review 23 (3): 513-521. 2018.
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85Kant and the Science of Logic: A Historical and Philosophical ReconstructionOxford University Press. 2018.This book is both a history of philosophy of logic told from the Kantian viewpoint and a reconstruction of Kant’s theory of logic from a historical perspective. Kant’s theory represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions. (1) Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? (2) If logic is a science, what is the subject matter that differentiates it from other sciences, particularly metaphysics? (3) If logic is a necess…Read more
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650Epigenesis of Pure Reason and the Source of Pure CognitionsIn Pablo Muchnik & Oliver Thorndike (eds.), Rethinking Kant Vol.5, Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 35-70. 2018.Kant describes logic as “the science that exhaustively presents and strictly proves nothing but the formal rules of all thinking”. (Bviii-ix) But what is the source of our cognition of such rules (“logical cognition” for short)? He makes no concerted effort to address this question. It will nonetheless become clear that the question is a philosophically significant one for him, to which he can see three possible answers: those representations are innate, derived from experience, or originally ac…Read more
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615Logical Normativity and Rational Agency—Reassessing Locke's Relation to LogicJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (1): 75-99. 2018.There is an exegetical quandary when it comes to interpreting Locke's relation to logic.On the one hand, over the last few decades a substantive amount of literature has been dedicated to explaining Locke's crucial role in the development of a new logic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Yolton names this new logic the "logic of ideas," while James Buickerood calls it "facultative logic."1 Either way, Locke's Essay is supposedly its "most outspoken specimen" or "culmination."2 Cal…Read more
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739From Logical Calculus to Logical Formality—What Kant Did with Euler’s CirclesIn Corey Dyck & Falk Wunderlich (eds.), Kant and His German Contemporaries : Volume 1, Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 35-55. 2017.John Venn has the “uneasy suspicion” that the stagnation in mathematical logic between J. H. Lambert and George Boole was due to Kant’s “disastrous effect on logical method,” namely the “strictest preservation [of logic] from mathematical encroachment.” Kant’s actual position is more nuanced, however. In this chapter, I tease out the nuances by examining his use of Leonhard Euler’s circles and comparing it with Euler’s own use. I do so in light of the developments in logical calculus from G. W. …Read more
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1200Kant on Proving Aristotle’s Logic as CompleteKantian Review 21 (1): 1-26. 2016.Kant claims that Aristotles logic as complete, explain the historical and philosophical considerations that commit him to proving the completeness claim and sketch the proof based on materials from his logic corpus. The proof will turn out to be an integral part of Kant’s larger reform of formal logic in response to a foundational crisis facing it
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2346Kant’s Conception of Logical Extension and Its ImplicationsDissertation, University of California, Davis. 2012.It is a received view that Kant’s formal logic (or what he calls “pure general logic”) is thoroughly intensional. On this view, even the notion of logical extension must be understood solely in terms of the concepts that are subordinate to a given concept. I grant that the subordination relation among concepts is an important theme in Kant’s logical doctrine of concepts. But I argue that it is both possible and important to ascribe to Kant an objectual notion of logical extension according to wh…Read more
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935The Objects and the Formal Truth of Kantian Analytic JudgmentsHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 30 (2): 177-93. 2013.I defend the thesis that Kantian analytic judgments are about objects (as opposed to concepts) against two challenges raised by recent scholars. First, can it accommodate cases like “A two-sided polygon is two-sided”, where no object really falls under the subject-concept as Kant sees it? Second, is it compatible with Kant’s view that analytic judgments make no claims about objects in the world and that we can know them to be true without going beyond the given concepts? I address these challeng…Read more
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582Chapter 5. Constructing a Demonstration of Logical Rules, or How to Use Kant’s Logic CorpusIn Robert R. Clewis (ed.), Reading Kant's Lectures, De Gruyter. pp. 137-158. 2015.In this chapter, I discuss some problems of Kant’s logic corpus while recognizing its richness and potential value. I propose and explain a methodic way to approach it. I then test the proposal by showing how we may use various mate- rials from the corpus to construct a Kantian demonstration of the formal rules of thinking (or judging) that lie at the base of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction. The same proposal can be iterated with respect to other topics. The said demonstration will have cleared th…Read more
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Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Immanuel Kant |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Chinese Philosophy |
Conceptions of Race, Misc |
Areas of Interest
Immanuel Kant |
Philosophy of Race |
Colonialism and Postcolonialism |
Slavery |
Social Epistemology |