Jacques Catudal

The main thesis, developed in Chapter 3, is that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is most comprehensively interpreted as addressing the possibility of knowledge organization . ;Chapter 1 serves as a survey of contemporary work in knowledge organization, and concludes that recent attempts to articulate a philosophical theory of knowledge organization are lacking. ;In Chapter 2, the import of knowledge organization is recovered by recourse to a sketch of the role which it played in the development of modern philosophy from Descartes on. It is against this historical backdrop that Kant's work is interpreted. ;In Chapter 3, it is argued that recent interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason fail to capture the constructive aspects of Kant's philosophical program. The critique of metaphysics unfolded by Kant in the "Transcendental Dialectic" is merely a first step in the transformation of the conception of metaphysics and its central concepts. ;In "The Architectonic of Pure Reason," Kant presents metaphysics as the system of pure speculative reason, a system which includes several disciplines. Having detailed this system , the author recovers Kant's account of the possibility of such a system of knowledge. Central to this account is Kant's theory of transcendental Ideas. ;Of equal and related importance is Kant's conception of reason as having two distinct employments. On the one hand, reason is viewed as the faculty of mediated judgement or inference; so construed, the syllogism becomes the focus of Kant's developing theory of knowledge organization. Yet this employment of reason is insufficient to thoroughly and correctly explain the possibility of knowledge organization. Thus, Kant argues that reason must be viewed as having a transcendental employment; so construed, reason is the faculty which supplies a priori the concepts of "soul," "cosmos," and "God," not as concepts of objects of possible experience, but as respective wholes which function to embody the several concepts which constitute the metaphysical disciplines. In addition, Kant presents reason as supplying a priori three transcendental principles whose employment makes possible the systematization of the concepts included within each a priori concept qua whole

Rather than just offer background readings or a survey of views on a subject, as traditional anthologies do, this volume tries to engage the reader’s active participation in understanding how philosophy came to be split between analytic and continental approaches and in finding ways to reconcile the two. It does so by tracing the history of philosophy as a perennial contest between two opposing world views: one that relates change to an underlying structure of invariance, and another that sees change itself as the basic condition of existence. The seven chapters cover the full range of major topics of philosophy, from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics, and present carefully selected readings from key thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, and Peirce up to Heidegger, Husserl, Kuhn, Kripke, and Putnam, among others—juxtaposed and introduced by the editors so as to stimulate active thinking about how the debate between these competing visions plays out in each arena. A bibliography of additional sources ends each chapter. The result is a new and inspiring tool for teaching philosophy to both beginning and advanced students. Even seasoned professionals will have much to learn about the development of philosophy and its current predicament from accepting the challenge to rethink the tradition from the perspective presented here

After describing the Child Pornography Prevention Act (CPPA) of 1996, I argue that the Act ought to be significantly amended. The central objections to CPPA are (1) that it is so broad in its main proscriptions as to violate the First Amendment rights of adults; (2) that it altogether fails to provide minors and their legal guardians with the privacy rights needed to combat the harms associated with certain classes of prurient material on the Internet; and, (3) that the actual rate of technological advance in home computing, and Congress' failure to appreciate how prurient material may be accessed, combined with CPPA to wrongfully expose an increasing number of individuals to possible prosecution and personal ruination. Several other objections are registered along the way, including one aimed at the draconian punishments the law metes out to violators. I close by offering the outlines of an amended version of the law that promises not to violate the rights of adults, that affords children and adults equal and effective protection against the very harmful practices the current law cannot eradicate, and that prescribes punishments that are consistent with the tolerance necessary to support a more democratic vision of the Internet.