John J. Callanan

This essay re-examines Kierkegaard's view of Socrates. I consider the problem that arises from Kierkegaard's appeal to Socrates as an exemplar for irony. The problem is that he also appears to think that, as an exemplar for irony, Socrates cannot be represented. And part of the problem is the paradox of self-reference that immediately arises from trying to represent x as unrepresentable. On the solution I propose, Kierkegaard does not hold that, as an exemplar for irony, Socrates is in no way representable. Rather, he holds that, as an exemplar for irony, Socrates cannot be represented in a purely disinterested way. I show how, in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard makes use of 'limiting cases' of representation in order to bring Socrates into view as one who defies purely disinterested representation. I also show how this approach to Socrates connects up with Kierkegaard's more general interest in the problem of ethical exemplarity, where the problem is how ethical exemplars can be given as such, that is, in such a way that purely disinterested contemplation is not the appropriate response to them.

This article addresses three questions concerning Kant’s views on non-rational animals: do they intuit spatio-temporal particulars, do they perceive objects, and do they have intentional states? My aim is to explore the relationship between these questions and to clarify certain pervasive ambiguities in how they have been understood. I first disambiguate various nonequivalent notions of objecthood and intentionality: I then look closely at several models of objectivity present in Kant’s work, and at recent discussions of representational and relational theories of intentionality. I argue ultimately that, given the relevant disambiguations, the answers to all three questions will likely be positive. These results both support what has become known as the nonconceptualist reading of Kant, and make clearer the price the conceptualist must pay to sustain her position

A novel solution to the knowability paradox is proposed based on Kant’s transcendental epistemology. The ‘paradox’ refers to a simple argument from the moderate claim that all truths are knowable to the extreme claim that all truths are known. It is significant because anti-realists have wanted to maintain knowability but reject omniscience. The core of the proposed solution is to concede realism about epistemic statements while maintaining anti-realism about non-epistemic statements. Transcendental epistemology supports such a view by providing for a sharp distinction between how we come to understand and apply epistemic versus non-epistemic concepts, the former through our capacity for a special kind of reflective self-knowledge Kant calls ‘transcendental apperception’. The proposal is a version of restriction strategy: it solves the paradox by restricting the anti-realist’s knowability principle. Restriction strategies have been a common response to the paradox but previous versions face serious difficulties: either they result in a knowability principle too weak to do the work anti-realists want it to, or they succumb to modified forms of the paradox, or they are ad hoc. It is argued that restricting knowability to non-epistemic statements by conceding realism about epistemic statements avoids all versions of the paradox, leaves enough for the anti-realist attack on classical logic, and, with the help of transcendental epistemology, is principled in a way that remains compatible with a thoroughly anti-realist outlook.

Lucy Allais presents an original interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. She argues that his distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear to us has both epistemological and metaphysical components. Kant is committed to a genuine idealism about things as they appear to us, but this is not a phenomenalist idealism. He is committed to the claim that there is an aspect of reality that grounds mind-dependent spatio-temporal objects, and which we cannot cognize, but he does not assert the existence of distinct non-spatio-temporal objects. On Allais's account, we cannot understand Kant's idealism without a clear account of his notion of intuition and of the role of intuition in cognition: she understands Kantian intuitions as representations that give us acquaintance with the objects of thought. This enables us to make sense of Kant's central argument for his idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and to see why he takes the complete idealist position to be established there.