Levi Haeck

This paper addresses the question of whether legal judgement can be outsourced to artificial intelligence (AI), and specifically to AI systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs). The issue has attracted international attention, both at the level of theoretical research and of practical application. Moreover, the development of LLM tools specifically designed for lawyers and judges (Legal LLMs) has sparked further discussions. Several scholars have expressed scepticism and highlighted limitations and concerns, while others have pointed out how operationalisation in the legal field seems to be inevitable and even desirable, once appropriate regulation is devised. This paper, however, approaches the issue from a different angle. It turns to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant in order to reconsider the very notion of judgement and, in particular, to examine what kind of judgement is at play in legal proceedings. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between _determinative_ and _reflective_ judgement, the analysis focuses on the specifically Kantian account of how judgement proceeds syllogistically. Particularly, it analyses the determinative mode of judgement, where the universal is already given and the particular subsumed under it, and the reflective mode, where, by reflecting on the particular, the universal is still to be sought. The paper compares these Kantian features of judgement with the current capabilities of LLMs, ultimately asking whether legal judgement, understood in both its determinative and reflective dimensions, can indeed be outsourced to them.

In this article, we revisit Immanuel Kant’s frequently used description of John Locke’s philosophical project as a “physiology” of human reason and understanding. We unpack this description in a twofold manner. Firstly, we stress the foundational role it might have had for Kant’s attempt to analyse the faculty of the understanding. In line with Michael Wolff ’s proposal in his seminal 1995 book, Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel, we propose to interpret the notion of physiology as part and parcel of the set of organic metaphors used by Kant to characterise his philosophical system. In particular, we argue that the derivation of the pure concepts of the understanding (Kant’s ‘categories’) from the functions of the understanding, the latter of which are identified by Kant as the epigenetic ‘germs and predispositions’ of the understanding, can be viewed precisely as a (metaphorically) physiological undertaking. Secondly, we argue that Kant’s depiction of Locke as a physiologist might also be appreciative in another, more literal sense. Whereas Kant would warn against Locke’s project insofar as it seems to be geared towards an overly empiricist account of human cognition, this is only one aspect of Kant’s discussion of Locke’s project. For Kant, Locke’s physiology is part of a valid epistemological and philosophical project: it can serve as a stepping stone for investigating the empirical occasioning causes for acquiring categories or developing cognition generally. More precisely, we argue that the notion of physiology in the metaphorical sense might have helped Kant to systematise his views on how the categories originate in the faculty of the understanding itself, as well as his views on how those categories enable cognition to arise (part (1)), while in the literal sense physiology corresponded to Kant’s anthropological aspiration to examine how (categorial) cognition commences, develops, and is cultivated (part (2)).

In this article, we argue that “affect” should be an important notion in political philosophy. We do this, firstly, by tracing the notion of affect through the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant. We find that affect plays a threefold role for Kant, which can be mapped onto Hannah Arendt’s distinction between natural humanity, moral humanity, and political/aesthetic humanity (our rephrasing). Affect clearly plays a role on the level of natural humanity, and it is arguably to be pinpointed from within moral humanity. With regard to political/aesthetic humanity, we argue that in order to understand how pure judgments of taste can vouch for the ‘bridging’ of the gap between natural and moral humanity, an understanding of the role of aesthetic _affection_ is essential. Secondly, we broaden the Kantian scope of affect by discussing how Žižek, in Lacan’s wake, has tried (but failed) to systematically examine the political relevance of pure judgments of taste. To understand how humans are able to come together politically, we need a better understanding of affect as that which allows _pure form_ to effectuate a subjectively but universally shareable proclivity for (dis)pleasure and desire.

In this paper, I propose to resolve the controversy over the derivation of the categories of quantity by spelling out three claims: (1) the three quantitative functions/forms of judgment (universal-particular-singular), qua synthetic categories of quantity (unity-plurality-totality), lawfully direct the determination of sensible manifolds as singular totalities, which (2) brings to light a specifically categorial type of judgmental activity, distinguishable from but presupposed by empirical judgments. This calls for (3) pairing the category of totality with the singular judgment and the category of unity with the universal judgment (‘Order B’), rather than pairing the singular judgment with unity and the universal judgment with totality (‘Order A’). At stake in this controversy is our understanding of the categories’ normativity, their scope, and the division of labor between intuitions and categories in individuating objects.

Even if the concept of organization is increasingly recognized as crucially important to (philosophy of) biology, the fear of thereby collapsing into vitalism, understood as the metaphysical thesis that “life” involves special principles irreducible to (and that perhaps even run counter to) the principles governing the physical order, has persisted. In trying to overcome this tension, Georges CanguilhemCanguilhem, G. endorsed an attitudinal form of vitalism. This “attitudinal stance” (a term coined by Charles Wolfe) shifts the issue of organization away from ontological commitments regarding the nature of things as they are in themselves, in favor of epistemologicalEpistemology issues concerning the stance of the knowing subjectSubject. However, it is based on some epistemological tenets that deserve further examination. Firstly, in spite of its anti-Cartesian spirit, the attitudinal stance implicitly relies on a CartesianCartesianism perspective on the relation between subject and object. Secondly, it rests on the idea that some objects can meaningfully be identified as persisting individuals—living organisms—in a way in which others cannot, even if it denies that the capacity to be meaningfully identified as such reflects an actual property of them. This chapter outlines a possible alternative viewpoint that takes these challenges to heart by developing a co-constitutive picture of the relation between subject and object—a picture based on Georges Canguilhem’s own theory of judgment, but supplemented by Immanuel KantKant, I.’s transcendental logic. Most fundamentally, it is argued that the (self-)organization of living beingsLiving beings draws attention to and is structurally intertwined with the (self-)organization of the thinking subject’s rational (i.e., logical, conceptual, judging) capacities.

By reappraising the biological theory of vitalism, Canguilhem attempted to give pride of place to the idea that acquiring knowledge about living beings is an activity of living beings. He is indeed credited with the view that knowledge in particular and rationality in general are “tied to a conception of life” whereby “life predominantly manifests itself in organic individuals that act and react within specific environments which, in turn, are defined by the needs and desires of these individuals” (Schmidgen H. Hist Philos Life Sci, 36(2): 4, 2014. doi:10.1007/s40656-014-0030-1). These needs and desires, we are told, constitute “un système de référence irréductible et par là absolu” (Canguilhem G. Le vivant et son milieu. In: La connaissance de la vie (Deuxième édition revue et augmenté). Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 129–154, 1992c). Canguilhem’s legacy is exactly this: rationality is rooted in life, and not the other way around. And yet, in “Le concept et la vie” (from 1966) and “De la science et de la contre-science” (from 1971), Canguilhem seems to tell another story about the complex intertwinement of life and rationality. Not only are we condemned to enter the realm of rationality (i.e., to take part in logical activities such as forming concepts and judgments about the world and about our own condition) because we have needs and desires as living beings, but we also have needs and desires as living beings that depend on the fact we are always already caught-up in the dynamics of rationality, i.e., always already logically active. At this point, Canguilhem’s thinking comes closer than ever to a Kantian, transcendental point of view on rationality. Paradoxically, the inscription of human rationality in organic life brings with it the idea of a subject, divided between two inverse but correlated realms in which it cannot but participate: the singular realm of sensibility and the general realm of logic.

I defend an interpretation of the first Critique’s category of totality based on Kant’s analysis of totality in the third Critique’s Analytic of the mathematical sublime. I show, firstly, that in the latter Kant delineates the category of totality — however general it may be — in relation to the essentially singular standpoint of the subject. Despite the fact that sublime and categorial totality have a significantly different scope and function, they do share such a singular baseline. Secondly, I argue that Kant’s note (in the first Critique’s metaphysical deduction) that deriving the category of totality requires a special act of the understanding can be seen as a ‘mark’ of that singular baseline. This way, my aesthetical ‘detour’ has the potential of revealing how the subjective aspects of object-constitution might be accounted for in the very system of the categories (of quantity) itself.