•  136
    Review of Katalin Makkai, Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 63 (2): 283-286. 2023.
    The perennial challenge for any Kant scholar is to offer close reading of a dense and often exceedingly abstract text that is faithful both to its driving philo.
  •  226
    Mendelssohn and Kant on Human Progress: a Neo-Stoic Debate
    In Kant on Freedom and Nature: Essays in Honor of Paul Guyer, Routledge. forthcoming.
    The chapter replies to Paul Guyer’s (2020) account of the debate between Mendelssohn and Kant about whether humankind makes continual moral progress. Mendelssohn maintained that progress can only be the remit of individuals, and that humankind only “continually fluctuates within fixed limits”. Kant dubs Mendelssohn’s position “abderitism” and explicitly rejects it. But Guyer contends that Kant’s own theory of freedom commits him, malgré lui, to abderitism. Guyer’s risky interpretive position…Read more
  •  248
    It is widely assumed that Kant’s moral psychology draws from the dualist tradition of Plato and Aristotle, which takes there to be distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. My aim is to challenge the air of obviousness that psychological dualism enjoys in neo-Kantian moral psychology, specifically in regard to Tamar Schapiro’s account of the nature of inclination. I argue that Kant’s own account of inclination instead provides evidence of his commitment to psychological monism, the i…Read more
  •  232
    Kant on Evil
    In Anil Gomes & Andrew Stephenson (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Kant, Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    The chapter examines Kant’s thesis about the ‘radical evil in human nature’ developed in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. According to this thesis, the human moral condition is corrupt by default and yet by own deed; and this corruption is the origin (root, radix) of human badness in all its variety, banality, and ubiquity. While Kant clearly takes radical evil to be endemic in human nature, controversy reigns about how to understand this. Some assume this can only be a syn…Read more
  •  250
    Mendelssohn and Kant on Virtue as a Skill
    In Ellen Fridland & Carlotta Pavese (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Skill and Expertise, Routledge. pp. 88-99. 2020.
    The idea that virtue can be profitably conceived as a certain sort of skill has a long history. My aim is to examine a neglected episode in this history — one that focuses on the pivotal role that Moses Mendelssohn played in rehabilitating the skill model of virtue for the German rationalist tradition, and Immanuel Kant’s subsequent, yet significantly qualified, endorsement of the idea. Mendelssohn celebrates a certain automatism in the execution of skill, and takes this feature to be instrume…Read more
  •  490
    Murdoch and Kant
    In Mark Hopwood & Silvia Panizza (eds.), Murdochian Mind, Routledge. pp. 253-265. 2022.
    It has been insufficiently remarked that Murdoch deems “Kant’s ethical theory” to be “one of the most beautiful and exciting things in the whole of philosophy” in her 1959 essay “The Sublime and the Good”. Murdoch specifically has in mind the connection between Kant’s ethics and his theory of the sublime, which runs via the moral feeling of respect (Achtung). The chapter examines Murdoch’s interest in Kant on this point as a way to tease out the range of issues that complicate Kant’s significa…Read more
  •  266
    Humor, Common Sense and the Future of Metaphysics in the Prolegomena
    In Peter Thielke (ed.), Kant's Prolegomena: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 9-26. 2021.
    Kant’s Prolegomena is a piece of philosophical advertising: it exists to convince the open-minded “future teacher” of metaphysics that the true critical philosophy — i.e., the Critique — provides the only viable solution to the problem of metaphysics (i.e. its failure to make any genuine progress). To be effective, a piece of advertising needs to know its audience. This chapter argues that Kant takes his reader to have some default sympathies for the common-sense challenge to metaphysics origi…Read more
  •  547
    Kant and Stoic Affections
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (5): 329-350. 2021.
    I examine the significance of the Stoic theory of pathē for Kant’s moral psychology, arguing against the received view that systematic differences block the possibility of Kant’s drawing anything more than rhetoric from his Stoic sources. More particularly, I take on the chronically underexamined assumption that Kant is committed to a psychological dualism in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, positing distinct rational and nonrational elements of human mentality. By contrast, Stoics take the…Read more
  •  253
    Feeling and Orientation in Action: A Reply to Alix Cohen
    Kantian Review 51 (5): 329-350. 2021.
    Alix Cohen argues that the function of feeling in Kantian psychology is to appraise and orient activity. Thus she sees feeling and agency as importantly connected by Kant’s lights. I endorse this broader claim, but argue that feeling, on her account, cannot do the work of orientation that she assigns to it.
  •  658
    Nature, corruption, and freedom: Stoic ethics in Kant's Religion
    European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1): 3-24. 2021.
    Kant’s account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant doesn’t talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil, and leaves other clues that his argument is a…Read more
  •  172
    Kant and the Science of Logic by Huaping Lu-Adler (review)
    Philosophy Now 132 46-47. 2019.
    Review for a non-academic audience of Huaping Lu-Adler, _Kant and the Science of Logic_.
  •  647
    The Sublime
    Cambridge University Press. 2018.
    This Element considers Kant's account of the sublime in the context of his predecessors both in the Anglophone and German rationalist traditions. Since Kant says with evident endorsement that 'we call sublime that which is absolutely great' and nothing in nature can in fact be absolutely great, Kant concludes that strictly speaking what is sublime can only be the human calling to perfect our rational capacity according to the standard of virtue that is thought through the moral law. The Element …Read more
  •  68
    Kant on Reflection and Virtue
    Cambridge University Press. 2018.
    There can be no doubt that Kant thought we should be reflective: we ought to care to make up our own minds about how things are and what is worth doing. Philosophical objections to the Kantian reflective ideal have centred on concerns about the excessive control that the reflective person is supposed to exert over her own mental life, and Kantians who feel the force of these objections have recently drawn attention to Kant’s conception of moral virtue as it is developed in his later work, chief…Read more
  •  337
    Sublimity and Joy: Kant on the Aesthetic Constitution of Virtue
    In Matthew Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Kant Handbook, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 447-467. 2017.
    This chapter argues that Kant’s aesthetic theory of the sublime has particular relevance for his ethics of virtue. Kant contends that our readiness to revel in natural sublimity depends upon a background commitment to moral ends. Further lessons about the emotional register of the sublime allow us to understand how Kant can plausibly contend that the temperament of virtue is both sublime and joyous at the same time.
  •  380
    In A Case for Irony, Jonathan Lear aims to advance “a distinguished philosophical tradition that conceives of humanity as a task” by returning this tradition to the ironic figure at its origin — Socrates. But he is hampered by his reliance on well-worn philosophical examples. I suggest that Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter illustrates the mode of ironic experience that interests Lear, and helps us to think through his relation to Christine Korsgaard, arguably the greatest contemporary propon…Read more
  •  685
    Attention and Synthesis in Kant's Conception of Experience
    Philosophical Quarterly 67 (268): 571-592. 2017.
    In an intriguing but neglected passage in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant appears to link the synthetic activity of the understanding in experience with the phenomenon of attention (B156-7n). In this paper, we take up this hint, and draw upon Kant's remarks about attention in the Anthropology to shed light on the vexed question of what, exactly, the understanding's role in experience is for Kant. We argue that reading Kant's claims about synthesis in this light allows us to combine two aspect…Read more
  •  626
    Love, Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 1844-1863. 2017.
    I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respe…Read more
  •  766
    Kant on the Pleasures of Understanding
    In Alix Cohen (ed.), Kant on Emotion and Value, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 126-145. 2014.
    Why did Kant write the Critique of Judgment, and why did he say that his analysis of the judgment of taste — his technical term for our enjoyment of beauty — is the most important part of it? Kant claims that his analysis of taste “reveals a property of our faculty of cognition that without this analysis would have remained unknown” (KU §8, 5:213). The clue lies in Kant’s view that while taste is an aesthetic, and non-cognitive, mode of judgment, it nevertheless involves the “free play” of cog…Read more
  •  947
    Reflection, Enlightenment, and the Significance of Spontaneity in Kant
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (5): 981-1010. 2009.
    Existing interpretations of Kant’s appeal to the spontaneity of the mind focus almost exclusively on the discussion of pure apperception in the Transcendental Deduction. The risk of such a strategy lies in the considerable degree of abstraction at which the argument of the Deduction is carried out: existing interpretations fail to reconnect adequately with any ground-level perspective on our cognitive lives. This paper works in the opposite direction. Drawing on Kant’s suggestion that the mos…Read more
  •  613
    Analysis in the critique of pure reason
    Kantian Review 12 (1): 61-89. 2007.
    The paper argues that existing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as an "analysis of experience" (e.g., those of Kitcher and Strawson) fail because they do not properly appreciate the method of the work. The author argues that the Critique provides an analysis of the faculty of reason, and counts as an analysis of experience only in a derivative sense.
  •  1218
    I take up Kant's remarks about a " transcendental deduction" of the "concepts of space and time". I argue for the need to make a clearer assessment of the philosophical resources of the Aesthetic in order to account for this transcendental deduction. Special attention needs to be given to the fact that the central task of the Aesthetic is simply the "exposition" of these concepts. The Metaphysical Exposition reflects upon facts about our usage to reveal our commitment to the idea that these conc…Read more
  •  440
    Review: Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (review)
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (3): 529-532. 2010.
    Review of Robert Clewis, _The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom_.
  •  718
    Science and the Synthetic Method of the Critique of Pure Reason
    Review of Metaphysics 59 (3): 517-539. 2006.
    Kant maintains that his Critique of Pure Reason follows a “synthetic method” which he distinguishes from the analytic method of the Prolegomena by saying that the Critique “rests on no other science” and “takes nothing as given except reason itself”. The paper presents an account of the synthetic method of the Critique, showing how it is related to Kant’s conception of the Critique as the “science of an a priori judging reason”. Moreover, the author suggests, understanding its synthetic method…Read more
  •  43
    Kant advertises his Critique of Pure Reason as fulfilling reason's "most difficult" task: self-knowledge. As it is carried out in the Critique, this investigation is meant to be "scientific and fully illuminating"; for Kant, this means that it must follow a proper method. Commentators writing in English have tended to dismiss Kant's claim that the Critique is the scientific expression of reason's self-knowledge---either taking it to be sheer rhetoric, or worrying that it pollutes the Critique wi…Read more
  •  801
    Practical Reason and Respect for Persons
    Kantian Review 22 (1): 53-79. 2017.
    My project is to reconsider the Kantian conception of practical reason. Some Kantians think that practical reasoning must be more active than theoretical reasoning, on the putative grounds that such reasoning need not contend with what is there anyway, independently of its exercise. Behind that claim stands the thesis that practical reason is essentially efficacious. I accept the efficacy principle, but deny that it underwrites this inference about practical reason. My inquiry takes place ag…Read more
  •  3455
    The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime
    In Timothy Costelloe (ed.), The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present (pp. 37-49), Cambridge University Press. 2012.
    A crucial feature of Kant's critical-period writing on the sublime is its grounding in moral psychology. Whereas in the pre-critical writings, the sublime is viewed as an inherently exhausting state of mind, in the critical-period writings it is presented as one that gains strength the more it is sustained. I account for this in terms of Kantian moral psychology, and explain that, for Kant, sound moral disposition is conceived as a sublime state of mind.
  •  1811
    Kant's Argument for the Apperception Principle
    European Journal of Philosophy 19 (1): 59-84. 2011.
    Abstract: My aim is to reconstruct Kant's argument for the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception. I reconstruct Kant's argument in stages, first showing why thinking should be conceived as an activity of synthesis (as opposed to attention), and then showing why the unity or coherence of a subject's representations should depend upon an a priori synthesis. The guiding thread of my account is Kant's conception of enlightenment: as I suggest, the philosophy of mind advanced in the Deduct…Read more
  •  1468
    Kant on Enlightened Moral Pedagogy
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (3): 227-53. 2011.
    For Kant, the ideal of enlightenment is most fundamentally expressed as a self-developed soundness of judgment. But what does this mean when the judgment at issue is practical, i.e., concerns the good to be brought about through action? I argue that the moral context places special demands on the ideal of enlightenment. This is revealed through an interpretation of Kant’s prescription for moral pedagogy in the Critique of Practical Reason. The goal of the pedagogy is to cultivate the moral d…Read more