-
Kant on real possibilityIn Otávio Bueno & Scott A. Shalkowski (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Modality, Routledge. 2018.
-
1Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (edited book)Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
-
8The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant's Metaphysics and Epistemology (edited book)Oxforrd University Press. 2022.The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds represents a new wave of interest in 'the metaphysical Kant'. In recent decades Kant scholars have increasingly become skeptical of interpreting Kant as a philosopher who wished to truly "leave metaphysics behind". The contributors to this volume share acommon commitment to the idea that Kant's philosophy cannot be properly understood without careful attention to its metaphysical presuppositions and, in particular, to how those metaphysical presuppositions ar…Read more
-
998Kant's Schematism of the categories: An interpretation and defenceEuropean Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the “inhomogeneity” of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls “transcendental schemata,” which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumpt…Read more
-
36Mind, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzab001
-
160The Force and Content of Judgment: A Critical Notice of Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, by RödlSebastian
-
266Kant and the concept of an objectEuropean Journal of Philosophy 29 (2): 299-322. 2021.European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.
-
70Hermann Cohen and Kant’s Concept of ExperienceIn Christian Damböck (ed.), Philosophie Und Wissenschaft Bei Hermann Cohen/Philosophy and Science in Hermann Cohen, Springer Verlag. pp. 13-40. 2018.Hermann Cohen’s 1871 classic, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, had a formative influence, not only on the Marburg school’s reading of Kant, but on their entire conception of philosophy. This influence was further magnified by the substantially revised and expanded second edition of 1885 and the yet further expanded third edition of 1918. Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in Germany in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which means that a work, ostensibly, of Kant schol…Read more
-
427Kant, Bolzano, and the Formality of LogicIn Sandra Lapointe & Clinton Tolley (eds.), The New Anti-Kant, . 2014.In §12 of his 1837 magnum opus, the Wissenschaftslehre, Bolzano remarks that “In the new logic textbooks one reads almost constantly that ‘in logic one must consider not the material of thought but the mere form of thought, for which reason logic deserves the title of a purely formal science’” (WL §12, 46).1 The sentence Bolzano quotes is his own summary of others’ philosophical views; he goes on to cite Jakob, Hoffbauer, Metz, and Krug as examples of thinkers who held that logic abstracts from …Read more
-
917How is Metaphysics Possible? Kant's Great Question and His Great AnswerIn Stephen Hetherington (ed.), What Makes a Great Philosopher Great? Thirteen Arguments for Twelve Philosophers, Routledge. 2018.
-
858Hermann Cohen and Kant's Concept of ExperienceIn Christian Damböck (ed.), Philosophie und Wissenschaft bei Hermann Cohen, . 2018.In this essay I offer a partial rehabilitation of Cohen’s Kant interpretation. In particular, I will focus on the center of Cohen’s interpretation in KTE, reflected in the title itself: his interpretation of Kant’s concept of experience. “Kant hat einen neuen Begriff der Erfahrung entdeckt,”7 Cohen writes at the opening of the first edition of KTE (henceforth, KTE1), and while the exact nature of that new concept of experience is hard to pin down in the 1871 edition, he states it succinctly in t…Read more
-
527Transcendental Idealism Without TearsIn Tyron Goldschmidt (ed.), Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 82-103. 2017.This essay is an attempt to explain Kantian transcendental idealism to contemporary metaphysicians and make clear its relevance to contemporary debates in what is now called ‘meta-metaphysics.’ It is not primarily an exegetical essay, but an attempt to translate some Kantian ideas into a contemporary idiom.
-
259Platonism in Lotze and Frege Between Psyschologism and HypostasisIn Sandra Lapointe (ed.), Logic from Kant to Russell, Routledge. 2019.In the section “Validity and Existence in Logik, Book III,” I explain Lotze’s famous distinction between existence and validity in Book III of Logik. In the following section, “Lotze’s Platonism,” I put this famous distinction in the context of Lotze’s attempt to distinguish his own position from hypostatic Platonism and consider one way of drawing the distinction: the hypostatic Platonist accepts that there are propositions, whereas Lotze rejects this. In the section “Two Perspectives on …Read more
-
818A Guide to Ground in Kant's Lectures on MetaphysicsIn Courtney Fugate (ed.), Kant's Lectures on Metaphysics: A Critical Guide, . 2019.While scholars have extensively discussed Kant’s treatment of the Principle of Sufficient Ground in the Antinomies chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason, and, more recently, his relation to German rationalist debates about it, relatively little has been said about the exact notion of ground that figures in the PSG. My aim in this chapter is to explain Kant’s discussion of ground in the lectures and to relate it, where appropriate, to his published discussions of ground.
-
1477I raise a problem about the possibility of metaphysics originally raised by Kant: what explains the fact that the terms in our metaphysical theories (e.g. “property”) refer to entities and structures (e.g. properties) in the world? I distinguish a meta-metaphysical view that can easily answer such questions (“deflationism”) from a meta-metaphysical view for which this explanatory task is more difficult (which I call the “substantive” view of metaphysics). I then canvass responses that the substa…Read more
-
44Kant's Modal Metaphysics: A reply to my criticsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 26 (3): 1159-1167. 2018.
-
82Appearances and Things in Themselves: Actuality and IdentityKantian Review 21 (2): 283-292. 2016.Lucy Allais’s anti-phenomenalist interpretation of transcendental idealism is incomplete in two ways. First of all, like some phenomenalists, she is committed to denying the coherence of claims of numerical identity of appearances and things in themselves. Secondly, she fails to explain adequately what grounds the actuality of appearances. This opens the door to a phenomenalist understanding of appearances. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-repl…Read more
-
18Review Essay: Greenberg on Kant, Existence, and De Re Necessity - Robert Greenberg, Real Existence, Ideal Necessity: Kant’s Compromise and the Modalities without the Compromise. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Pp. xviii + 211, $119.00, hbk. 978-3-11-021013-2 (review)Kantian Review 19 (3): 475-489. 2014.
-
50Review: Greenberg, Robert, Real Existence, Ideal Necessity: Kant’s Compromise and the Modalities without the Compromise (review)Kantian Review 19 (3): 475-489. 2014.
-
15Kant’s Modal MetaphysicsOxford University Press UK. 2016.What is possible and why? What is the difference between the merely possible and the actual? In Kants Modal Metaphysics Nicholas Stang examines Kants lifelong engagement with these questions and their role in his philosophical development. This is the first book to trace Kants theory of possibility all theway from the so-called pre-Critical writings of the 1750s and 1760s to the Critical system of philosophy inaugurated by the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Stang argues that the key to underst…Read more
-
964The Non‐Identity of Appearances and Things in ThemselvesNoûs 47 (4): 106-136. 2013.According to the ‘One Object’ reading of Kant's transcendental idealism, the distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself is not a distinction between two objects, but between two ways of considering one and the same object. On the ‘Metaphysical’ version of the One Object reading, it is a distinction between two kinds of properties possessed by one and the same object. Consequently, the Metaphysical One Object view holds that a given appearance, an empirical object, is numerically …Read more
-
697Bodies, Matter, Monads and Things in ThemselvesIn Brandon Look (ed.), Leibniz and Kant, Oxford University Press.. 2022.In this paper I address a structurally similar tension between phenomenalism and realism about matter in Leibniz and Kant. In both philosophers, some texts suggest a starkly phenomenalist view of the ontological status of matter, while other texts suggest a more robust realism. In the first part of the paper I address a recent paper by Don Rutherford that argues that Leibniz is more of a realist than previous commentators have allowed. I argue that Rutherford fails to show that Leibniz is any…Read more
-
4206Kant's Argument that Existence is not a DeterminationPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (1): 583-626. 2015.In this paper, I examine Kant's famous objection to the ontological argument: existence is not a determination. Previous commentators have not adequately explained what this claim means, how it undermines the ontological argument, or how Kant argues for it. I argue that the claim that existence is not a determination means that it is not possible for there to be non-existent objects; necessarily, there are only existent objects. I argue further that Kant's target is not merely ontological argume…Read more
-
662Artworks Are Not Valuable for Their Own SakeJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (3): 271-280. 2012.
-
1881Who’s Afraid of Double Affection?Philosophers' Imprint 15. 2015.There is substantial textual evidence that Kant held the doctrine of double affection: subjects are causally affected both by things in themselves and by appearances. However, Kant commentators have been loath to attribute this view to him, for the doctrine of double affection is widely thought to face insuperable problems. I begin by explaining what I take to be the most serious problem faced by the doctrine of double affection: appearances cannot cause the very experience in virtue of which th…Read more
-
316Did Kant Conflate the Necessary and the A Priori?Noûs 45 (3): 443-471. 2011.It is commonly accepted by Kant scholars that Kant held that all necessary truths are a priori, and all a priori knowledge is knowledge of necessary truths. Against the prevailing interpretation, I argue that Kant was agnostic as to whether necessity and a priority are co-extensive. I focus on three kinds of modality Kant implicitly distinguishes: formal possibility and necessity, empirical possibility and necessity, and noumenal possibility and necessity. Formal possibility is compatibility wit…Read more
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
PhilPapers Editorships
Kant: Epistemology |