Noam Hoffer

Should we take seriously Kant’s claim that his critical philosophy is the ‘true apology for Leibniz’? By exploring Kant’s attitude towards Leibniz’s doctrine of pre-established harmony, I argue that we should take it seriously because it sheds light on the development of Kant’s view about the role of teleology in science in general and in the life sciences in particular. I first present the general framework through which Kant appropriates Leibnizian doctrines as regulative ideals. I then address Kant’s pre-critical engagement with pre-established harmony. While he rejected it as an account of relations between states of substances, he made extensive references to harmony between the laws of nature. I argue that the critical development of this type of harmony allows Kant to appreciate one of Leibniz’s motivations in arguing for pre-established harmony, the compatibility of mechanistic and teleological causal laws. Finally, I show how this affinity becomes explicit in the Critique of the Power of Judgment in Kant’s novel position on the legitimacy of teleological explanations of organisms. I demonstrate this by pointing to Kant’s complex attitude towards 18th-century theories of epigenesis.

Both in the appendix to the dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the introduction of the Critique of Judgment,Kant maintains that scientific knowledge requires a principle of systematicity. In the first case, the principle of systematicity is anchored in the faculty of reason with its regulative principles. In the second, it is the power of judgment in its reflective use. Yet Kant does not give an account of the duplicity of explanations or the relation between them. What is the meaning of transferring the principle from reason to the power of judgment? Most of the literature deals with the different arguments establishing the necessity of the principle. In this paper, however, I give attention to the change in the faculty responsible for the principle. I argue that the third Critique supplements the doctrine of the regulative ideas of reason of the first Critique in that it expresses the same principle of systematicity in the form of the act of reflective judgment. Thus, the principle of systematicity is a subjectively necessary demand of finding the world amenable to our cognitive ends. It is expressed both in reason’s idea of maximal systematicity and the act or reflective judgment.

Kant maintains that particular laws of nature are discovered empirically yet are taken to be necessary. This raises the question of how to account for their necessity. Two leading interpretations emerged: the best system account (BSA) and the necessitation account (NA). BSA provides a methodological-epistemological account for the regularities that can be justifiably considered as laws of nature. On the other hand, NA provides an account of what it is to be a law of nature in terms of metaphysical explanatory grounds. While the interpretations are different in nature, there is textual evidence in Kant for both. In this paper, I aim to explain the duality of the interpretations and reconcile them. I present how they are intertwined in Kant’s works, first by pointing out the metaphysical content of the idea of God which grounds the unity and necessity of the laws of nature. Secondly, I argue that both accounts share an epistemic status as regulative ideas which I interpret as expressing rational norms of scientific inquiry. Thus, Kant maintains that scientific inquiry encompasses a single norm of explanation in which the systematicity and necessity of the laws of nature are interdependent. This norm is expressed in metaphysical concepts such as essences, powers, and most importantly the regulative idea of God. Finally, I consider the relevance of this unified account to contemporary debates about the laws of nature by suggesting that the Kantian regulative framework could explain and deflate questionable ontological commitments by identifying metaphysical terms as expressions of norms.

In his lectures on Logic and Metaphysics, Kant distinguishes between logical and real essences. While the former is related to concepts and is knowable, the latter is related to things and is unknowable. In this paper, I argue that the unknowability is explained by the modal characteristic of real essences as a necessitating ground on which a priori knowledge is impossible. I also show how this claim is related to the unknowable necessity of particular laws of nature. Since laws of nature are conceived as grounded in real essences, the unknowability of the latter is equivalent to Kant's other claim that there can be no knowledge of the necessity of particular laws of nature. Necessity can only be known a priori, and therefore, the necessity of particular laws is only assumed and conceived as grounded in something unknowable, a real essence. This conclusion will allow me to attribute to Kant a position I label as “regulative essentialism”, meaning that real essences have an indispensable role in accordance with the rational interest to explain nature as a system of laws and natural kinds, combined with an epistemic humility about the correspondence of our empirical concepts to real essences.

Abstractabstract:In Morning Hours (1785), Moses Mendelssohn presents a proof for the existence of God from the grounding of possibility. Although Mendelssohn claims that this proof is original, it has not received much attention in the secondary literature. In this paper, I analyze this proof and present its historical context. I show that although it resembles Leibniz's proof from eternal truths and Kant's precritical possibility proof, it has unique characteristics that can be regarded as responses to deficiencies Mendelssohn identified in these earlier proofs. I argue that by analyzing the semantics of judgments about dispositions, Mendelssohn provides a novel explanation for the basic premise shared by these proofs, namely that possibility is grounded in actuality. Additionally, this analysis simplifies the inference to a unique infinite mind grounding all possibility. Thus, the proof is worth studying both for historical reasons and for its original account of modal concepts.

The nature of Kant’s criticism of his pre-Critical ‘possibility proof’ for the existence of God, implicit in the account of the Transcendental Ideal in the Critique of Pure Reason, is still under dispute. Two issues are at stake: the error in the proof and diagnosis of the reason for committing it. I offer a new way to connect these issues. In contrast with accounts that locate the motivation for the error in reason’s interest in an unconditioned causal ground of all contingent existence, I argue that it lies in reason’s interest in another kind of unconditioned ground, collective unity. Unlike the conception of the former, that of the latter directly explains the problematic ontological assumption of the possibility proof, the existence of intelligible objects as the ground of possibility. I argue that such Platonic entities are assumed because they are amenable to the kind of unity prescribed by reason. However, since the interest in collective unity has a legitimate regulative use when applied to the systematic unity of nature, the conception of God entailed by the possibility proof is retained as a regulative idea of reason.

In the ‘Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic’ of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant contends that the idea of God has a positive regulative role in the systematization of empirical knowledge. But why is this regulative role assigned to this specific idea? Kant’s account is rather opaque and this question has also not received much attention in the literature. In this paper I argue that an adequate understanding of the regulative role of the idea of God depends on the specific metaphysical content Kant attributes to it in the Critique and other writings. I show that neither a heuristic principle of conceptual systematicity, nor conceiving God as a hypothesis of an intelligent designer, can satisfy the demands of reason to make the unity and necessity of the laws of nature intelligible. Regarding the positive account about the metaphysical content of the idea of God, I support my argument by referring to Kant’s pre-critical discussion of the usefulness of the conception of God for the project of science, and by expounding Kant’s critical account of the necessity of the laws of nature. Thus my account sheds light on the continuity of Kant’s conception of God and his appropriation of his own rationalistic metaphysics.

Andrew Chignell and Omri Boehm have recently argued that Kant’s pre-Critical proof for the existence of God entails a Spinozistic conception of God and hence substance monism. The basis for this reading is the assumption common in the literature that God grounds possibilities by exemplifying them. In this article I take issue with this assumption and argue for an alternative Leibnizian reading, according to which possibilities are grounded in essences united in God’s mind (later also described as Platonic ideas intuited by God). I show that this view about the distinction between God’s cognition of essences as the ground of possibility and the actual world is not only explicitly stated by Kant, but is also consistent with his metaphysical picture of teleology in nature and causality during the pre-Critical period. Finally, I suggest that the distinction between the conceptual order of essences embodied in the idea of God and the order of the objects of experience plays a role in the transition into the Critical system, where it is transformed into the distinction between the intelligible and the sensible worlds.

Kant's “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” seems an odd element in Kant's oeuvre. Parts of it seem like scholastic theology or an arbitrary effort to reconcile the Kantian philosophical system with the doctrines of Christianity1. One of the most troubling notions is that of radical evil. Not only is the motivation for introducing the notion unclear, it is also difficult to grasp the line of argumentation, and furthermore accept its conclusion that there must be an innate propensity for evil in human nature. The vague introduction of the concept of grace exacerbates the puzzlement even further. Nevertheless, I claim that the notions of radical evil and grace form a significant addition to Kant's conception of moral life lacking in his earlier works in ethics, Groundwork to the Metaphysic of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. I contend that the depiction of human moral life is not exhausted by the consciousness of duty and the endless pursuit toward virtue. Moral life is characterized also by the ongoing introspection of character accompanied by the hope for moral transformation as manifested by the notions of radical evil and grace.