• Introduction
    In Kant's Prolegomena: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
  •  16
    What role does genius play in scientific invention and discovery? This was a question at the fore of many discussions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially as the Romantic movement came to a head. It also serves as a frame for Idit Chikurel's focused and fascinating account of Salomon Maimon's views about mathematical invention and discovery. As with many of his positions, Maimon adopted a rather iconoclastic theory of genius and invention, and Chikurel does an excellent job of…Read more
  •  45
    Kant's Prolegomena: A Critical Guide (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2021.
    The Prolegomena is often dismissed as Kant's failed attempt to popularize his philosophy, but as the essays collected here show, there is much to be gained from a careful study of the work. The essays explore the distinctive features of the Prolegomena, including Kant's discussion of philosophical methodology, his critical idealism, the nature of experience, his engagement with Hume, the nature of the self, the relation between geometry and physics, and what we cognize about God. Newly commissio…Read more
  •  31
    Given Kant's seemingly dismissive attitude toward Scottish philosophers of common sense—in the Prolegomena, he famously describes how painful it is to see them miss Hume's point—one might expect that a book titled Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment would be a rather slim volume. However, as Manfred Kuehn in Scottish Common Sense in Germany and elsewhere has made abundantly clear, Scottish philosophy played a large role in eighteenth-century Germany, and was a significant influence on Kant. The …Read more
  •  44
    Kant famously noted that a memory of Hume "interrupted" his dogmatic slumbers, an alarm commonly taken to have been sounded by the challenge Hume raised against the rational foundations of causal connections. The Prolegomena's discussion of the role played by Hume's skepticism in the development of the critical philosophy makes it relatively easy to see how to formulate something along the lines of "Kant's response to Hume," and a great deal of ink and toil have been devoted to debates about the…Read more
  •  83
    Getting Maimon's Goad: Discursivity, skepticism, and Fichte's idealism
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (1): 101-134. 2001.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 101-134 [Access article in PDF] Getting Maimon's Goad:Discursivity, Skepticism, and Fichte's Idealism Peter Thielke The image of J. G. Fichte has of late displayed a rather substantial, and even remarkable, transformation. Where before Fichte was viewed—and most often dismissed—as advancing an unpalatable type of metaphysical idealism, in recent years several new perspectives on Fichte…Read more
  •  49
    Salomon Maimon
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  110
    Who’s Who from Kant to Hegel II: Art and the Absolute
    Philosophy Compass 5 (5): 398-411. 2010.
    Kant's 'Copernican Revolution', which began in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), had, by the early 1790s, fundamentally altered the terrain of German philosophy – but not entirely in the way that Kant had foreseen. Skeptical challenges to Kant's discursive account of cognition, in which experience arises from the separate faculties of sensibility and understanding, had led thinkers such as K.L. Reinhold and J.G. Fichte to attempt to provide a first, foundational principle for the critical…Read more
  •  82
    Hume, Kant, and the Sea of Illusion
    Hume Studies 29 (1): 63-88. 2003.
    Given Hume's seemingly ambivalent—and often cryptic—claims about the limits of human knowledge, it is no surprise that a skeptical and a naturalistic reading compete as the proper interpretation of the Treatise. Although Hume was traditionally viewed as a skeptic, more recently the "naturalized" view of the Treatise has been in the ascendancy. On this view, while Hume deploys various skeptical arguments, they are mainly in the service of revealing the essentially naturalistic structure of human …Read more
  •  78
    To Have and to Hold: Intelligible Possession and Kant's Idealism
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (3): 502-523. 2015.
    While the debate about whether Kant's idealism requires a ‘Two Worlds’ or ‘Two Aspect’ interpretation has reached a seeming impasse, I argue that the account of intelligible possession found in the ‘Doctrine of Right’ provides novel and compelling evidence in favour of an epistemic ‘Two Aspect’ reading of Kant's position
  •  1
    Discursivity and its Discontents: Maimon's Challenge to Kant's Account of Cognition
    Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. 1999.
    Kant's system of transcendental idealism is based upon the idea that cognition is discursive, in that it involves the separate faculties of intuition and the understanding. This account of cognition I call the 'discursivity thesis.' Kant, however, provides little argument in favor of this thesis, instead taking it to be an assumption about the nature of human cognition. Despite discursivity's initial appeal, the lack of an argument on its behalf leaves it open to skeptical challenge. In the diss…Read more
  •  49
    What Would It Take to Change Your Mind?
    Metaphilosophy 45 (3): 462-472. 2014.
    Most of us have settled views about various intellectual debates, and much of the activity of philosophers is devoted to giving arguments that are designed to convince one's opponents to change their minds about a certain issue. But, what might this process require? More pointedly, can you clearly imagine what it would take to make you change your mind about a position you currently hold? This article argues that the surprising answer to this question is no—you cannot imagine what would convince…Read more
  •  101
    Fate and the fortune of the categories: Kant on the usurpation and schematization of concepts
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 49 (5). 2006.
    In the early steps of the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant briefly addresses the threat posed by usurpatory concepts such as 'fate' and 'fortune'. Commentators have largely passed over these remarks, but in this paper I argue that a careful analysis of the reasons why 'fate' and 'fortune' are usurpatory reveals an important point about the relation between the Deduction and the Principles chapters of the Critique. In particular, I argue that 'fate' and 'fortune' are …Read more
  •  83
    Recent Work on Early German Idealism (1781–1801)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (2): 149-192. 2013.
    One of the Key Questions Facing anyone interested in German Idealism concerns the puzzling transition from Kant to Hegel: how, in the course of a mere two decades, did Kant’s critical idealism, with its emphasis on the need to limit reason’s aspirations, come to be replaced by the seemingly boundless Absolute Idealism of the late 1790s and early 1800s? The traditional—though admittedly caricatured—answer follows an appealingly straightforward path from Kant to the idealist triumvirate of Fichte,…Read more
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    Apostate Rationalism and Maimon’s Hume
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (4). 2008.
    The paper examines the way in which Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) combines Humean skepticism and Leibnizian rationalism to mount an innovative challenge to Kant. Maimon’s position can be described as an “apostate rationalism,” which holds that reason makes unavoidable demands on us that are nonetheless not satisfied in experience. An appreciation of Maimon’s arguments also sheds new and interesting light on the surprising role that this apostate rationalism plays as a component of Hume’s skeptical …Read more
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    Who’s Who from Kant to Hegel I: In the Kantian Wake
    Philosophy Compass 5 (5): 385-397. 2010.
    While almost all of Kant's contemporaries agreed that the Critique of Pure Reason effected a philosophically epochal change, there was far less consensus about what precisely Kant's new critical philosophy had brought about. In large part, this uncertainty was a result of a methodological crisis that Kant's work had sparked: the Critique had shown that traditional dogmatic metaphysics was suspect at best, but what new methods needed to be adopted in the wake of Kant's 'Copernican Revolution'? Th…Read more