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45In Defense of Intuitions: A New Rationalist ManifestoPalgrave MacMillan. 2013.A reply to contemporary skepticism about intuitions and a priori knowledge, and a defense of neo-rationalism from a contemporary Kantian standpoint, focusing on the theory of rational intuitions and on solving the two core problems of justifying and explaining them
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108A Minimalist Approach to the Development of Episodic MemoryMind and Language 27 (1): 29-54. 2012.Episodic memory is usually regarded in a Conceptualist light, in the sense of its being dependent upon the grasp of concepts directly relevant to the act of episodic recollection itself, such as a concept of past times and of the self as an experiencer. Given this view, its development is typically timed as being in the early school-age years. We present a minimalist, Non-Conceptualist approach in opposition to this view, but one that also exists in clear contrast to the kind of minimalism espou…Read more
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152How do we know necessary truths? Kant's answerEuropean Journal of Philosophy 6 (2). 1998.It is traditionally held that our knowledge of necessity is a priori; but the familiar theories of a priori knowledge – platonism and conventionalism – have now been discredited, and replaced by either modal skepticism or a posteriori essentialism. The main thesis of this paper is that Kant's theory of a priori knowledge, when detached from his transcendental idealism, offers a genuine alternative to these unpalatable options. According to Kant's doctrine, all epistemic necessity is grounded dir…Read more
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114Rationality and LogicBradford. 2006.In Rationality and Logic, Robert Hanna argues that logic is intrinsically psychological and that human psychology is intrinsically logical. He claims that logic is cognitively constructed by rational animals and that rational animals are essentially logical animals. In order to do so, he defends the broadly Kantian thesis that all rational animals possess an innate cognitive "logic faculty." Hanna 's claims challenge the conventional philosophical wisdom that sees logic as a fully formal or "top…Read more
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79Kant, Wittgenstein and the fate of analysisIn Micahel Beaney (ed.), The Analytic Turn, Routledge. pp. 142. 2007.
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176Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, Rogue Objects, and The Gap in the B DeductionInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (3). 2011.This paper is about the nature of the relationship between (1) the doctrine of Non-Conceptualism about mental content, (2) Kant's Transcendental Idealism, and (3) the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, or Categories, in the B (1787) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, i.e., the B Deduction. Correspondingly, the main thesis of the paper is this: (1) and (2) yield serious problems for (3), yet, in exploring these two serious problems for the B Deduction, we als…Read more
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52The Trouble with Truth in Kant's Theory of MeaningHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1): 1-20. 1993.
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77Review: Forster, Michael, Kant and Skepticism (review)Philosophical Quarterly 61 (244): 635-637. 2011.
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91Review: Weatherston, Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2003 (8). 2003.
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44Cognition Content and a Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and KnowledgeOxford University Press UK. 2015.Robert Hanna works out a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, he provides accounts of intentionality and its contents, sense perception and perceptual knowledge, the analytic-synthetic distinction, the nature of logic, and a priori truth and knowledge in mathematics, logic, and philosophy. This book is specifically intended to reach out to two very different audiences: contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and knowledge, and contempor…Read more
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59(A) Books: (3) Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: OUP, forthcoming). (2) Rationality and Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming). (1) Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon/OUP, 2001 [pbk., 2004]). (B) Articles: (30) "Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Fate of Analysis," in M. Beaney (ed.), The Analytic Turn (London: Routledge, forthcoming.) (29) "Kant and the Analytic Tradition," in C. Boundas (ed.), A Companion to the Twentieth-Century Philosophies (Edinburgh: Univ…Read more
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49Kant's Theory of Empirical Judgment and Modern SemanticsHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 7 (3). 1990.
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172Kant in the Twentieth CenturyIn Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, . pp. 150-203. 2008.Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) quotably wrote in 1929 that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”1 The same could be said, perhaps with even greater accuracy, of the twentieth-century Euro-American philosophical tradition and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).2 In this sense the twentieth century was the post-Kantian century. Twentieth-century philosophy in Europe and the USA was dominated by two distinctiv…Read more
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133The Myth of the Given and the Grip of the GivenDiametros 27 25-46. 2011.In this paper I argue that the Sellarsian Myth of the Given does not apply to all forms of Non-Conceptualism; that Kant is in fact a non-conceptualist of the right-thinking kind and not a Conceptualist, as most Kant-interpreters think; and that an intelligible and defensible Kantian Non-Conceptualism can be developed which supports the thesis that true perceptual beliefs are non-inferentially justified and also normatively funded by direct, embodied, intentional interactions with the manifest wo…Read more
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30How Ideas Became Meanings: Locke and the Foundations of Semantic TheoryReview of Metaphysics 44 (4). 1991.THERE IS A NOTORIOUS THESIS in the philosophy of language which runs as follows: meanings are wholly mind-dependent, in the sense that they exist only in particular human minds. We might call this "the thesis of semantic psychologism." Versions of this thesis have been attacked and rejected by some of the most important philosophers of language in the twentieth century: Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and, most recently, Hilary Putnam.
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5Direct reference, direct perception, and the cognitive theory of demonstrativesPacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2): 96-117. 1993.
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125Logical Cognition: Husserl’s Prolegomena and the Truth in PsychologismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (2): 251-275. 1993.
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81Kant, science, and human natureOxford University Press. 2006.Robert Hanna argues for the importance of Kant's theories of the epistemological, metaphysical, and practical foundations of the "exact sciences"--relegated to the dustbin of the history of philosophy for most of the 20th century. In doing so he makes a valuable contribution to one of the most active and fruitful areas in contemporary scholarship on Kant.
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32The Unity of Understanding (review)Review of Metaphysics 44 (4): 864-865. 1991.To think is to think-about objects; this simple fact is of course what philosophers of mind have dubbed "intentionality." The traditional doctrine of intentionality has it that the mind pictures or in some sense represents its objects to itself. Kant initiates a radical departure from this doctrine by insisting that the mind forms or in some sense constructs its objects. This power of mental construction Kant calls the "understanding".
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135Kant and the foundations of analytic philosophyOxford University Press. 2001.Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the connections between them. But this is not just a study in the history of philosophy, for out of this emerges Hanna's original approach to two much-contested theories that remain at the heart of contemporary philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a v…Read more
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92The inner and the outer: Kant's 'refutation' reconstructedRatio 13 (2). 2000.In Skeptical idealism says that possibly nothing exists outside my own conscious mental states. Purported refutations of skeptical idealism – whether Descartes's, Locke's, Reid's, Kant's, Moore's, Putnam's, or Burge's – are philosophically scandalous: they have convinced no one. I argue (1) that what is wrong with the failed refutations is that they have attempted to prove the wrong thing – i.e., that necessarily I have veridical perceptions of distal material objects in space, and (2) that a ch…Read more
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67From an Ontological Point of View: Hegel's Critique of the Common LogicReview of Metaphysics 40 (2). 1986.Hegel's logic is often understood as a competitor to ordinary formal logic; this leads to such false accusations as that hegel "denies the principle of non-Contradiction." on the contrary, Hegel's speculative logic is wholly conservative with respect to ordinary logic. What hegel denies is ordinary logic's suitability to be a paradigm for philosophy. Hegel's logic, Itself, Can be seen as arising from a critical ontological reflection on ordinary logic
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22Perspective in Whitehead's Metaphysics (review)Review of Metaphysics 37 (3): 650-652. 1984.Recent books on Whitehead have shown a marked tendency to use Whiteheadian notions in ways not strictly compatible with Whitehead's own explicit views. This fact may suggest either the fecundity of Whitehead's ideas, or a general dissatisfaction with the fully developed cosmological scheme as outlined in Process and Reality. In any case, Ross's book continues in the recent tradition of "neo-Whiteheadian" as opposed to "strictly Whiteheadian" interpretations of Whitehead's thought. The purpose of…Read more
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26Review: Powell, Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness (review)Review of Metaphysics 45 (3): 631-633. 1992.
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