Roberto Leone Zellini

In the Prolegomena, Kant offers his official definition of analogy in terms of the perfect similarity of the relations holding for completely dissimilar pairs. Although interpreters neglect to reconstruct Kant's views on similarity, they often cite the Prolegomena definition and take it to characterise analogy as the identity of two relations. As I show in the paper, this account is hermeneutically inaccurate and cannot do justice to Kant's claim according to which metaphysical judgements are meaningless unless they are interpreted against the background of some analogy. My aim is to offer an interpretation of Kant's definition of analogy with special regard to his conception of similarity. For Kant, I argue, an analogy subsists between four terms a, b, c, d iff the pairs and satisfy non‐identical relations and the latter exhibit the same (compatible) structural features—(non)/(a)symmetry, (non)/(a)transitivity, (ir)reflexivity. On this account, as I show, Kant's stance on the meaning of metaphysical judgements becomes clear, plausible and compatible with the examples of analogy he adduces.

In this article, I argue that Newton’s influence on Kant’s Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels is primarily reflected in Kant’s employment of analogy. To this end, I first frame Newton’s second rule of philosophizing in terms of an inference ticket for analogical arguments and explain Newton’s reference to the “analogy of nature” in terms of a metaphysical principle authorizing transductive inferences. Secondly, I argue that several crucial arguments in Kant’s essay exhibit the argumentative scheme warranted by Newton’s second rule and/or implicitly appeal to Newton’s analogy of nature. In doing so, I both challenge studies on Kant’s pre-critical commitment to Newton and expand on existing literature concerning 18th-century Newtonianism.

In this article, I challenge two paradigmatic forms of heterodox (meta-)philosophical naturalism – second-nature naturalism and liberal naturalism – and outline a form of naturalism capable of avoiding their shortcomings. I first criticize John McDowell’s arguments for a second nature naturalism by showing how they give rise to a merely negative and philosophically unsatisfactory definition of nature. In the second place, I confront a meta-philosophical position developed in McDowell’s wake, i.e., liberal naturalism. As I argue, liberal naturalism inherits the shortcomings of McDowell’s stance with regard to the philosophical practice it advocates. After illustrating how liberal naturalism implies the rejection of any continuity between scientific and philosophical discourse, I conclude by sketching a form of meta-philosophical naturalism capable of doing justice to both heterodox and orthodox naturalism.

This paper reconstructs Kant’s notion of concrete universals by illustrating his treatment of lowest species. In doing so, I shall oppose the widespread view that Kant rejects the very notion of a lowest species in the following manner. By distinguishing between two kinds of lowest species in Kant’s logic, I first show how his dismissal of the latter relays on non-deductive arguments and concerns empirical concepts only. Secondly, I argue that Kant’s notion of correspondence between geometrical concepts and the related figures substantiates the idea that he conceived of geometrical notions as lowest species.

Although Wilfrid Sellars provides a single and rather brief explicit account of analogy, he has been frequently using this concept in the most significant sections of his work. The aim of this article is to prove that Sellars’s few explicit remarks on analogy can be traced back to a coherent definition of the concept, which turns out to be compatible with Sellars’s usage of the term «analogy» as well as with his views on the role of models in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Moreover, I will show how this result supports an interpretative hypothesis concerning Sellars’s dealings with the history of philosophy.

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag schlage ich eine Rekonstruktion der ersten “Aufgabe” der Fichtschen Sittenlehre vor, um über Fichtes Gebrauch naturphilosophischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Begriffe Rechenschaft abzulegen. Laut meiner These führt der darin enthaltene Verweis auf das Phänomen der Elastizität zur Entdeckung einer Analogie zwischen der Wirkungsweise eines elastischen Körpers und den Eigenschaften eines Willensakts, ohne welche Fichtes Überlegung in einen Widerspruch geraten würde. Die in der Sekundärliteratur gängige Unterschätzung des Fichtschen Bezugs auf die Elastizität wird sich dementsprechend als ungerechtfertigt erweisen.