Rosalind Chaplin

Many of Kant’s rationalist predecessors held that there must be something self-grounding to serve as the ultimate ground of all dependent things. In the pre-Critical New Elucidation (NE), however, Kant argues that self-grounding plays no legitimate role in metaphysical explanation. I argue in this paper that Kant’s position in the NE is best understood as an expression of his distinctive conception of complete explanation. According to Kant (and contra his opponents as he understood them), an explanation of a grounded thing is complete just in case it cites all the grounds of the grounded thing, and an ungrounded ground can completely explain something grounded. I also argue that this conception of complete explanation stays with Kant throughout his career, and it contributes to several of his most important metaphysical positions in both the pre-Critical and Critical periods. It drives his argument that the PSR must be restricted in scope; it lies at the heart of his views about the kind of intelligibility reason demands as our highest faculty; and it reveals neglected aspects of his conception of the unconditioned and his critique of traditional metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason.

The philosophical literature on shame treats shame as essentially a self-concerning emotion. According to this view, when we experience shame, it is always the self that is subject to negative assessment, and shame concerning others traces back to some form of self-concern. Against this, I argue for an expanded conception of shame. On the view I advance, shame always manifests investment and partiality regarding its target, but investment and partiality need not trace back to self-concern, and shame does not essentially require an appraisal of the self at all. I also argue that this can help us improve our understanding of partial concern for persons more broadly. While we often think of partial concern for a person's well-being as the paradigmatic form of partial concern, partial concern for a person's character (broadly construed) plays an equally important role in our moral-emotional lives, and especially in our close relationships.

Chapter 4 challenges a common dogma of the literature on forgiveness: that forgiveness is the exclusive prerogative of victims. Attacks on third-party forgiveness generally come in two forms. One form of attack suggests that third-party forgiveness is conceptually incoherent (and so impossible). Another form of attack suggests that it is always morally inappropriate for third parties to forgive. This chapter argues against both of these claims; third-party forgiveness is possible, and in some cases it is morally appropriate for third parties to forgive (or refuse to forgive) wrongdoers for wrongs done to victims. The chapter also proposes an explanation of third-parties’ standing to forgive. Third parties have the standing to forgive when it is appropriate for them to take ‘personally’ wrongs done to victims, and this occurs primarily in the context of close relationships. Thus, while the standing to forgive is not grounded exclusively in having been wronged, the prerogative to forgive is normally limited to victims and their loved ones. Once we recognize the importance of third-party forgiveness in our moral lives and the norms that govern it, we can more easily adjudicate between competing accounts of the nature of forgiveness.

An influential account holds that blame is paradigmatically a form of moral address aimed at facilitating moral communication between the blamer and the blamed (or, less paradigmatically, between the blamer and the moral community). This chapter argues that our practices of third-party blaming and forgiving should prompt us to supplement this model. When we blame and forgive as third parties in close relationships with victims (i.e., when we blame and forgive as intimates), our blame often aims not only at facilitating moral communication but also at fulfilling the obligations of our relationships with victims. I argue that these victim-focused aims bear not only on the ethics of third-party blame by intimates but also on its fittingness conditions. And this, in turn, has implications for how we should understand the blaming and forgiving that we do when we ourselves are victims to wrongdoing. If blame by intimates has victim-focused fittingness conditions, I argue, then so too does the blaming and forgiving we do when we ourselves are wronged. This illuminates the special discretionary nature of forgiveness when it is given or withheld by victims, and it suggests a looser distinction between forgiving and letting go than is commonly assumed.

Kant resolves the second antinomy by making a striking claim about the compositional structure of spatiotemporal objects: such objects are composed neither of finitely many simples nor of infinitely many material parts all of which are divided in turn. A prominent reading interprets this as a claim about potential infinity: whereas the thesis and antithesis positions hold that objects’ parts are strictly finite in number and actually infinite, respectively, Kant resolves the antinomy by claiming that objects’ parts are merely potentially infinite. Against these approaches, I argue that potential infinity is not the key notion in the antinomy’s resolution, and instead quantitative indeterminacy is: according to Kant, it is indeterminate how many actual parts spatiotemporal objects have, and this is not equivalent to a claim concerning their potential infinity. Kant does not deny that objects’ parts are potentially infinitely numerous, but as I argue, attributions of quantitative indeterminacy and attributions of potential infinity are not the same, and quantitative indeterminacy rather than potential infinity is the key result in the antinomy’s resolution.

In the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant formulates a principle he calls the “supreme principle of pure reason” (hereafter, ‘SP’). According to SP, if a conditioned object is given, then the whole series of its conditions and hence something unconditioned is also given (A308/B365). Most interpreters take SP to be Kant’s rendering of the rationalist’s Principle of Sufficient Reason (hereafter, ‘PSR’), which says that everything has a sufficient reason that explains why it is the way it is. I argue that this obscures an important distinction in Kant’s philosophy between two different explanatory demands. For Kant, SP’s demand for unconditioned conditions expresses a demand for what I call explanatory completeness, i.e., for explanations to come to an end in things that do not require explanation. In contrast, the PSR as Kant understands it expresses a demand for what I call exceptionless explicability, i.e., for nothing to lack an explanation. These demands are not the same, and they even stand in tension in Kant’s view if neither is subject to restriction. Once we see this, we better understand the predicament Kant thinks we face as rational inquirers who seek both explanatory completeness and exceptionless explicability.

The philosophical literature on shame treats shame as essentially a self-concerning emotion. According to this view, when we experience shame, it is always the self that is subject to negative assessment, and shame concerning others traces back to some form of self-concern. Against this, I argue for an expanded conception of shame. On the view I advance, shame always manifests investment and partiality regarding its target, but investment and partiality need not trace back to self-concern, and shame does not essentially require an appraisal of the self at all. I also argue that this can help us improve our understanding of partial concern for persons more broadly. While we often think of partial concern for a person's well-being as the paradigmatic form of partial concern, partial concern for a person's character (broadly construed) plays an equally important role in our moral-emotional lives, and especially in our close relationships.

Most interpreters hold that Kant rejects actually infinite tota synthetica as conceptually impossible. This view is attributed to Kant to relieve him of the charge that the first antinomy’s thesis argument presupposes transcendental idealism. I argue that important textual evidence speaks against this view, and Kant in fact affirms the conceptual possibility of actually infinite tota synthetica. While this means the first antinomy may not be decisive as an indirect argument for idealism, it gives us a better account of how our ideas of the unconditioned generate the antinomies, and it allows us to see important and often overlooked elements in Kant’s account of the infinite.

Famously, Kant describes space and time as infinite “given” magnitudes. An influential interpretative tradition reads this as a claim about phenomenological presence to the mind: in claiming that space and time are given, this reading holds, Kant means to claim that we have phenomenological access to space and time in our original intuitions of them. In this paper, I argue that we should instead understand givenness as a metaphysical notion. For Kant, space and time are ‘given’ in virtue of three related facts: (i) they are necessary grounds of the existence of all other spatial and temporal possibilities; (ii) in virtue of being such grounds, they are metaphysically linked to all other represented spatiotemporal things; and (iii) as representations, space and time issue from the nature of our faculty of sensibility rather than from an arbitrary act of choice. Understanding givenness in this non-epistemological way helps us recover what is plausible in both ‘intellectualist’ and ‘anti-intellectualist’ readings of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Anti-intellectualists are correct that space and time are given in mere sensibility, but intellectualists are correct that we depend on the understanding for consciousness of space and time.

This paper argues for a new understanding of Strawson’s distinction between personal, impersonal, and self-reactive attitudes. Many Strawsonians take these basic reactive attitude types to be distinguished by two factors. Is it the self or another who is treated with good- or ill-will? And is it the self or another who displays good- or ill-will? On this picture, when someone else wrongs me, my reactive attitude is personal; when someone else wrongs someone else, my reactive attitude is impersonal; and when I wrong someone else, my attitude is self-reactive. Against this account, I argue that the basic reactive attitude types are better distinguished according to whether they express partial or impartial concern. This fits Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment”, and it allows us to see an important point that the alternative approach obscures. Namely, while attitudes like resentment, gratitude, shame, and pride can arise as responses to our own treatment and behavior, they can also arise as third-party responses to the treatment and behavior of our family members, romantic partners, and close friends. Similarly, attitudes like moral indignation and disapprobation also have a wider scope than is often acknowledged; they can arise as responses to others’ treatment, but they can also arise as responses to our own treatment when we react impartially to circumstances involving ourselves.