Samuel Descarreaux

This paper argues that W. V. O. Quine’s twentieth-century evidential and proximal theory of meaning and belief, developed in opposition to Donald Davidson, employs argumentation strategies strikingly similar to those of Hermann von Helmholtz and Friedrich Albert Lange in their nineteenth-century efforts to naturalize Kant’s epistemology. Contrary to Jim Hopkins’s interpretation, which links Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious predictive inferences with Davidson’s causal theory of action and truth-conditional semantics (2018), this paper contends that Quine’s epistemic externalism, rooted in a naturalized account of evidentiality and proximality, aligns more closely with Helmholtz and Lange’s psychophysiological theory of meaning.

This study investigates the surprising rebirth of interest in Kantian philosophy in Philosophies, the Société de Philosophie du Québec journal, from 1990 to 2000. At the time, we were witnessing the reception in Quebec of Franco-German debates that had begun a decade earlier around the critique of the judicial faculty. I demonstrate that two separate philosophical projects may explain this historical convergence. On the one hand, a strong Quebec exegesis reinstates the aesthetic function of the “sublime”, which Adorno and Lyotard overemphasized, in its relation to the judgment of taste. On the other hand, in their “family quarrel” in political and legal philosophy, Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and Alain Renaut, make use of the conceptual resources developed in the first section of the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment (e.g. intersubjectivity, communicability, sympathy) to identify criteria of practical objectivity practical.