T. A. Pendlebury

It is easy to grant Kant’s claim that we exercise sensibility in empirical intuitions and the understanding in empirical judgments, these acts being readily recognizable moments of our cognitive lives. And yet central to his explanation of the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori is the idea that these capacities are also actualized in a different way, in some sense prior to their empirical actualization: sensibility in pure intuitions that ‘occur [stattfinden] a priori’ and the understanding in pure syntheses that ‘proceed [vorgehen] a priori’. This seems difficult to reconcile with his insistence that the exercise of cognition ‘begins with experience’ and with his intention to restrict his transcendental philosophy to the description of what ‘lies in experience’. I argue that these problems are dissolved in the recognition that these actualizations have the character of Aristotelian first acts. They are prior to empirical acts not in being performed before, under, or above experience, but in being the subject’s general active readiness for every moment of experience.

Recent decades have witnessed sharp disagreement about the character of Kant’s metaethical position. Constructivists have read him as thinking of moral value, against the example of his rationalist predecessors, as constructed by acts of the human mind. Realists have read him as thinking of such value, in the company of these predecessors, as constituted prior to human nature altogether. I argue that both camps have mischaracterized Kant’s position, in particular as it contrasts with that of the rationalists, and that the correct characterization depends on an underappreciated distinction between two forms of constitutivism. While the rationalists follow a medieval precedent in thinking that the human will is by nature the power to love and pursue a good constituted prior to it, so that they are aptly described as endorsing a heteronomist constitutivist conception of the relation of the will to the good, Kant defines the good in terms of the will as the object to which its internal standard directs it, thereby embracing an autonomist constitutivism.

Christine Korsgaard’s oft-quoted image of the reflective agent “backing up” from her desires has been criticized on the ground that it depicts desires as items external to practical reason which can, therefore, have no normative bearing on her rational activity. I argue that her critics have failed to recognize the possibility of a different explanation of the deliberative import of desires: that even if their origin is external to reason, reason confers deliberate import upon them. I develop this alternative as a reading of the moral psychology of Kant, whose work informs that of both Korsgaard and her critics, and consider the question whether Korsgaard embraces it too.

In Kant’s Groundwork II, the Formula of Universal Law (FUL) seems to be the argumentative link between the notion of a categorical imperative and later formulae (e.g. of humanity), its function as this link dependent on its equivalence to both. Some commentators have denied this equivalence and read the section as a failure. Others have abandoned its expository development by reading later formulae into the FUL. I argue that we need do neither if we distinguish the universality of the FUL from that of the will of all and read Groundwork II as extracting the latter from common moral cognition.

This essay is about the relationship between the notions of practical reason, the will, and choice in Kant’s practical philosophy. Although Kant explicitly identifies practical reason and the will, many interpreters argue that he cannot really mean it on the grounds that unless they are distinct, irrational and, especially, immoral action is impossible. Other readers affirm his identification but distinguish the will from choice on the same basis. We argue that proper attention to Kant’s conception of practical reason as a capacity reveals that these distinctions are neither textually grounded nor philosophically necessary. His moral psychology concerns a single capacity, practical reason, which is the will, and whose actualities in this or that individual fall under the title of choice. Practical reason is the will and choice because it is the rational faculty of desire: a rational being’s capacity to be, by means of her representations, the cause of the actuality of their objects. This, we argue, is entailed by his conception of rational action: action not just in accordance with, but in and through the representation of, principles. The possibility of irrational action is explained not by a distinction between capacities but by the finitude, and thereby the fallibility, of human reason.

Kant's readers have disagreed about whether, according to his account of cognition, concepts, representations of the understanding, are involved in intuitions, representations of sensibility. But proponents of the affirmative 'conceptualist' answer and those of the negative 'non-conceptualist' answer have alike presupposed that such involvement should be construed in a particular way: i.e., as the involvement of particular concepts in particular exercises of sensibility. I argue, on the contrary, that it should not be: that though, for Kant, no concepts are applied in exercises of sensibility, nonetheless the understanding, the faculty of concepts, is teleologically internal to sensibility and, therefore, to its exercises. That is, those exercises are per se directed towards the provision to the understanding of objects to which its fundamental concepts, the categories, are applicable, though no act of categorical application is internal to them. This conception of sensibility, available only in light of a careful distinction between capacities and acts, is demanded, I argue, by Kant's conception of a priori knowledge as elaborated in his Transcendental Deduction.

The problem of Kant's first Critique is the problem of pure reason: how are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Many of his readers have believed that the problem depends upon a delimitation within the class of a priori truths of a class of irreducibly synthetic truths—a delimitation whose possibility is doubtful—because absent this it is not excluded that all a priori truths are analytic. I argue, on the contrary, that the problem depends on nothing more than the human knower's everyday consciousness of her own finitude: her dependence in thinking and knowing on what is given to her. The problem is a difficulty about how the concepts which figure in metaphysical judgments could represent reality given that they cannot do so in the way in which concepts figuring in empirical judgments do. Empirical judgment here functions as exemplary of thought and knowledge because it is exemplary of finite thought and knowledge. Mere analysis could not, therefore, dissolve the problem even in principle, because to say that a concept can be analyzed is not yet to explain the possibility of its real representative power. The significance of the analytic-synthetic distinction in the context of the problem of pure reason is that its formulation allows Kant to say this.