Tyke Nunez

The near consensus among Kant’s interpreters is that if he holds experience of a causal connection to be possible, then cognition of necessity gets ‘injected’ into that experience through reason when we infer the connection from a particular causal law. Kant, however, does not write of such injection. Rather, in its least scientifically developed form, he seems to hold that experience of a causal connection is constituted merely through present perceptions and the categories—especially cause and necessity—in a judgment of the understanding. I present an interpretation on which experience of a causal connection is so constituted, and the cognition of necessity in it need not be grounded in cognition of a particular causal law.

In this essay, I examine how Kant understood the formality of pure general logic, which he takes to be the distinctive feature of this science. According to Kant this formality is grounded in his conception of the faculty for thinking as the faculty that contributes the form to cognition. I argue that for Kant, pure general logic is formal cognition or formal philosophy because it studies the laws of thinking that make thinking what it is, as thinking. I investigate how we should understand this task of pure general logic by proposing two plausible interpretations of it. On the first more Fregean proposal, pure general logic makes distinct the concepts <concept>, <judgment>, and <inference>, while on the second less Fregean proposal, it merely articulates the system of the laws that govern material cognitions in virtue of their form, or what they are as thoughts. Ultimately, I argue that the crux of the difference between these proposals comes down to how they understand Kant’s conception of consciousness or awareness (Bewußtsein), which is “a representation that another representation is in me” (JL, 9:33). According to the more Fregean proposal, this is a higher-order representation. According to the less Fregean proposal, consciousness is the form of the original representation – what makes the representation what it is. I argue that ultimately Kant’s system of logic dissolves on the more Fregean interpretation, and that the less Fregean proposal is truer to Kant.

I begin by introducing Sutherland’s account of why Kant takes mathematics to require a non-conceptual source of knowledge of bare numerical difference. Given that objective space and time are wholes, however, I wonder why, according to Sutherland, such a source of knowledge can’t be circumvented by taking each spatial or temporal position to have conceptualizable features sufficient for distinguishing them. I then point to an issue with Sutherland’s appeals to “construction” and argue that if Sutherland more sharply distinguished between the syntheses involved in mathematical construction and empirical apprehension, then he could avoid some problems that his reading faces.

Bertrand Russell’s rejection of the doctrine of internal relations – the doctrine that all relations are determined by intrinsic properties of the terms related – was a critical step in his development away from his geometry-focused idealist philosophy of mathematics of the 1890s and towards his logic of relations and the logicism of Principles of Mathematics. Although this rejection is usually tied to his 1898 conversations with Moore (Hylton) or reading of Leibniz (Griffin), I argue that in his 1897 An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (EFG), Russell already exhibits skepticism towards the doctrine within geometry. I make this argument by examining his discussion of Hermann Lotze, Carl Stumpf, and William James in resolving what Russell calls “the antinomy of spatial relations.” In this examination I argue that Russell rejects Stumpf’s conception of spatial figures as grounded in an underlying “absolute content” in favor of a conception where spatial figures are merely relations. Russell finds support for this view in James. Even though Russell strives to stay neutral on the metaphysical issue of whether space is real or ideal, his EFG view of space and the non-spatial atoms that underlie it is closer to Lotze’s interpretation of Kant’s view of phenomena and things in themselves than Lotze’s own. Tied to this, in closing I argue that reencountering Lotze’s argument against Kant early in 1898 may have been a catalyst for Russell’s jettisoning of non-spatial atoms and for his warming to the doctrine of internal relations, before his rejection of it later that year.

I argue that in Bertrand Russell’s An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897), his forms of externality serve the same fundamental role in grounding the possibility of geometry that Immanuel Kant’s forms of intuition serve in grounding geometry in his critical philosophy. Specifically, both provide knowledge of bare numerical difference, where we have no concept of this difference. Because geometry deals with such conceptually homogeneous magnitudes and their composition on both accounts, forms of intuition or externality (respectively) are at its foundation.

Do plants represent according to Kant? This is closely connected to the question of whether he held plants are alive, because he explains life in terms of the faculty to act on one’s own representations. He also explains life as having an immaterial principle of self-motion, and as a body’s interaction with a supersensible soul. I argue that because of the way plants move themselves, Kant is committed to their being alive, to their having a supersensible ground of their self-activity, and to their having desires (although these are not conscious). This has important ramifications for Kant’s teleology and philosophy of mind.

There are two ways interpreters have tended to understand the nature of the laws of Kant’s pure general logic. On the first, these laws are unconditional norms for how we ought to think, and will govern anything that counts as thinking. On the second, these laws are formal criteria for being a thought, and violating them makes a putative thought not a thought. These traditions are in tension, in so far as the first depends on the possibility of thoughts that violate these laws, and the second makes violation impossible. In this essay I develop an interpretation of Kant’s pure general logic that overcomes this tension. It accounts for the possibility of logical mistakes, as the first tradition does, while still establishing the absolute impossibility of logical aliens, as the second tradition does. I then argue that the formalist insight that illogical exercises of the understanding are not alternative ways coherent thoughts could have been, but are mere confusions, is fundamental for achieving a proper understanding of the absolute normativity of the laws of pure general logic.

Should objects count as necessarily having certain properties, despite their not having those properties when they do not exist? For example, should a cat that passes out of existence, and so no longer is a cat, nonetheless count as necessarily being a cat? In this essay I examine different ways of adapting Aldo Bressan’s MLν so that it can accommodate an affirmative answer to these questions. Anil Gupta, in The Logic of Common Nouns, creates a number of languages that have a kinship with Bressan’s MLν , three of which are also tailored to affirmatively answering these questions. After comparing their languages, I argue that metaphysicians and philosophers of language should prefer MLν to Gupta’s languages in most applications because it can accommodate essential properties, like being a cat, while being more uniform and less cumbersome.

The consensus view in the literature is that, according to Kant, definitions in philosophy are impossible. While this is true prior to the advent of transcendental philosophy, I argue that with Kant's Copernican Turn definitions of some philosophical concepts, the categories, become possible. Along the way I discuss issues like why Kant introduces the ‘Analytic of Concepts’ as an analysis of the understanding, how this faculty, as the faculty for judging, provides the principle for the complete exhibition of the categories, how the pure categories relate to the schematized categories, and how the latter can be used on empirical objects