r/Kant

Welcome everyone to this online reading & discussion group about Kant! (hosted by Philip, James, Adam and others). The meetings will take place on Zoom.

Everyone who wants to get an understanding of Kant (and approaches him in a serious and dedicated way) wants a text-based approach to the study of Kant. But being "text based" can mean different things to different people. Let me tell you what it will mean in this meetup so that no one is disappointed if the emphasis we take here is different from what some people are used to.

Kant often takes standard philosophical words that lots of Philosophers use (like "Metaphysics", "Idealism" and many others). He then defines them in highly idiosyncratic ways. I wish he had not done this! I wish he had invented neologisms for his highly specialized and idiosyncratic philosophical notions. But, sadly, he did not. Instead he used standard words in highly nonstandard ways and serious Kant scholars must adapt to Kant's way of doing things. Some Kant scholars have a tendency to ignore Kant's idiosyncratic definitions and usages of words like "Metaphysics" and "Idealism" and revert to the meanings these words had in the early modern period or the meanings they typically have in a standard dictionary definition. But in this meetup we will be text based and take Kant at his word. We will use his philosophical lexicon in the way he tells us to use it (unless and until we encounter good text-based reasons for doing otherwise).

For example, very early on in the First Critique (roughly 5 pages in) Kant defines Metaphysics in the following way:

• "For it [Metaphysics] is nothing but the inventory of all we possess through pure reason". (see Axx, page 104 in the Guyer/Wood translation)

Really? Can Kant actually mean that? Can he really be defining Metaphysics as a kind of inventory and not as some grand Scholastic edifice far away beyond any straightforward method we may have of grasping it? Well, Kant said it and so we will take him at his word until and unless Kant himself tells us he has changed his mind.

This meetup will be dedicated to the following guiding principle: We will accept that Kant means what he says. We will accept his actual definitions of words as he states them in the text, and we will stick to these definitions until Kant himself gives us good textually based reasons for deciding that the meanings of his key terms may have shifted.

If we do this, I think you will be amazed at the wonderful Kant who emerges! Scholars who ignore Kant's (admittedly highly idiosyncratic and frustrating) definitions often present to us a Kant who sounds like a medieval or early modern philosopher evoking vast cathedrals of abstract metaphysics (in the sense of that word which we find in Scholasticism). This reading of Kant was highly influential and inspired Romantic thinkers like Schelling who himself gives us a philosophy somewhat reminiscent of grand medieval scholastic metaphysical edifices.

But if we accept that Kant means what he says and stay close to the actual definitions of terms Kant gives us in his works, a different sort of Kant emerges. There emerges a Kant who was a paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker focused on human freedom, the human ability to acquire real knowledge of the empirically real world, and all of the other characteristic Enlightenment concerns.

In case you think that the Kant who emerges from this text based approach is skewed too much in the direction of being "Analytic" or "Continental", or in case you think that the Kant who emerges from this approach is far from the mainstream, consider this. In the famous philosophical battle at Davos involving Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger (the event that inaugurated the rift between Analytic and Continental philosophy) all three of these great thinkers accepted Kant's own definitions of his key terms. All three advocated readings of Kant that are more or less in harmony with the reading of Kant that will emerge and be emphasized in this meetup.

So which books will we be reading in this meetup you ask?

There will be two main books. We will read the entirety of one of Kant's works:

• "The Metaphysics of Morals". We will use the Cambridge edition edited by Lara Denis and Translated by Mary Gregor. Be sure to get the revised edition from 2017

(Scroll down for the reading schedule and pdf copies of the readings 👇)

We will also read the entirety of this book about Kant:

• Kant's Conception of Freedom: A Developmental and Critical Analysis (2021, Cambridge University Press) by Henry Allison

Allison's book spearheaded a new and promising direction in the ongoing efforts to deal with the truly bewildering variety of ways there are of interpreting Kant. Allison's book will look at the all-important Kantian notion of Freedom and ask how Kant's views about this notion changed subtly over the course of Kant's career. Maybe if we get a better sense of these subtle shifts in Kant's thoughts throughout his career we will be able to build bridges between all of the wildly different ways there are of interpreting Kant. Or at least this is the hope of Allison and some of his students like Huaping Lu-Adler who have pioneered this approach to Kant scholarship.

Since Kant defined so many of his key terms in the First Critique, participants will be expected to have the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique (Cambridge University Press) on hand at all times so we can dip into it.

Also, participants should have this book on hand since I may refer to passages in this book from time to time:

• The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason (2006) by Graham Bird

This will be a 2 hour meetup. Some sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of "The Metaphysics of Morals". Other sessions will be dedicated entirely to the reading of the Henry Allison book. At any point I may refer to the Guyer/Wood translation of the First Critique or to the Graham Bird book, so please always keep those two books on hand.

https://preview.redd.it/fxspdzostcjh1.jpg?width=1536&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c3df80da1058e6a7c315483a995e781907093163

To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Monday August 24 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Meetings will be held every other week on Monday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).

Here is the (tentative) reading schedule:

• For the 1st session (Aug 24), please read the Preface and pages 1-12 in Allison
• For the 2nd session (Sept 7), please read pages 3-17 in "The Metaphysics of Morals"
• For the 3rd session, please read pages 12-33 in Allison
• ..... (updates on the main group page)

Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.

DISCUSSION FORMAT:

The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 15-20 pages from the book assigned for that day's session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.

People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading. In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read the assigned readings. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful – no argument there! But you still have to do the reading if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.

Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: We want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.

Kant’s treatment of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic contains an insight that I think is both powerful and largely correct, followed almost immediately by an inference that does not logically follow from it.

The strong insight is that space is a priori. Spatial organization is not simply abstracted after the mind has encountered a collection of already constituted external objects. Kant writes:

--->“Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences.” (B38)

His reasoning is straightforward: in order for sensations already to be represented as outside me, alongside one another, or in different places, some spatial organization must already be operative.

This is highly plausible. An object cannot first be given as spatially differentiated and only afterwards provide us with the capacity for spatial differentiation. Some prior capacity for extension, orientation, relative position must be involved in the very constitution of a spatial appearance.

But then the argument changes.

Kant writes:

---->“We can never represent to our-selves the absence of space, though we can quite well think it as empty of objects." (A24)

And from this he concludes that space:

--->“must therefore be regarded as the condition of the possibility of appearances, and not as a determination dependent upon them.” (B39)

This is where the inference becomes questionable.

The phenomenological observation is: I can mentally remove particular objects while still representing extension or space.

But the conclusion is: Thus space is genetically prior to determinations, it is a condition.

The latter does not follow from the former.

My ability, in reflective consciousness, to subtract objects while retaining something I call “space” establishes a fact about the organization of my representation. It does not establish the ontological or genetic sequence through which spatiality and figure become determinate.

Indeed, what exactly remains after I have “removed” all objects?

Not sheer indeterminacy. I still retain extension, direction, dimensionality, possible position, possible boundary, distance. The particular figure has disappeared, but determination has not disappeared.

This is why I would call Kant’s stronger inference rationalist, despite the transcendental vocabulary surrounding it. He asks what the reflective mind can remove in thought, discovers that it can eliminate objects while retaining space, and then converts this structure of conceivability into a claim about the order of determination.

The argument has the form:

I cannot represent outer appearance without space; Therefore, space must be the antecedent condition from which spatial determination proceeds.
That is considerably stronger than:

spatial organization must already participate in the constitution of outer experience.

The latter seems sound. The former requires another argument.

The problem becomes still sharper when Kant draws his explicitly transcendental-idealist conclusion:

--->“Space represents no property at all of any things in themselves, nor any relation of them to one another.” (A26/B42)

Kant has now moved from an epistemological record of the conditions under which we experience space to a claim concerning what spatial determination cannot derive from.

He can legitimately say:

Whatever reality may be independently of us, human outer experience is spatially constituted.

But that does not establish:

Whatever reality may be independently of us, it contributes nothing to spatial determination.

The second statement tells us something about the qualitative powers of precisely that noumenal ground which Kant otherwise insists cannot be cognized as it is in itself.

Nor does restricting space to “phenomena” eliminate the difficulty. A phenomenon is not an ontologically disconnected universe floating free of whatever grounds manifestation. If something appears, then—whatever theory we adopt concerning that relation—the appearance and its ground cannot simply be treated as absolutely unrelated. (or we might return to a circular dualism, the very thing he is trying to discipline)

What are the best introduction books for someone starting to explore Kant's work?

I have just come out from under the 9-lecture Robert Wolff YouTube presentation on the Critique. It was a clear exposition, but on one point I feel unclear. Kant seems to saying that the imagination starts with the manifold of intuition and then reproduces its contents in a certain rule-determined order, which unifies it and results in the creation of objects in experience. The implication is that a rule specifies the order in which objects appear, and the ordering principle is that of causation, according to the Second Analogy. . Does this mean that the only way we know which things come first is determining what causes what?. Hume had the opposite viewpoint that the temporal order is given in experience and we empirically determine causation by induction.

Seems to me that temporal order is often obvious without our being able to ascribe a particular cause to it (we often do not know). Is the assumption that there must be a causal connection enough of a rule to establish temporal order? The assumption that everything has a cause is a good heuristic assumption that causes us to seek knowledge, but I don't see that as providing an adequate ordering principle. I feel I must be missing something. Can anyone help?

I think the sense of number comes from the idea of substance, so it is a unity and then the idea of number can take off from there because here is an object and here is another

I’m reading through the CPR and I’m confused as to whether analytic judgments (or judgments in general) are cognitions or not.

I thought judgments were a kind of proposition-cognition with a subject and a predicate, where in analytic judgments the concept of the predicate is contained within the subject and in synthetic judgments it isn‘t.

But I’m confused since cognition for Kant requires intuition and concepts, but analytic judgments don’t require intuition. So analytic judgments aren’t cognitions? This would make sense since they don’t add to our knowledge. If this is true, then judgments in general aren’t all cognitions since the analytic ones aren’t.

Are they cognitions or not? What am I getting wrong here?