Kant's Metaphysics

This volume sheds new light on Immanuel Kant’s conception of anthropology. Neither a careful and widespread search of the sources nor a merely theoretical speculation about Kant’s critical path can fully reveal the necessarily wider horizon of his anthropology. This only comes to light by overcoming all traditional schemes within Kantian studies, and consequently reconsidering the traditional divisions within Kant’s thought. The goal of this book is to highlight an alternative, yet complementary path followed by Kantian anthropology with regard to transcendental philosophy. The present volume intends to develop this path in order to demonstrate how irreducible it is in what concerns some crucial claims of Kant’s philosophy, such as the critical defense of the unity of reason, the search for a new method in metaphysics and the moral outcome of Kant’s thought.

ABSTRACT : Metaphysics and Anthropology in Kant's doctrine of Character. This paper assesses Kant's ideas on character, as exposed in the Critique of pure reason and in Pragmatic Anthropology. The main issue raised by the modern concept of character concerns its disputed mutability: do people inherit an unchangeable character, or can education and circumstances influence it significantly? Kant's answer is a highly complex one. He deals indeed with the concept from both a metaphysical and an anthropological point of view. Metaphysically, character accounts for the regularity of any causal action, which would otherwise be random and unpredictable. This holds for intelligible causes and for phenomenal ones as well. Anthropologically, character is neither merely inherited, nor effectively influenced by education.

ABSTRACT ITALIANO Il presente lavoro considera le tesi kantiane sul carattere esposte nella prima Critica e nell'Antropologia pragmatica. Il problema filosofico principale sollevato dal concetto di carattere è quello della sua controversa mutabilità: noi ereditiamo un carattere invariabile, oppure l'educazione o altri fattori possono influenzarlo? La risposta di Kant, altamente complessa, coinvolge la metafisica e l'antropologia. La prima afferma che il carattere è la regola dell'azione causale, che altrimenti sarebbe casuale e imprevedibile. La seconda stabilisce che il carattere non è né ereditario e immutabile, né influenzabile dall'educazione. Kant pensa invece a una improvvisa rivoluzione che conduce alla formazione del carattere morale. Grazie allo studio del carattere empirico dell'uomo, considerato senz'altro come essere libero, l'antropologia indirizza pragmaticamente la ricerca al miglioramento dell'essere umano, dal singolo alla specie.

Лингвистика нынешних дней — взор пустой, в словах Слово не зрящий, Корнь наш. Зрить его  оком Пращуров — сущих имен тайны знать.
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Приход наш в сей мир — не рожденье, но шаг к нему: к Целому — часть, к Полноте — половина. Мир, Дом наш — единство Сего и Того: Земли и Неба, бренья и Вечности. С тем, для Земли рождены, Мира цельного ради должны мы родиться от Неба, скрепив Духом плоть как Водою живой.

Так глаголет Христос Никодиму, искателю Знания: «Истинно, истинно говорю тебе, если кто не родится свыше, не может увидеть Царствия Божия». «Как может человек родиться, будучи стар? Неужели может он в другой раз войти в утробу матери своей и родиться?», — пытает Никодим. Иисус речет: «Истинно, истинно говорю тебе, если кто не родится от воды и Духа, не может войти в Царствие Божие. Рожденное от плоти есть плоть, а рожденное от Духа есть дух» (Ин. 3:3-6).

То ж — с наукой лингвистикой. Древней порой, Неба часть, человек не искал Речь — он был с ней един, с тем — тождественен Слову, создавшему всё, и могуч его силою. Рек Иисус о том: «…истинно говорю вам: если вы будете иметь веру с горчичное зерно и скажете горе сей: «перейди отсюда туда», и она перейдет; и ничего не будет невозможного для вас» (Мф. 17:20).

Утрата единства сего породила стремление людей вернуть его, с тем — и науку исканий, лингвистику. Сильной стать ей — есть родиться вторично: от Слова, Начала. Лингвистика Мира — сакральная, труд мой — наука земная, рожденная свыше. То — Знанье, стяжавшее Силу: Ум — Сердце, Исток. Им сильны, обретем мы Себя.

Kant’s legal thought has long been ignored in debates on global justice. Kantian theories tend to focus mainly on Kant’s moral philosophy and on moral concepts such as dignity and autonomy to provide arguments for global justice and other political problems.
Is Kant’s legal theory still pertinent today? How can Kant’s legal philosophy be applied to current global challenges such as climate change, refugees, migration, growing populism and nationalist movements, and threats to international peace?

Before going much further, given the engagement with Foucault that occupies much of the early sections of this nomadic exploration, I should address Foucault's (1972) theorizations of History in The Archaeology of Knowledge and his problematization of " the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization " (p. 12) therein as my reading does not fully cohere with Ball's (2013) assertion that Foucault " reject[ed]… essentialisms and universals ".

In recent years, more and more people have become attracted by the idea that the imagination should play a central role in explaining our knowledge of what is possible and necessary and what would be the case if things were different from how they actually are. The biggest challenge for this account is to explain how the imagination can be restricted in such a way that it can play this epistemic role, for there are certainly also unrestricted uses of the imagination in which it fails to yield the requisite knowledge. In this paper, I inquire how Kant's account of the imagination could inspire the contemporary debate at this point. I first give an overview about Kant's account of the imagination and its different roles for our cognition of the real world. I then show that some recent attempts to seperate the epistemically valuable uses of the imagination from the epistemically worthless ones bear some striking similarities to Kant's ideas about how the imagination helps us to get insight into metaphysical possibility. By discussing what Kant says about the method of a prori imaginative construction in the case of concepts such as that of matter and that of disembodied minds, I also point to those aspects of his view which make it really distinct from all contemporary accounts, but which he himself thought bear the greatest potential of making the imagination a source of modal knowledge.

Kant posits the schema as a hybrid bridging the generality of pure concepts and the particularity of sensible intuitions. However, I argue that countenancing such schemata leads to a third-man regress. Siding with those who think that the midway posit of the Critique of Pure Reason's schematism section is untenable, my diagnosis is that Kant's transcendental inquiry goes awry because it attempts to analyze a form/matter union that is primitive. I therefore sketch a nonrepresentational stance aimed at respecting this primitivity.

The creation, or emergence, of a technological singularity is the subject of a wide array of speculations. Due to their lack of tangible criteria, the prospect of an upcoming singularity is still unclear, if not completely mysterious. This paper proposes to unfold a precise and exhaustive profile that may be applicable to any class of emergent singularity. The guideline for this endeavor is Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, as expressed in his tripartite epistemological groundwork, The Three Critiques. As Kant never intended the first two of them (Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason) to be merely descriptions of ‘human’ or ‘psychic’ cognition, they have always been an invitation to ponder non-human forms of scientific world-exploration, technical world-building, and moral behavior.
Even the Critique of Judgement, which is more focused on the evolution and culture of actual human beings, can teach us a great deal about a singularity to come. The working hypothesis is that Kant’s Three Critiques are a complete set of universal concepts and principles, involving scientific, technical, and moral reason, and that they must, as such, contain a blueprint for technological singularities. Hence, this paper deduces a set of ten laws that will govern any future singularity. By the force of these laws, the singularity must be a polycentric subject – just as we humans are. In the process, we will confirm Nick Bostrom’s orthogonality thesis, solve David Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness, and confirm the unwavering validity of Kant’s critical philosophy for science and technology in the 21st century, and beyond.

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

‘Metaphysics’ is the quest to find the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. It is about trying to find a decisive and conclusive resolution to the human condition, such that the human condition is fulfilled in some absolute way, and no longer at the mercy of meaningless suffering, or a dreadful sense of uncertainty. All other definitions and determinations of metaphysics are trivial, and irrelevant; and, given the critical importance of the quest for human fulfilment – our lives are not infinite, after all – really quite bewildering. Western philosophy  has never understood this, and its entire intellectual history has been characterised by a persistent debasing of any simple, straightforward and direct quest for objective metaphysical self-knowledge, preferring instead always to indulge either in pedantic squabbling over definitions, distinctions and conceptual manoeuvrings, or in flatulent ‘system building’.

This is a defense of Kant against the allegedly neglected alternative in his formulation of transcendental idealism. What sets it apart from the contributions of others who have spoken for Kant in this regard is the construction of a general interpretive framework — a reconstruction of the one Kant provides for transcendental idealism — as opposed to the development of an ad hoc defensive strategy for refuting the charges. Hence, comprehensive clarification instead of pointed rebuttal. The difference is between focusing on the text and focusing on the problem. No doubt, doing both is not only possible but also required, as the problem is supposed to be in the text, but the point is that it is not there, and further, that we need not go anywhere else to show that it is not there. Thus, the approach is constructive rather than defensive, or more accurately, constructive as well as defensive. And the construction rests on what Kant actually said rather than on what he might have meant or on what he should have said instead.

Schopenhauer positions himself squarely within the tradition of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and his first sense of the metaphysical comprises the synthetic cognition a priori that makes experience possible within transcendental idealism. This is Schopenhauer’s transcendental metaphysics. As he developed philosophically however, Schopenhauer devised a second sense of the metaphysical. This second sense also depends, albeit negatively, on transcendental idealism because its central claim—that the thing in itself should be identified with will—looks like precisely a species of transcendent metaphysics, a claim that goes beyond the possibility of experience into the cognitively forbidden realm of things in themselves. I shall argue however that this second sense of the metaphysical can be formulated much more independently of transcendental idealism, following a recent similar interpretation of Kant due to Rae Langton, and that this makes for some surprising connections to contemporary metaphysics.