God, Hypostasis, and the Threat of Paradox: Exploring Kantian And Non-Kantian Reasons for Circumspection (original) (raw)
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Kant's First Critique and the Ineffectiveness of Transcendental Arguments
Sofia Philosophical Review, 2023
In this essay, I show that transcendental arguments, which have their origins in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, are inherently vulnerable to the type of rebuttal common today in analytic philosophy: that whatever is doubted but is the condition for the possibility of something necessary need not actually be, but only be believed to be. I begin by exploring what transcendental arguments are and why they purportedly work. I then summarize the consensus opinion in analytic philosophy that they are ineffective. Finally, I situate them within the context of Kant's First Critique to show why they must be ineffective.
A CRITIQUE OF KANT'S NOTION OF TRANSCENDENCE
The disappointed reader may finally pose the bold question whether there is a real meaning of Kant. The answer to this question, it seems to me, is both yes and no. If we mean by a real meaning, a unified understanding of Kant apparent to anyone who takes the time and effort to make a careful study of the Critique of Pure Reason, then there is no real meaning. But if a real meaning is an understanding of Kant's transcendental philosophy based on one or a few unifying themes or doctrines posited as central, then there is a real meaning of Kant, or more precisely, there are several meanings of Kant to several philosophers. Various thinkers who have studied Kant's transcendental ontology or philosophy have sought to unify what he accomplished by reference to one or a few key notions operative in the Critique of Pure Reason, but none of these readings of Kant has won general acceptance. Kant's transcendental philosophy made both positive and negative impacts in the minds and lives of readers. The negative influence was so pronounced in lives and works of Dooyeweerd, Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich von Kleist to mention but a few. For Dooyeweerd, Kant's sharp separation of the practical from the theoretical, the noumenal from the phenomenal, shatters the coherence of reality and break the cosmos asunder into two spheres. To Moses Mendelssohn, Kant is the all-destroyer. Heinrich von Kleist moaned how Kant shattered his life; 'we cannot determine whether that which we call truth really is truth or only appears to be truth, my life-plan had collapsed, my only and highest goal has sunk, and I no longer have a goal.' He turned from the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality to a preoccupation with feeling and the non-rational side of consciousness. But he never found full satisfaction, and in 1811 he finally took his own life. This paper is of the view that Kant's human transcendence had no critics but critiques because the lacuna they claim to discover inspired a new line of philosophy. Most philosophers, who take a positive or approving attitude toward Kant's notion of human transcendence, tend to regard him as a forerunner of their own philosophical positions.
Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: an Interpretation and Defense
2014
This book offers a complete and internally cohesive interpretation of Religion. In contrast to the interpretations that characterize Religion as a litany of “wobbles”, fumbling between traditional Christianity and Enlightenment values, or a text that reduces religion into morality, the interpretation here offered defends the rich philosophical theology contained in each of Religion’s four parts and shows how the doctrines of the “Pure Rational System of Religion” are eminently compatible with the essential principles of Transcendental Idealism. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415507868/
On Kant's Transcendental Argument(s)
Presented in the " Critique of Pure Reason " transcendental philosophy is the first theory of science, which seeks to identify and study the conditions of the possibility of cognition. Thus, Kant carries out a shift to the study of 'mode of our cognition' and TP is a method, where transcendental argumentation acts as its essential basis. The article is devoted to the analysis of the transcendental arguments. In § 2 the background of ТА — transcendental method of Antiquity and Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason — are analyzed and their comparison with ТА is given. § 3 is devoted to the analysis of TA in the broad and narrow senses; a formal propositional and presupposition models are proposed. In § 4 I discuss the difference between TA and metaphysics' modes of reasoning. It analyzes the Kant's main limitations of the use TA shows its connection with the Modern Age and contemporary science.
In this paper I present a new solution to the so-called ‚neglected alternative'-objection against Kant's argument for transcendental idealism. According to this objection, Kant does not give sufficient justification for his claim that not only are space and time forms of our intuition but that they also fail to be things in themselves or properties thereof. I first discuss a proposal by Willaschek and Allais, who try to defend Kant against this charge by building on his account of a priori intuition, and argue that it is insufficient in order to meet the objection in its full force. I then present my own solution to the problem. It is based on a reconstruction of Kant's account of properties of appearances and tries to show that this account implies that spatio-temporal properties could in principle not pertain both to appearances and to things in themselves.
Open Philosophy 5, 2022
The article focuses on re-evaluating Kant's Transcendental Dialectic by initially highlighting its seemingly negative function within the Critique of Pure Reason as a mere regulative form for cognition and experience. The Dialectic, however, does not only have such a negative-regulative function but also its very own positive and founding character for cognition that even is present in the supposedly most immediate forms of intuition. In exploring this positive side of the Transcendental Dialectic it becomes clear that it manifests itself as a bridge between the so-called theoretical and practical reason inasmuch as it fills in their gap within Kant's philosophy. From the practical side, the Dialectic is manifest as an action full of purposiveness, maxims, and imperatives within cognition, from a theoretical side it assumes the form of syllogistic inference, which is the adequate and acting theoretical form of practical reason. Therefore, the unity of reason is shown in presenting its inner gap as a dialectical misunderstanding that Kant not only highlights in the Transcendental Dialectic but also tends to leave unsolved mostly. Nevertheless, the Dialectic can be shown as the a priori synthetic act of unifying reason, if investigated in the context of Kant's complete critical endeavour.
Imagination and Transcendental Objects: Kant on the Imaginary Focus of Reason
The Being of Negation in Post-Kantian Philosophy, 2022
Going back to Jacobi, commentators have often considered Kant’s notion of the transcendental object (thing in itself, monad, or object = X) to be concerned merely with empirical affection. Although most agree that this argument of Kant’s forbids the understanding from making illegitimate claims regarding the transcendental object, it is often assumed that no positive function can be ascribed to metaphysical illusions produced by reason. I will show in this paper, in contrast to most commentators, that a positive notion of transcendental illusion is brought about by the cooperation of the imagination and reason in the latter’s pursuit of positing transcendental objects––in the same way that the imagination aids the understanding in determining objects of empirical cognition. When describing reason’s pursuit of systematicity, Kant writes that the transcendent ideas serve as a focus imaginarius that unifies cognition as such (A644/B672). It is not merely the case that metaphysical illusions regarding the soul, the world as such, and God are entirely useless, just because the understanding is prohibited from claiming having knowledge of such concepts. I take it that the transcendental object so considered in Kant’s Dialectic refers only to a representation of the imagination. I show that all three transcendental ideas––namely, God, the World as such, and the soul––are imaginary projections of unity carried out by the power of reason. Drawing on Kant’s notion of the focus imaginarius, I claim that reason regards transcendental illusions as being real objects. This holds as much for the schema of scientific knowledge, which is merely regulative, as it does for the three transcendental ideas. Unlike most commentators, I do not take Kant’s consideration of the transcendental object to concern empirical affection. Rather, reason posits this object in order to transcend the limits of the understanding, and to thereby use its own inner illusions for systematic purposes (cf. A250–53 and A393). To my mind, reason necessarily posits ideas, but the imagination often leads reason into holding that the focus imaginarius of the idea is an actual object. The critical use of reason must then put limits on the imagination (cf. A770/B798). But the imagination nonetheless serves reason’s interest by allowing it to put otherwise negative illusions to work for the sake of systematicity.