Repositório RCAAP

A systematical interpretation of Kant’s critical philosophy requires the elucidation of what can be considered a critical use of reasoning by analogy. Analogical thought was largely employed in traditional philosophy, even in Kant’s time. My proposal in this paper is to clarify what kind of use remains for the analogical thought after Kant’s copernican revolution in metaphysics. The main issue is of course the function of analogy in Kantian transcendental philosophy.

This paper sustains the thesis that the problem of the possibility of a system of reason can only be systematically legitimated by means of its reconstruction and defense on the ground of the method of Kant’s philosophy. Initially, in order to guarantee the self-revision of the method of philosophy in the Critique of pure reason, the pre-critical consideration of the method as analytical is expounded. It is argued that the “micro-system” of the deduction of the categories is the determining element for the critical justification of the method of philosophy as synthetic a priori. Secondly, the reference of the synthetic a priori method to the “macro-system” of reason is taken into account, in what matters to the relation between its theoretical and practical domains. It is sustained that what Kant takes to be a mystery up to 1785 in relation to this reference consists of the systematic incapacity to legitimate the practical use of reason from the domain of its theoretical use. Finally, on account of Kant’s discovery of the selfsufficiency of the theoretical and practical domains, the specificity of the problem of the system of reason is presented. It is argued that, from the second half of the 1780s on, the approach of the problem of the system of reason essentially aims at guarding this self-sufficiency.

It is known that Kant discoursed about the feelings of the beautiful and sublime in different moments of his philosophy. The first occurrence seems to be in Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and the sublime (1764). And there, precisely, genders are represented by such sentiments. It’s use, then, the Critique of Judgment (1790) to present a possible justification for the assigning of the quality of the beautiful to woman and of the sublime to the man. Nowhere, it is intended to submit Observations under the critical perspective and vice-versa. However, the examination of the arguments disposed in the third critique allows to determine a relation between these works, because of the representation of genders by refined feelings of pleasure. To this end, it is use an assumption of the cultural character, namely, in the history of the West, the man appears related to culture, while the woman is in the context of nature.

From a reading of Transcendental Analytics on Critique of Pure Reason and of the Kantian answer to the question “What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?”, I discuss a supposed inconsistency in the demand for a concept of thing in itself.

This article takes a fresh look at relevant extracts from Kant’s first critique. The study emphasizes certain relations which link the Critique of Pure Reason with the German Philosopher’s later texts on politics, law and peace among peoples, nations and States. The aim of the analysis is to try to fight the repeated thesis that Kantian philosophy is a solipsist undertaking in origin, development and completion. The concluding section of the study is an attempt to give a satisfactory direction to the philosopher’s different alternatives in regard to lasting peace.

This article intend to elucidate how Wilhelm Windelband employed the Kantian critic method without devoid its typical features, going through this, what is fundamental for the approach from speculative reason to practical reason would be identified. We understand that practical reason, as a theoretical interest, is prefigured on the first critic, and that the Kantian system suffers mutations until his second critic formulation. Windelband’s critical view, can offer the tips of how to interpreter Kant’s passage from speculative to practical reason, observing the elements witch are kept, as constant elements, the third antinomy for stance, and witch one changes among the course, as the ideas of liberty and nature in both theoretical and practical sense. Windelband can unfold to notice those variations and help to understand them in the development of Kantian theories as elements not contradictories with the canon of speculative reason.

In this paper I discuss one of the main topics of the debate on Transcendental Arguments that took place since the 1960s: the uniqueness of conceptual schemes; and I relate the conclusions to Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, I discuss Körner’s statement of the main points and terminology, followed by Schaper’s justification of an internal examination of our conceptual scheme. Then, I examine Davidson’s proposal to abandon the scheme-and-content dualism. Finally, I take into account some viewpoints of J. E. Malpas’, whose approach to the debate led him to a comparison between Davidson’s holism and Kant’s dualism that I would like to challenge.

This paper shows the different perspectives of interpretation about the Kant’s work in Brazil between 1809 and 2009. This is an expanded version of the previous Introduction to Brazilian Work on Kant, D. Perez & Frederick Rauscher (eds.), North American Kant Society (Forthcoming).

It is often argued that while Kant grounds practical freedom in the idea of transcendental or absolute freedom in the Dialectic of the First Critique, he would have explicitly dissociated these concepts in the Canon. For, in contradiction with the Dialectic, Kant claims in the Canon that through experience we know practical freedom to be one of the natural causes and that the transcendental freedom could be left aside as irrelevant. These claims are usually interpreted in the light of the socalled “patchwork theory” as evidence of an inconsistency between the two sections of the First Critique and of a defense of a mere comparative, compatibilistic or even psychological concept of freedom by Kant in the Canon. In contradistinction to this widespread interpretation, I intend to provide an alternative interpretation of the Canon by showing that the concept of practical freedom contained in it is a genuinely incompatibilistic one and that this section can be reconciled with the Dialectic. Moreover, I intend to show that Henry Allison’s allegedly alternative interpretation is entirely misguided.

It is often overlooked that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is not just an enterprise to understand the transcendental function of synthetic a priori truths, but to give an analysis of propositions with empirical content, too. This means, that Kant’s enterprise is a semantical one in a much more challenging sense than the pure formal semantics after Tarski, Carnap, and Davidson, where the whole issue was a formal concept of truth as we use it already inside pure mathematics. Therefore, and only therefore, writers in this tradition can withdraw into different forms of (semantical) deflationism and merely pro-sentential theories of truth. The task of a full fledged semantics is, however, the clarification of the relation between language and the world. Kant’s semantical analysis of this relation starts with a reflection on Anschauung. I propose to reconstruct the object of such an Anschauung as the present field of observable things and movements. Kant then turns to the forms of judgements (as we know them more or less from traditional logic), and develops semantical categories and basic principles of pure understanding. They explicate, so to speak, how the categories are applied to the specific domain of the objective empirical world, mediated by possible Anschauung.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant describes time as the formal condition on which all phenomena are based upon. He considers it as a one-dimensional subject, that is not an empirical perception, which is given a priori and nothing else but the form of an inner sense. Elias contradicts this, as he differentiates between a social time and a physical time. He demands an understanding for the relation between time in ’society' and in ’nature'. Elias states that languages (he specifically mentions German) often don't have a word that would be equivalent to the English term “timing". For Elias ’time' is part of the fifth dimension, the dimension of symbols, of experience, of awareness. Only this makes it possible to find out and know what time really is in a social context, a specific synthesis of occurrences, that has to be learned in higher developed societies that are based on the division of labour. Elias mentions ’time', but he states that it's only a synchronisation of positions in the seriatim of events.

This article intends to discuss the Julio Esteves’s interpretation of the Canon of Critique of Pure Reason. According to Esteves, the moral theory outlined by Kant in the Canon is consistent with the concept of morality found in the Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason. I argue that reading is unsatisfactory and conclude that the Canon does not represent the Kant’s critical moral philosophy.

Kant’s early essay, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), is commonly regarded as an original contribution to the development of Newtonian cosmological ideas, and as a step in the evolution of Kant’s own thought. In this paper I try to show, firstly, that despite the recognised debt to Newton’s Principia, the young German thinker makes a personal philosophical synthesis of several ancient and modern sources of cosmological thought; secondly, that besides the novelty of the exposed conjectures about the mechanical production and systematic constitution of the Universe as a whole, and beyond the boldness of the proposed perspectives on the origins and continuous formation or creation of the Cosmos, this essay is also an interesting example of the manner how the young Kant works in such matters as cosmology and cosmogony. There, we can perceive and identify the epistemic presuppositions he puts in action, which are founded in the principle of analogy, used largely as a heuristic principle when the direct observation of phenomena is not possible or the propositions of natural philosophy cannot reach the mathematical precision and geometrical rigour.

In this paper I present an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty to a new conception of space. Looking to discuss how the work of Merleau-Ponty opposes the thesis established by classical thought about space, primarily in relation to Kant´s considerations.

This article deals with the importance that Foucault attributes to the Critic of Pure Reason, in his book, The Order of Things (1966). According to Foucault, the Critic occupies a symbolic place because of the problematic of finitude that this work inaugurates in the history of philosophy. First of all, Kant thinks about finitude from itself, and this differentiates him from Descartes, to whom this concept is referred to the infinite. Then, the Kantian finite transcendental subject is not an empirical one, in contrast to the modern analyses of finitude, which confuse the empirical with the transcendental. In this respect, the Critic does not belong to the Classical Age any longer, because it bypasses the representation. But it cannot be included in the modern analyses of finitude either, such as those of the naturalistic positivism, the dialectic, and the phenomenology. Foucault thus suggests that the Critic brings with itself the possibility of an anthropology, in the sense it is a thought that imparts a transcendental value to the empirical contents, even if it does not belong to them.

Na obra intitulada Universalismo e Direitos Humanos, o professor titular e diretor do Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade de Kiel, Wolfang Kersting, apresenta quatro textos de cunho eminentemente filosófico ético/político, perpassando os períodos da história da filosofia, apontando a contribuição do pensamento filosófico sobre determinado tema.

The real interest of the Kantian doctrine of categories lies in the thesis that only by being submitted to the pure concepts of understanding can objects be presented as objects. (B 164-5). Recently, the most authoritative research on infant cognition and infant object representations (Elizabeth Spelke, Susan Carey, Fei-Xu, Nancy N. Soja, Renée Baillargeon, amongst many others) has pointed out the infant’s possession of a concept of object largely antecedent to the acquisition of kind concepts. The main objective of this paper is to try to throw some new light on Kant´s doctrine of the categories by means of a comparison with the most general results of this recent psychological research on the subject. In spite of the fact that we could be tempted to consider Kant’s concepts of the object in general as having a function similar to the sortal role attributed by psychologists to the concept of object, we had better resist this temptation as long as Kantian semantics of the categories – so claims the paper – must be likened to the semantics of indexicals rather than to those of sortal terms.

In this paper, I present a new interpretation for Kant’s notion of a consciousness of oneself as Subject on behalf of a polemic with a recent reading suggested by Longuenesse (Longuenesse, 2006). My central aim is to provide a systematic interpretation of Kant’s metaphysics of consciousness in general. I present and defend new interpretations for four capital Kant’s notions. First, I present a reading of Kant’s sensible intuition as a de re form of mental representation without a conceptual content and without any structure. It makes the subject aware only in the limited sense of demonstratively representing of what appears to him. In the sequence, I present a reading of empirical consciousness as the result of a first-order representation. The important introduction of §16 of the first Critique <KrV> is construed here as expressing what is known today as the access consciousness. Lastly, I propose a new reading for the transcendental Apperception as an intransitive form of consciousness.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant presents virtue not as an arduous task, but as an endeavor, that costs a lot for the agent. In order to explain in what consists moral content, Kant tells a story of an honest man, to whom it is offered great gifts if he joins the calumniators of an innocent person, but he denies it. Then he is threatened by his friends, who deny him friendship, by his relatives, who deny him inheritance, and a prince who threatens him with loss of freedom and even life. If the man, whatever loss or pain he is threaten with, decides to be truthful, then he shows here the value of virtue. Moreover “yet virtue here worth so much because it costs so much, not because it brings any profit” (KpV, 5:156)1 . Virtue shows its worth, even to the youngest listener, because of his pureness and deserves approval and admiration, because moral actions were done without any pretension to happiness or even magnanimity. In this article, I analyze the idea of virtue in Kant and how it is related to the controlling of affects and passions. I begin by showing the relation between virtue and happiness and then I explore virtue as strength.

This paper deals the language relation between the aesthetic ought enclosed in the exemplary necessity of the common sense explicit in the Kant’s Critical of Aesthetic Judgement Faculty, especially in the Dialectic of aesthetic judgement faculty and those pointed in the Pragmatic Anthropology. The purpose is to check some points that promote the stage changing between the formal community of the Critical of Judgement and the cultural community of the Anthropology.