This long-awaited volume is an impressive collection on Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology from a no-less impressive range of contributors. Tobias Rosefeldt argues that a realist account of Kant’s metaphysics can accommodate the problem of noumenal affection; Desmond Hogan argues that Schopenhauer perceived that Kant’s account of space and time related to the latter’s handling of the principle of sufficient reason; Lucy Allais develops her reading of Kant’s non-conceptualism by arguing that the categories are conditions of possible determinate representations of an object; Stefanie Grüne’s paper develops a kind of Kantian non-conceptualism through a sophisticated reading of how the categories are first formed; Jessica Leech also appeals to the notion of concept-formation in order to explore a possible transcendental argument for the validity of Kant’s modal principles; Timothy Rosenkoetter discusses how Kant distinguishes ways in which human minds can grasp the obviousness of a priori truths; Dina Emundts argues that Kant’s notion of self-consciousness has to be construed as one that enables knowledge of the self as a real existing thing; Anja Jauernig argues that Kant’s mature theory of space’s structure is akin to Leibniz’s mature one in claiming that space (and the bodies within it) are ideal and infinitely divisible; Clinton Tolley develops an interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism by adapting Fregean concepts; Karl Schafer gives a detailed analysis of Kant’s notion of cognition and argues that it is compatible with a claim that we have some general knowledge of things in themselves; Ralf Bader argues that the relationship between noumena and phenomena ought to be modelled as a multiple-domain supervenience relation; Nicholas Stang addresses the claims of the identity or non-identity of appearances and things in themselves and argues that each claim is correct if aligned respectively with Kant’s distinction between ‘thing’ and ‘object’; Andrew Chignell argues that metaphysical properties that things in themselves ‘really’ have and properties that they merely appear to have are best appreciated in the case of moral properties, which have elements of both and which therefore ‘straddle’ the phenomenal/noumenal divide; Uygar Abaci takes up the issue of whether practical cognition in Kant’s moral philosophy can lay claim to being genuine cognition, despite it lacking sensible intuition as a component, and concludes that it can; Colin Marshall argues that for Kant normative claims ought properly to be explained, metaethically speaking, as claims regarding the functioning of the faculty of reason in human beings, ultimately constituting a reductive view.
This volume also includes an impressive introduction from Schafer and Stang, one which attempts not only to take stock of the historical moment in which Kant studies currently finds itself but also to ask where it could go next. Before picking a couple of papers for discussion – they are all of a high quality - one should perhaps say something about this context. In the latter half of the 20th century, Allison, Bird, and others insisted that the point of the critical project was (as Allison memorably put it) not the establishment of an alternate ontology but an alternative to ontology. Metaphysical notions, this reading claimed, were nothing but a familiar language describing what were in reality epistemic achievements, and talk of things in themselves belied its surface grammar and in fact expressed nothing but the semantic and epistemic limitations to our cognitive achievements. Earnest metaphysical speculation was curtailed not out of Lockean humility, but because the very idea of metaphysical speculation was incoherent.
It is hard to look back now and not feel the need to remind Kantian Review’s younger readers of some of the context of that reading. It was sometimes held in those benighted days that the goal of philosophy was to display philosophical problems as pseudo-problems, that philosophy of language was at one point thought philosophy enough, and in general anti-realism about meaning and truth occupied people’s minds to an inordinate degree. Today, Kant’s works are often viewed as properly understood only if taken as sincerely concerned with real metaphysical problems, ones that cannot be reduced to examinations of forms of language or styles of thinking, and are full of metaphysical speculations as to what is the case at the fundamental ontological level. Kant’s Lockean restrictions are meant to be a mere curtailment on the theoretical excesses of what can look like a straightforwardly post-Leibnizean vision of non-spatial substances with causal powers. And of course, this return to metaphysics should be no surprise, sociologically speaking. While the spirit of mid-20th century philosophy was often anti-metaphysical, since then Kripke, Stalnaker, Lewis, Sider, and others have rendered earnest metaphysical modelling the default approach to such questions. Kant studies are no less than any other area of philosophy their own time apprehended in thoughts. ‘O tempore, o mores!’ future historiographers of philosophy will cry.
As the editors themselves state, it is probably time for the pendulum to swing back a little – one admirable feature of the epistemological reading was that it stressed that the first Critique was an exercise in thinking about the status of metaphysical statements. It does not follow from this that it cannot also be an exercise in metaphysics. Yet the converse is also the case – even if one does not hold the epistemological reading (I personally do not) any metaphysical reading worth its salt should still include this metaphilosophical dimension, i.e., that the first Critique is a reflection on the meaning of metaphysics as well as an occasion of it. However, if one accepts this point, then a further one emerges. As work by Allison, Pippin, and others stressed, Kant seemed to hold that the ‘tribunal of reason’ that determines the meaning and truth conditions of metaphysical statements recognized no authority external to itself. It cannot then – at least so it seemed to Kant’s immediate successors – take instruction from some prior metaphysical image of reality. This methodological constraint must be somehow squared with the idea that there was nonetheless a metaphysical vision already in Kant’s mind that he aimed to vindicate through the critical system. At the very least, we should be on guard about readings that present transcendental idealism’s epistemology merely as the overture to a sotto voce monadology.
An admirable aspect of the editors’ introduction is that it anticipates concerns such as these, especially since no contribution in the volume actually addresses the justification for this change of interpretative approach. They are sensitive to the thought that the collection might be taken to be a declaration of the hegemony of the metaphysical reading of transcendental idealism, or that the topics addressed here might be thought to be canonical of what is at stake in considering Kant’s metaphysics. Many of the topics concern the issue of the relationship between concepts and intuitions, the nature of appearances, the kinds of realism on offer from Kant, etc. These topics, the editors know, have been explored by many of their contributors for a good two decades by now, and they are aware of the risks of unintended prescriptiveness. The collection does not include that much on the metaphysical themes from the Transcendental Dialectic for instance, and one would expect discussions of the character of space, time, timelessness, causation, infinity, the concept of the universe, etc., as explored in that part of the first Critique to be just as central to Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics. There is only one paper on Kant’s metaphysics of the self; similarly, there is not that much on the method of metaphysics and its relationship to science. An edited collection cannot do everything, but it is worth considering the topics that are not considered in it as having as much potential for new research than the ones explored here.
The editors also take an appropriately cautious attitude even on the issue of just what constitutes the distinction between an epistemological and a metaphysical reading of transcendental idealism. A helpful proposal they make is that the metaphysical readings take noumenal discourse at ‘face value’ (p. 3). Any language one uses here has its pitfalls. One might think that, short of denying this dimension to Kant’s analysis, all readings must take Kant as sometimes concerned to debunk the face value character of noumenal discourse, e.g. insofar as there might be a natural temptation to conceptualize it in terms of schematized categories. One might wonder just what is so Kantian about taking discourse at face value anyway, since it is not as if Kant is asking us to take phenomenal discourse at face value. The antics of medium-sized dry goods are explained from a philosophical point of view as outputs of rule-like synthesizing practices of a timeless subject acting upon its own mental representations. Whatever else this is, it is not taking the judgements made in empirical realist mode, of ships moving downstream, etc. at face value. It is rather insisting that if we say something very much opposed to our first-order realist perceptual intuitions at the transcendental level, then we might subsequently be able to sustain the truth-evaluability of face-value judgments at the level of ordinary experience. It might then seem an odd manoeuvre to see transcendental idealism’s concessions to intuitiveness made just so that one can then fall back into a face value mode of discourse at the noumenal level. This raises the question as to just what the metaphilosophical stakes in taking noumenal discourse at face value are supposed to be. It would be strange if it were nothing but a lingering fondness for homely concepts to apply without qualification or paraphrase at the fundamental ontological level, given that one has surely already accepted the qualification that the domain in question is neither spatial nor temporal just in order to secure this result. The stakes for Kant were surely practical ones, though the secondary literature’s interest in characterizing the noumenal is often theoretical.
I make these remarks just to make more explicit the kind of metaphysical outlook presupposed by some of the papers in the volume. This volume is nevertheless a testament to the exciting work going on under that presupposition, and I’ll single out just a couple of those contributions here. Clinton Tolley’s chapter is a fascinating development of his view of appearances as Fregean senses. Of course, Kant was not troubled as to how judgements of identity can be informative or why judgements with the same referent are not obviously substitutable into salva veritate; and so the issue arises as to what Kantian question Fregean sense is supposed to answer. Tolley sees Kant as recognizing the need for a theory of representation to involve a three-place relation between the subject, the representation, and the object that the representation determines. Most phenomenalist readings, he claims, inevitably collapse the latter two relata in a metaphysical sense, but offer few resources to explain how the Kantian subject is supposed even to differentiate the two things notionally, i.e. grasping the very distinction between the representation and what is represented by it. If we take it that Kant does have a theory of intentional representation, then it must be that his theory of representation is one that accommodates the intentionality of representation in its structure. Tolley’s view is that we should re-imagine what transcendental idealism looks like if we take seriously that Kant had such an account, and that the Fregean sense/reference distinction can in many ways be appropriately mapped onto an appearance/empirical reality distinction as a result.
Skipping over the details, the significance of this reading is obvious – it points towards a very different consideration of the nature of Kant’s transcendental idealism, one whereby the appearances are ideal but are not themselves empirically real – there is still a principled connection between appearances and empirical reality, but what is empirically real is now what is determined through appearances. What’s more, empirically real causes and substances emerge as the things we determine through appearances. If only appearances are mind-dependent then it looks like the empirically real and the transcendentally real come closer than one might have ever thought, since an unusual aspect of Tolley’s reading is that the appearance seems to be aligned with the sense, but the thing in itself is aligned with reference. It seems then that – since cognition entails reference – in cognizing a spatiotemporal object one will secure reference to a thing in itself as a consequence of referring to empirical reality. But then it seems (to me at least) that since we do not have cognition of things in themselves, there arises an unusual triad: I can cognize appearances, and appearances entail reference to things in themselves, but I cannot cognize things in themselves. Similarly, it must be the case that although the thing we cognize secures reference, the things we cognize are not the things to which we refer. The limits of the Fregean analogy are important here since it also seems unusual to think that things in themselves are the truth values of (say) the spatiotemporal judgements I make regarding appearances, as they would be if the analogy were a strict one. I raise these issues just to point to the interesting new ways in which we might think about transcendental idealism and metaphysical realism if we explore Tolley’s view.
A second excellent chapter is Uygar Abaci’s on Kant on practical cognition. A long-standing concern in Kant’s overall critical project is his sanguine attitude towards the possibility of practical cognition given his apparent previous restriction of the possibility of theoretical cognition to occasions where there is some contribution of intuition. Since this condition seems to be lacking in practical cases, cognition looks impossible here by the demands of Kant’s own system. Moreover, Kant surely strove to put the likely targets beyond the domain of possible intuition, making it even more puzzling as a strategy for making room for practical cognition. Abaci resists thinking of intuition as a formal condition on cognition and instead argues that cognition requires the more general conditions that there be a really possible object presented to consciousness and that the representation of that object be a conscious and determinate one. Intuition is one way in which an object can be presented to consciousness, but Abaci shows how Kant intended for the conditions to be satisfiable beyond the context of intuition. The paper should in my view be standard reading for any course trying to understand how Kant’s moral philosophy operates within and beyond the restrictions of his theoretical philosophy.
To my mind, Abaci’s chapter raises questions for Kant’s approach more clearly than they have been raised before. For example, that practical cognition has an ‘object’ is possible once we grasp (with Engstrom and others) that ‘the object is both existentially and formally dependent on our representation of it’ (p. 372). That this might be the case when the practical object is an imperative is perhaps understandable, if we think of that imperative as deriving from and so not identical with the moral law. But it is harder to understand whether it applies to the moral law itself, since many would deny that the moral law is dependent upon our representation of it. If it does not apply to the moral law itself, and if the moral law is independent of our representation of it, then it is not a possible object of cognition. Later, Abaci quotes the Logic, where Kant says that the objects of practical cognition can be either imperatives or the grounds of possible imperatives (p. 374). Few would want freedom, qua ground of possible imperatives that we can practically cognize, to be itself an object that depends existentially on our representation of it. It is hard then to see how Kant can hold on to the distinction between theoretical and practical cognition in terms of the distinction between an object’s existential independence and existential dependence upon representation respectively.
Again, this is an excellent collection – I could have picked any of the papers to show the rewards to be had from reading this volume in its entirety. A few errors caught my unskilled proofreader’s eye. One, on p. 369, has: ‘theoretical reason at least opens up the logical for the ideas of supersensible’, where perhaps ‘space’ or ‘possibility’ was intended after ‘logical’. Another is on p. 265, where the discussion is of Leibniz’s ‘Meditations on Cognition, Truth, and Ideas’: ‘Leibniz defines a clear representation as follows: “a clear notion is like the one an assayer has of gold…”’. However, Leibniz’s line here concerns the criterion of distinctness and the text in fact runs: ‘a distinct notion is like the one an assayer has of gold…’ etc. (A VI, 4, 586-587/AG, 24).
