Questions tagged [kant]
Immanuel Kant was a German Enlightenment philosopher.
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Is there at least one essay focused on Kant's definition of "notions" as intermediary between idea(l)s and conceptions?
I tried Googling "Kant 'notions'" but that doesn't seem efficient (from the results I've gotten). I assume that he appealed to the word for its being originally cognate with noesis and the ...
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Does Kant think we have an imperfect duty to not take intoxicants?
I want to smoke a cigarette to feel better. I want to smoke opium to feel better.
I think we can ignore the consequences of everyone performing this action (in similar situations), mass addiction and ...
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What dictates how we phrase a maxim of a situation?
Can Kantian Maxims have more than one goal? Suppose I tell the murderer at the door that my mother is not home in order to save her life. That itself may be fine, but equally I am saying that in order ...
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According to Kant, are bad consequences of permitted actions imputable to the agent?
According to Kant, can permitted actions have culpable consequences?
bad consequences are not imputable to the agent who acts dutifully
Does that mean bad consequences are not "imputable" ...
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For Kant, how can we have moral autonomy if there's just one correct moral law?
What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is, the property of the will to be a law to itself?
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
So that in a nutshell is autonomy and freedom ...
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Kant's "interpret them as divine commands" remark
I was thinking about the idea of teleological/natural-law ethics as founded in the will of a divine power, and I thought that there would be (A) a purpose that this power had set for Itself alongside (...
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Does the Transcendental Dialectic destroy science?
Long story short, probably the most remarkable contribution of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the notion that the subject plays an important role on the definition of the object.
However, if the ...
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Are there any well-grounded moral systems that can't be manipulated to justify whatever decision its acceptant wishes?
In §26 of A Theory of Justice (1999 ed.), Rawls writes:
A problem of choice is well-defined only if the alternatives are suitably restricted by natural laws and other constraints, and those deciding ...
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Can there be such a thing as pure a priori thinking?
Having read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and in fact just finishing a second read after some time, I've been trying to develop a suitable "worldview" about the structure of the mind.
I ...
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Kant and ontological character of the mind
I have a basic understanding of Kant's philosophy which revolves mostly around how human mind synthesizes valid knowledge, that is, the forms of understanding unifying perceptions, and forms of ...
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Kant's remarks about the concept of time and the principle of noncontradiction
In the Transcendental Aesthetic he notes:
... I shall add that the conception of change, and with it the conception of motion, as change of place, is possible only through and in the representation ...
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Kant and "the causes of living"
Once upon a time, I was thinking about the argument for the justification of mass civilian killing that is read off a sense of collective responsibility in "evil nations," and wondered:
If ...
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What would it mean for time not to be real?
According to Kant, time is a pure intuition, meaning (in part) that its existence depends on the nature of human cognition. According to this doctrine, Other beings could in principle not experience ...
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To what extent is Nietzsche an "Idealist?"
I am well aware of Nietzsche's prolonged and often prolific critiques of what he referred to as "Idealism," yet I am curious as to the extent which two of his ideas in particular, namely ...
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Does "ought-implies-can" have to be taken for a universal material implication?
I was thinking of Quine's "change the logic, change the subject," saying, and thought over "change the deontic logic, change the deontic subject," and so then I wondered if deontic ...
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Categories of the Understanding
Kant's categories are supposed to tell us what kinds of judgments human minds are capable of making, but they are rather artificial. One commentator I've read says Kant was more concerned with filling ...
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Matter and form vs. noumena and phenomena
Aristotle says that the objects of experience are made up of matter which has taken up a form. This can be understood in a fairly unremarkable sense: in a statue of Aphrodite, the matter is marble, ...
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Problems with saying that our universe is physically closed (reformulating Kant's antinomies)
Initial caveat: some misapprehension seems to have arisen over my reference to physical sets. But in this, I am trying to follow the language of modern topology, which seems to be applied everywhere ...
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How is it Kant's view that lying is always wrong consistent with his view that killing in self-defense is permissable?
In his essay, "On the Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns" Kant seems to be arguing that lying is always wrong, even if it could save someone's life from a murderer. He ...
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Kant's commentary on the faculty of judgment: did he anticipate things like incompleteness/halting/truth-undefinability?
First, to cite the (Meiklejohn) version of the argument:
If understanding in general be defined as the faculty of laws or rules, the faculty of judgement may be termed the faculty of subsumption ...
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Did Kant believe that the a priori truths don't coincide with the necessary truths?
I just started to read about Kant's metaphysical distinction between analytic vs synthetic truths (necessary vs contingent) and his epistemological distinction between a priori vs a posteriori truths. ...
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Is there a preferred reading order for Kant's ethics?
I have followed a course on theoretical as well as on practical philosophy, so I feel at least somewhat familiar with Kant's metaphysical project.
I am primarily interested in his ethics. I've read ...
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Is Kant's talk of "homogeneity" the deeper point-of-contact between his theory of categories, and modern category theory?
The SEP article on category theory says:
Categories, functors, natural transformations, limits and colimits appeared almost out of nowhere in a paper by Eilenberg & Mac Lane (1945) entitled “...
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Is Kantian ethics silent on most complex moral questions?
The examples Kant gives for the application of the CI (categorical imperative) are relatively simple and unproblematic.
Of course, it's contentious to regard lying for the greater good as immoral, but ...
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What is the morality of offending with uncomfortable truths?
Say the child of an ultra conservative father is homosexual, has kept it quiet for years but is quite sure that their father finding out would cause severe amounts of shame and anxiety that he might ...
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What did Kant mean by "pure physics"?
Early in the Prolegomena, Kant says that both pure mathematics and pure physics are examples of a priori cognition. What exactly did he mean by "pure physics"?
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What is the justification for Deleuze's 3rd synthesis of time?
In Difference and Repitition by Deleuze, he comes up with 3 syntheses of time. The first being habitus, which is the conditioning of actual experience through pre-existing material patterns for the ...
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Kant and the Ship of Theseus
Does Kant's philosophy of perception and intuition imply that the unity of perceived individuals is an intuition? If so, this seems to resolve the various paradoxes of physical individuals such as the ...
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Kant's view on higher-dimensional geometry
According to Kant, geometry is possible because of our intuition of space. But, this intuition is presumably 3-dimensional, as we experience the world 3-dimensionally. So, how would higher-dimensional ...
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In moral-psychology terms, is it in vain, if not downright counterproductive, to compare inner moral issues to combat, esp. as per Kantian ethics?
Note: this question concerns the reason I started posting on this SE years ago, and has to do with my obsession with universal sets, anti-terms (antisets of late), the morality of punishment and ...
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Does Kant think that an evil God is a contradiction?
At one point in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant says:
So it is not surprising that an Apostle represents this invisible enemy, who is known only through his operations upon us and ...
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What does Kant mean by object of the senses in relation to pure geometry?
In studying Kant I am running into a problem. Kant refers to pure geometry as only having objective reality under the condition that it refers only to objects of the senses (Prolegomena, Note I). If ...
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Kant Critique of Pure Reason, how is time subjective to human intuition yet objective in regard to appearances?
I'm confused on a section in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant says "Hence time is merely a subjective condition of our (human) intuition (an intuition that is always sensible-- i.e. inasmuch as ...
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What is the difference between the thing-in-itself and substance? (Kant)
I have thought about this for a long time, but unfortunately still do not manage to understand how exactly the thing in itself differs from substance. I am aware that the thing in itself is something ...
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Is 'Critique of Pure Reason' a contradictory project? [closed]
Kant is using Pure Reason to critique Pure Reason. Is that not contradictory?
PS: I have not read the book yet.
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List of German books (mainly Kant) which are untranslated into English
I just got access to the new Bing and I really like it so far. It has translated works pretty well for me so far so I wanted to see if people had a list of books that they would like translated which ...
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Does Kant's scheme for the analytic/synthetic distinction have room for a (degenerate?) further distinction, for "hyperanalytical" knowledge?
Kant can be easily misread (or: I myself easily misread him, for a long time) as claiming that no "existence claims" are analytically knowable. Technically, though, his system has it that (...
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For Kant, why does temporal synthesis need to happen?
Taking our experience of time... this is how I understand what Kant is saying.
There's this non-temporal manifold of sensation. I am picturing it like the pages of a flipbook. Images in succession ...
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A concept of strong free will that's able to be represented in category theory?
Are there any such things as category theories where the category is an indeterminist/postdeterminist form of free will? Let's say, maybe it is a category where each object is an object of choice, ...
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Where does the type of practical reason fit into Kant's layered terminology?
At one point in the first Critique, Kant shoots off this list of stipulative definitions:
We are in no want of words to denominate adequately every mode of representation, without the necessity of ...
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What did Kant have to say about atomism?
I've been trying to understand whether on not Kant accepts the atomic model (that matter is composed of smallest pieces) based on his writings in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.
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Obligations to think well: are they to myself or for others?
Kant calls “the first command of all duties to oneself” – namely,
self-knowledge. Kant is concerned here not with knowing one’s
personality type, personal history, or potential talents. His concern
is ...
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Does Kant read the is/ought question in a way different from the "normal" reading?
First, to quote Hume:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the ...
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Is Kant speaking "in his own voice" or more "synoptically" in the casuistical sections of the Doctrine of Virtue?
Sometimes Kant is said to have held antiquated or at least weird views (and worse, to be honest) about various subjects, including things like certain sexual activities or perhaps more bizarre ...
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Having trouble understanding "not possible without" vs. "necessary for"
At face value for me these don't mean the same thing but I'm struggling to find if they are separate concepts. Are there examples where they differ? Are they or aren't they separate ideas? I can't ...
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Does (possibly) non-humans have a priori knowledge?
In the article “Absolute provability and the safe knowledge of axioms” by Timothy Williams
http://media.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/assets/pdf_file/0004/35338/provabilityfinal.pdf
The author notes
“However, ...
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What is the distinction between Gegenstand and Objekt?
In German philosophy (particularly Kant and Husserl), the concepts Gegenstand and Objekt (and their conjugations Gegenständlichkeit and Objektivität) are used to describe very different things while ...
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Help reconstructing argument
I saw the following argument in Paul Guyer's text "Kant" (Routledge). I am trying to reconstruct it, yet am not sure the of the form of the argument. Can anyone provide help?
If whenever ...
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Would the cofinitude relation be a more realistic parameter than the exclusivity one, in the formulation of the CI?
Since I read Gödel, Escher, Bach eleven years ago, in 2011, I figured that 2022 would be a poetic time for me to reread it. (If you’ve read the book, you should know what I mean, haha!) While I was ...
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Kant's transcendental apperception and 'ipseity' in phenomenology
In the writings of various phenomenologists, the concept of 'ipseity' is widely discussed. As far as I can make out from various sources (e.g. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, esp. chapter 5), ...
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