It is quite common when explicating the nature of Kant's break with the preceding Early Modern tradition to cite his attitude towards the acquisition and deployment of concepts. It is claimed that Kant sought to distinguish two tasks that had become unfortunately intertwined and conflated — explaining how we come to acquire our concepts on the one hand and showing how we are justified in deploying them in judgement on the other. This conflation can be expressed in terms of a conflation of the natural and the normative, of descriptive and prescriptive questions. The topic of the conditions of concept-possession, i.e. how we have come to possess the concepts that we do, is an entirely psychological inquiry, involving ‘natural’ descriptive inquiries. The topic of concept-deployment, the story about how we use our concepts in veridical judgements about the world, is an entirely philosophical question, since it involves the question of how we ought to deploy those concepts in judgement. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the normative is drawn by Kant, it is claimed, in order to distinguish these two practices of acquisition and deployment.The manner in which this claim is expressed is through Kant's distinction between the question of fact (quaestio facti) and the question of right (quaestio juris). I want to claim that a proper understanding of this distinction doesn't support this notion of Kant's ‘normative turn’. In fact, the distinction is best understood within an interpretation whereby Kant is understood as continuing to endorse the Early Modern conviction that the provision of a concept's possession-conditions is sufficient to determine that concept's deployment-conditions, and that the task of the Transcendental Deduction is to determine the possession-conditions for the Categories.
It is well known that at the heart of Kant's Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity [Vermögen]. It is also sometimes maintained that Kant's appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgment. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant's epistemology. A different conception of the role of spontaneity in judgment has clear precedents, I claim, in the works of Cudworth and Rousseau. There the imagined role for the active power of the mind is not to identify criteria that might serve as norms for epistemically responsible judgment. Rather the spontaneous power of the mind is cited as the source of representational contents that secure the truth conditions of our everyday claims to empirical knowledge.
Abstract:The difference between the method of metaphysics and the method of mathematics was an issue of central concern for Kant in both the Pre-Critical and Critical periods. I will argue that when Kant speaks of the 'philosophical method' in the Doctrine of Method in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), he frequently has in mind not his own methodology but rather the method of conceptual analysis associated with rationalism. The particular target is Moses Mendelssohn's picture of analysis contained in his submission for the 1763 Prize Essay competition. By the time of the first Critique, I argue, Kant wants to maintain his own longstanding commitment to the distinctness of the methods of metaphysics and mathematics. However, Kant wants to use this same analysis of the source of the distinction to diagnose the origins of the dogmatism that is engendered by the method of the rationalists.
Mandeville's first publication-the thesis Disputatio Philosophica de Brutorum Operationibus (1689)-advocated the Cartesian position that both denied feeling and sensation, let alone thought, to nonhuman animals and stressed the inherent distinctiveness of the conscious sensory and inferential capacities of human agents. Yet his later writings subscribed to a directly opposed Enlightenment position. His translation of La Fontaine's Fables drew comparisons between humans and animal throughout, and by the time of the Fable of the Bees, Mandeville was clearly in the camp stressing the continuity of human and nonhuman animal nature, a tradition following Hobbes, Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, and later to include Helvétius, de la Mettrie and Hume. The function of pride in Mandeville's ethics is examined in terms of this debate, framed by Bayle's famous 'Rorarius' entry in his Dictionary. With this background in place, Mandeville's claim regarding the psychological role of pride as the 'other Recompense…[of] the vain Satisfaction of making our Species appear more exalted and remote from that of other Animals' is then discussed. It is presented as a critique of Shaftesbury's discussion in the Characteristics relating to the norm of fulfilling one's human nature.
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