Quorant asked recently, "How is Wittgenstein related to both Kant and Hegel?". I answered: The early Wittgenstein, the author of the TRACTATUS, is very much a Kantian as to epistemology. His own linguistic epistemology is what you get if you try to adhere to Kant as closely as possible consistent with a rejection of Kant’s idea of “synthetic a priori” knowledge. Kant would be surprised at the notion that anyone CAN separate Kantianism from the synthetic a priori. But Wittgenstein, in a manner, pulls it off. Of that of which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein tells us, we must be silent. He was speaking here of the really real, of that which is beyond that conceptual tools in our minds that control what we can take in as "facts." As to the knowable world, what "is the case" is a fact, not a thing. It is provisionally or pragmatically real, not really real. A Hegel/Wittgenstein link? That is a different trick. You COULD try to see the movement from th...
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Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a fascinating and powerful thinker whom I do not think I discuss enough in this place. But someone asked a question on Quora thus: whether there was anyone who continued Nietzsche's work in something akin to the way in which Hegel continued that of Kant. There are many ways I might have gone about answering it. To be quite honest, the querent actually mentioned how "Kant" had continued the work of "Hegel". That is a chronological absurdity of course, so I presume that Kant (1724 -1804) and Hegel (1770 - 1831) were simply reversed in the question by typographical haste. If as I suspect the querent meant to ask about a continuance of Nietzsche in the manner of the continuance of Kant by Hegel, we also have to consider what kind of continuance THAT is. I infer that the querent meant not someone calling him/herself a Nietzschean and dedicated to exegesis of a Master, but someone who continued-with-a-difference. So I repl...
From the history of ancient philosophy that we discussed yesterday we now turn to the history of modern philosophy, because a distinguished intellectual historian concerned with the latter subject, and associated with the University of Notre Dame, passed away recently and we should note the fact. Karl Ameriks is best known for his work interpreting Immanuel Kant in particular and German idealism more generally. He is known as a critic of a strict anti-realist view of Kant (or of that broader tradition). Kant is less of an anti-realist than, say, George Berkeley, on his account. Not just a different sort of anti-realist, but less of one. To explain the relative degrees of anti-realism he had in mind, Ameriks invoked a distinction between "long" arguments and "short" arguments for idealism. Here is a short argument: Any experience I have must be an experience of mine. That which is mine is subjective -- i.e. it depends upon me. Therefore, any experience I have is s...
I quoted, yesterday, the Ivyberry passage from Tennyson's 1880 poem, De Profundis. Today I'd like to say something about what it means, which I will do beneath the image of (21st century) London at Christmas. Ivy berries (the phrase is not typically written as one word outside poetry) are symbolic of an ability to thrive even in difficult conditions. In the context of this poem, ivy berries appear right after a reference to grapes. Tennyson is writing from out of the depths of his own experience as, at this time, a man of 71. "Out of the depths," of course, is the literal English language meaning of the title. Anyway: young folk, strike out into the world! It is your own responsibility to choose between a life of leisure, drinking the fruit of the grape, and a more rigorous challenging life, symbolically drinking of the Ivyberry. W hatever you do, you will help express the fullness of God who is the fountain of which we are all but droplets. Soon t...
Somebody not long ago asked on Quora, "What is the meaning of Kant's statement, 'I have no need for that hypothesis' in his work Critique of Pure Reason?" Yes, the premise of the question is false. But I had fun putting together a reply, and I'll re-use it here, with slight cosmetic changes. Happy Thanksgiving. ----------------------------------- That is not a Kantian statement. It is one generally attributed to Laplace. And it doesn't come from a book of Laplace’s, either. It comes from a later book by a biographer of Napoleon, discussing a confrontation Laplace, an early 19th century big-shot politician, supposedly had with the Emperor Napoleon. (Kant does come into this story in an indirect way — but put a pin in that for a bit). Pierre-Simon Laplace was an astronomer and mathematician as well as a politician. While Napoleon was busy in Russia, Laplace wrote a great work on CELESTIAL MECHANICS which was seen in some quarters as the most important th...
In the history of opera many distinctive movements, one might even call them fashions, have come and gone. That known as bel canto continues to have its admirers among the cognoscenti and I will say a few words about it today. The phrase simply means "beautiful singing" in Italian. That is not a phase that comes or goes. Who could not want the singing to be beautiful? What bel canto generally means when used outside of vernacular Italian is (a) a particular style of singing that its admirers deem beautiful, and (b) the view that the rest of the opera exists mostly as a setting for that singing. The composers and lyricists behind that setting are expected to give the star vocalists plenty of opportunities for exhibitions of vocal gymnastics (coloratura --light agile soprano voices showing off their stuff). They were also supposed to discourage the orchestra from showing ITS stuff. To the mind of a bel canto enthusiast the orchestral accompaniment should be low-key and support...
A philosopher and theologian of some importance passed away on April 17. I refer to Robert M. Adams, long affiliated with the UNC Chapel Hill and with Rutgers. Adams gave the Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1998-99. This alone makes him worthy of note. The Gifford lectures have become legendary as a regular contribution by one or another significant scholar, each presented originally as a lecture series over the course of an academic year though put eventually into book form. The mandate from the will of the late Lord Gifford is that the lectures should "promote the knowledge of God" in "the widest sense." This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who have been honored with a Gifford invitation have included Josiah Royce, William James, Henri Bergson, Etienne Gilson, Samuel Alexander, Arthur Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Eccles, Simon Bla...
One would think (a priori) that Immanuel Kant would have had a lot to say about Baruch Spinoza. After all, Spinoza was a great exhibit A for the sort of dogmatic rationalism whence Kant thought he had been saved, awakened, by his reading of Hume. Spinoza was why rationalism had to go "critical" in order to be worth the attention of people who likewise have awakened from such slumber. But one finds that Spinoza is barely ever mentioned in Kantian texts at all. When Spinoza IS mentioned, it is in the philosophy-of-religion context. And therein lies a tale. Kant despised Spinoza's God concept. To identify God as nature is to make of God (Kant said) a non-being, a no-thing. In German, an Unding. Further, Kant seems to have believed that Spinoza was clear on this point: he was an atheist who obscured the subject and denied his atheism by his tricky redefinition of terms. This matters to Kant in part because Kant doesn't believe atheists as such can be morally good, yet ...
Derek Parfit's book, ON WHAT MATTERS, published in two volumes in 2011, acquired a third volume from his posthumous writings, in 2017 (he died on the very first day of that year). The book was much anticipated, generating both discussion groups and an academic conference in advance of its 2011 publication. Parfit's thesis, in short, is that there are three distinct moral theories and that, if each is pursued rigorously, it ends up in concord with the other two. Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, and contractualism are all different paths on different slopes of the same mountain. They lead to the same behavior: that is, the paths come together at the summit. That's a bold claim. Decoded (in accord with pragmatism) it means that the differences turn out to be merely conceptual not practical. A right-thinking Kantian and a right-thinking proponent of either of the other views will do the same thing at the notorious trolley switch. Today I will merely say a few wor...
Immanuel Kant is a giant in the history of philosophy. He is remembered as the leading exponent of deontological ethics; as the inventor of a sort of transcendental idealism that breaks both with Plato's objective and Berkeley's subjective idealism; and a proponent of keeping Christianity within the realm of reason (a determination that really ticked off poor Kierkegaard, among others.) G.W.F. Hegel is another giant. He is remembered for sticking yet another modifier in front of "idealism." No objective, subjective, or transcendental -- it is Absolute Idealism that was his brand. The line from Kant to Hegel is contested terrain. The figures in between, especially Fichte and Schelling, are generally treated as exactly that, as in between figures, as transitions. Historians of 19th century German idealism debate how those intermediaries brought Kantianism to the point of becoming Hegelianism. Markus Gabriel has a different view. In his 2013 book, TRANSCENDENTAL ...
"At the end of our books about God, those of us who are not Kantians will discuss how it is that we human beings can think and speak about God. That for us is an important matter of intellectual curiosity, But it is not a matter of agony. We empathize with those who experience the Kantian agony; but we do not share it. If one believes that one's car is in good working order, one does not spend the whole day under the hood to determine whether it could possibly be in good working order, and if so how." So wrote Nicholas P. Woltenstorff, at the end of his essay "Conundrums of Kants' Rational Religion (1991). That was a contribution to an anthology -- I won't give you the title of the full book, just to give you a job to do. The metaphor of driving a car here here refers to the fact of having and discussing ideas about God, such as "God's grace is necessary for salvation." Kant had such ideas, and expressed them in some of his writings that p...
AT least in an early phase of his own academic career, Allen W. Wood had a high opinion of Kant's book, RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE. In contrast to much of the voluminous literature on that somewhat idiosyncratic item in the Kant canon, Wood thought the book consistent with Kant's three great Critiques as well as consistent with the historical monotheistic faiths. Wood wrote, "It would be a great mistake to see in the God of Kant's moral faith no more than an abstract, metaphysical idea. For Kant, moral faith in God ... is the moral man's trust in God." Wood, KANT'S MORAL RELIGION (1970). Wood seemed later to change his view, in two seminal articles in the early 1990s. Who is Allen Wood, you ask? A philosopher born in Seattle in 1942 who has taught at Cornell, Yale, and Stanford.
I'm writing about this because I'm not sure I understand it. Corrections of my stupidity are more than usually welcome. Five points: 1. "Taste," for Kant, is the act of deciding whether something is or isn't beautiful. (Not "sublime," another matter I'll stay away from here.) 2. For something to be beautiful, it must offer "disinterested satisfaction." Presumably, a heterosexual man who finds a woman "beautiful" has an "interest" in mind, consciously or not. Because it is not DIS interested, then sexual appeal is NOT "beauty" in the Kantian sense. On the other hand an image of abstract art, or perhaps a musical motif, may be considered beautiful, and those are both a better candidates for satisfying the test of disinterest than our beautiful woman in the "male gaze." 3. The fact that one takes pleasure (that is, the grounds of one's taste) is not completely subjective. If I find a mus...
A well-known popularizer of philosophy has passed away. Bryan Magee died on July 16 in a hospital after a long illness. Magee was the author of MEN OF IDEAS (1982), PHILOSOPHY AND THE REAL WORLD (1985), CONFESSIONS OF A PHILOSOPHER (1997), and WAGNER AND PHILOSOPHY (2001), etc. He was a great popularizer of philosophy for non-academic audiences, adept at breaking down complex problems into their component parts and presenting them in ordinary (and non-patronizing!) prose. It was Magee's view that Immanuel Kant brought about "the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy," and that Kant was right to compare it to the turning produced by Copernicus in astronomy. Magee wrote, "Because of the fundamental character of these problems [unearthed by Kant], and because Kant did not solve them, confronting them has been the most important challenge to philosophy ever since." However well expressed it may be, I don't believe that. ...
As a matter of the psychology of emotions, or for that matter of moral philosophy: is agent regret the same thing as guilt? Jake Wojtowicz, a philosophy PhD student at King's College in London, thinks not. That is the subject of his ongoing dissertation work, and the subject of a lot of the tweets in his twitter account too. It has taken me some time to come to grips with the terminology. "Agent regret" doesn't mean, "regret that one has hired the wrong agent," which is presumably what Britney Spears feels toward -- just about any agent she's ever had. Agent regret means regrets about one' actions in one's capacity as a moral agent. "Oh, damn, I cheated that poor soul. Terrible thing I did," Is that the same as guilt? The case that it isn't the same as guilt is apparently that agent regret is acquired by looking at one's self as if from the outside, whereas true guilt is more of an internal matter. This seems to be mix...
In 2010, Cambridge University Press published KANT'S THEORY OF VIRTUE, by Anne Margaret Baxley, of Washington University, St. Louis. Kant of course is generally considered the foremost exponent in the western canon of deontological ethics, the view that good and bad are subordinate to right and wrong, and hat right/wrong are defined by duties, imperatives, things human beings as rational creatures must or cannot do, damning the consequences. Baxley says, though, that Kantian thinking goes beyond that. Kant has a worked-out view of human character, or virtue, logically separate from his well-known view of duty, We generally associate "virtue ethics" with Aristotle, just as we associate deontology with Kant and consequentialism with Bentham. If one were going to teach a very abbreviated ethics course, one might focus it on those three, and then if allowed time for a fourth, throw in John Stuart Mill and his differences with Bentham to show that consequentialisms ar...
I somewhat regret having been so perfunctory in my discussion of Kant in my book on the history of modern philosophy. I've been making up for that lately on Quora, posting repeatedly on matters Kantian. Here I am getting all pedantic full throttle when another Quora denizen asked the meaning and significance of the phrase "synthetic a priori." ---------------- There are two different dichotomies involved. First, for Kant, (following Hume here), some propositions are synthetic and others are analytic. Roughly speaking, synthetic propositions refer to the objective world, whereas analytic propositions describe the concepts/tools that I may use to grapple with the world. In other words, if we think of knowing-the-world as watching a football game, then synthetic means “about the game and its outcome,” whereas analytic means “about what counts as a ‘point’ and what counts as a ‘win’ etc.” Secondly, taking from thinkers like Leibniz, Kant sees so...