Abstract

This is the Dawes Hicks Lecture on Philosophy for 1967. Interestingly enough the previous year's Lecture, by G. J. Warnock, was also on Kant's moral theory. Körner is a bit more reverential toward his subject than Warnock, but not too much more. In particular, he criticizes Kant's exclusion of freedom from the realm of phenomena. This is a familiar criticism but Körner does not merely state it. He firms it up by offering a different account of the relation between categoreal and phenomenal intelligibility. Kant regarded the latter as simply an expression, albeit confused, of the former: science, with an assist from transcendental logic, could be expected to recapitulate exhaustively the intelligibility of phenomenal experience in categoreal and, most importantly, deterministic terms. Körner's account of the relation between these two forms of intelligibility stresses, on the contrary, the logical discontinuity between the two. In the language of contemporary philosophy of science, the relation between experience and theory is instrumental. Körner has developed his basic argument more clearly and sophisticatedly in the last two chapters of his Experience and Theory, and his application in this lecture of its essentials to Kant, although certainly appropriate, is not very smooth. It is cluttered up with a lot of miscellaneous observations which could be harmonized in a longer study of Kant but only tend to distract here.--E. A. R.