Let me start with a well-known story. Kant held that logic and conceptual analysis alone cannot account for our knowledge of arithmetic: “however we might turn and twist our concepts, we could never, by the mere analysis of them, and without the aid of intuition, discover what is the sum [7+5]” (KrV, B16). Frege took himself to have shown that Kant was wrong about this. According to Frege’s logicist thesis, every arithmetical concept can be defined in purely logical terms, and (...) every theorem of arithmetic can be proved using only the basic laws of logic. Hence, Kant was wrong to think that our grasp of arithmetical concepts and our knowledge of arithmetical truth depend on an extralogical source—the pure intuition of time (Frege 1884, §89, §109). Arithmetic, properly understood, is just a part of logic. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that Kantian analytic judgments are about objects (as opposed to concepts) against two challenges raised by recent scholars. First, can it accommodate cases like “A two-sided polygon is two-sided”, where no object really falls under the subject-concept as Kant sees it? Second, is it compatible with Kant’s view that analytic judgments make no claims about objects in the world and that we can know them to be true without going beyond the given concepts? I address these (...) challenges in two steps. First, given Kant’s distinction between an object in general = x from an object of sensible intuition, I argue that analytic judgments are about objects in the former sense, no matter whether the purported objects can be given in our intuition. Second, using Kant’s method of representing certain logical relations of concepts with such figures as circles, I construct a model to show that analytic truths are truths about objects in general = x and yet can be determined solely by the intensional relation between the given concepts plus certain Kantian-logical laws. Analytic truths are thus shown as formal in the Kantian sense that they do not presuppose the purported objects as givable in our intuition. This account of the formality of analytic truths captures Kant’s diagnosis of the Leibnizian illusion that we can make material claims about the world by analytically true judgments. (shrink)

Neo-logicism is, not least in the light of Frege’s logicist programme, an important topic in the current philosophy of mathematics. In this essay, I critically discuss a number of issues that I consider to be relevant for both Frege’s logicism and neo-logicism. I begin with a brief introduction into Wright’s neo-Fregean project and mention the main objections that he faces. In Sect. 2, I discuss the Julius Caesar problem and its possible Fregean and neo-Fregean solution. In Sect. 3, I raise (...) what I take to be a central objection to the position of neo-logicism. In Sect. 4, I attempt to clarify how we should understand Frege’s stipulation that the two sides of an abstraction principle qua contextual definition of a term-forming operator shall be “gleichbedeutend”. In Sect. 5, I consider the options that Frege might have had to establish the analyticity of Hume’s Principle: The number that belongs to the concept F is equal to the number that belongs to the concept G if and only if F and G are equinumerous. Section 6 is devoted to Frege’s two criteria of thought identity. In Sects. 7 and 8, I defend the position of the neo-logicist against an alleged “knock-down argument”. In Sect. 9, I comment on Frege’s description of abstraction in Grundlagen, §64 and the use of the terms “recarving” and “reconceptualization” in the relevant literature on Fregean abstraction and neo-logicism. I argue that Fregean abstraction has nothing to do with the recarving of a sentence content or its decomposition in different ways. I conclude with remarks on global logicism versus local logicisms. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically discuss Frege’s philosophy of geometry with special emphasis on his position in The Foundations of Arithmetic of 1884. In Sect. 2, I argue that that what Frege calls faculty of intuition in his dissertation is probably meant to refer to a capacity of visualizing geometrical configurations structurally in a way which is essentially the same for most Western educated human beings. I further suggest that according to his Habilitationsschrift it is through spatial intuition that we (...) come to know the axioms of Euclidean geometry. In Sect. 3, I argue that Frege seems right in claiming in The Foundations, §14 that the synthetic nature of the Euclidean axioms follows from the fact that they are independent of one another and of the primitive laws of logic. If the former were dependent on the latter, they would be analytic in Frege’s sense of analyticity. But then they would not be independent of one another and due to their mutual provability would lose their status as axioms of Euclidean geometry, since according to Frege an axiom of a theory T is per definitionen unprovable in T. I further argue that only by invoking pure spatial intuition can Frege “explain” the epistemological status of the axioms of Euclidean geometry completely: their synthetic a priori nature. Finally, I argue that his view about independence in The Foundations, §14 seems to clash with his conception of independence in his mature period. In Sect. 4, I scrutinize Frege’s somewhat vague, but unduly neglected remarks in The Foundations, §26 on space, spatial intuition and the axioms of Euclidean geometry. I argue that for the sake of coherence Frege should have said unambiguously that space is objective, that it is independedent not only of our spatial intuition, but of our mental life altogether including our judgements about space, instead of encouraging the possible conjecture that in his view it contains an objective and a subjective component. I further argue that for Frege the objectivity of both space and the axioms of Euclidean geometry manifests itself in our universal and compulsory acknowledgement of the Euclidean axioms as true. I conclude Sect. 4 by arguing that there is a conflict between the subjectivity of our spatial intuitions as stressed in The Foundations, §26 and Frege’s thesis in his dissertation that the axioms of Euclidean geometry derive their validity from the nature of our faculty of intuition. To resolve this conflict, I propose that in the light of his avowed realism in The Foundations Frege could have replaced his early thesis by saying that although we come to know the axioms of Euclidean geometry through spatial intuition and are justified in acknowledging them as true on the basis of geometrical intuition, their truth is independent not only of the nature of our faculty of intuition and singular acts of intuition, but of our mental processes and activities in general, including the inner mental act of judging. In Sect. 5, I argue that Frege most likely did not adopt Kant’s method of acquiring geometrical knowledge via the ostensive construction of concepts in spatial intuition. In contrast to Kant, Frege holds that the axioms of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry express state of affairs about space obtaining independently of our spatial intuition. In Sect. 6, I conclude with a summarized assessment of Frege’s philosophy of geometry. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of constitutivity and normativity in Frege’s conception of logic. It outlines an historical interpretation with two goals. First, it traces these concepts back to their origins in Kant’s philosophy. Second, it considers some of the different ways in which the issue of normativity and its proper grounding was addressed in the neo-Kantian tradition and in early analytic philosophy. Some neo-Kantians worked out an epistemic-normative conception of objective judgment, according to which the objectivity of cognition is (...) constituted by distinctively logical norms. In Frege we find an original and sophisticated version of this line of thought. For Frege, the normative and constitutive roles of logic come to the fore in the articulation of scientific reason which follows the classical model of demonstrative science as cognitio ex principiis. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus then opens up a fresh Kantian perspective on the constitutivity of logic, one that grounds logic in structure rather than norms, and does so in conscious opposition to Frege and his normative science. Logic is transcendental, according to Wittgenstein, being the essence of the world and of all description. Hence, the normative function of logic becomes, in a way, superfluous. (shrink)

Over the past decade, scholarship on Kant’s practical philosophy has developed from a one-dimensional focus on his objective normative doctrines toward a more richly textured engagement with his views of character, virtue, and subjective moral consciousness. A significant contribution to this trend is made by G. Felicitas Munzel’s new study of the formal notion of character running throughout Kant’s mature works. As Munzel notes, the exhaustive attention that has long been focused on the Groundwork’s justification of fundamental moral principles has (...) obscured the equally crucial issue “of what it means for the human subject concretely to actualize such moral insight”. In Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, she provides a meticulously detailed and multi-dimensional answer to this question. Her book argues “not only that [Kant] has a very rich notion of moral character, but also that it is a conception of systematic importance for his thought, linking the formal moral with the critical, aesthetic, anthropological, and biological aspects of his philosophy”. While the book is almost entirely devoted to the latter exegetical aim, Munzel’s larger purpose is to highlight the gulf between Kant’s conception of moral character and the Aristotelian conception that underlies much recent philosophical work in virtue theory. By demonstrating the possibility of a notion of character focusing on the principled, rigorously controlled conduct of thought, she wants to present the Kantian account as one capable of contributing to contemporary debates about character, virtue, and moral education. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of conceptual content, object cognition, and modal constraints in the form of counterfactual sustaining causal laws. It is an idea that extends from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason through C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order to the Kantian naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars and the analytic pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Kant put forward what I characterize as a modal conception of objectivity, which he developed as (...) an extended argument stretching from the transcendental deduction through the analogies of experience to the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. In related ways in Lewis and Sellars, the very idea of an object of knowledge (and of intentionality more generally) is connected with a certain lawfulness or modal constraint the necessary representation of which, they argue, is an achievement of conceptualization. While Sellars agreed with the spirit of Lewis’s famous pragmatic conception of the a priori, Sellars’s conception of meaning and conceptual content differed in crucial ways with important consequences for this issue. I argue furthermore that a certain phenomenalist temptation threatens to spoil this insight both among some of Kant’s interpreters and in Lewis’s thought. Finally, I point out that Brandom’s “Kant-Sellars thesis” provides new support for this line of thought. Although questions concerning idealism continue to raise controversies for neo-Kantians and pragmatists, the line of thought itself represents a distinctive and still promising approach to questions concerning intentionality and conceptual content. (shrink)

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in (...) his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object. (shrink)

In the 'Critique of Pure Reason' Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of “containment,” a second time in terms of “identity,” a third time in terms of the explicative–ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of “cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction.” The paper asks: Which of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—best captures Kant’s conception of analyticity in the first Critique? It suggests: “the second.” It argues, further, that (...) Kant’s distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject–predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction’s meaning, its epistemology, and its tenability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Concepts, Judgments, and Unity in Kant's Metaphysical Deduction of the Relational Categories CHARLES NUSSBAUM 1. INTRODUCTION TO ANY ATTENTIVEREADERof the section of the Critique of Pure Reason' known as the "Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories" (A67/B92-A83/B to9), one paragraph in that section stands out particularly by virtue of its special importance for Kant's developing argument: The same function Which gives unity to the various representations in ajudgment also gives (...) unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in general.... (CPR A79/B loS) The importance of this paragraph is, however, more than equaled by its difficulties, which center on the question of how the function which operates by means of analytical unity can be the same as one that operates by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold of intuition in general. Put shortly, the problem is this. If the functions are really the same, then how do we distinguish at all between analytic and synthetic operations? But if they are different, then how can these forms of judgment serve as a clue for the discovery of the categories? ' Immanuel Kant, Critiqueof Pure Reason, trans. Norman KempSmith (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1963).Hereafter CPR. [89] 9~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:1 JANUARY 1990 The results of this dilemma which can be observed in the literature are not surprising: commentators tend to grasp one horn or the other. They either emphasize the difference between analysis and synthesis, and reject or dilute the claims as to sameness of function; or they take seriously Kant's argument concerning sameness of functions, and try to minimize the difference between analysis and synthesis. The major twentieth-century representant of the former approach is Kemp Smith," and of the latter, Paton. 3 This latter approach has found a formidable contemporary champion in the person of Henry Allison. By Allison's own admission,4 however, his position on this controversial topic was suggested (in part) by arguments first put forward over fifty years ago by Klaus Reich in a most remarkable book entitled Die Volls~ndigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel, 5 a book, by the way, also greatly admired by Paton. 6 In the first section of this paper I will try to show that Reich's arguments are rather more subtle than Allison apparently takes them to be, and that Reich is one commentator who attempts to go between the horns of the dilemma described above, and who essays an interpretation of our crucial paragraph that unifies its seemingly divergent tendencies. In the second section of the paper I will introduce some interpretive elements of my own. 2. Let us begin by reacquainting ourselves with Kant's notion of analytical unity, one aspect of this debate which is not particularly controversial and is largely agreed upon by all parties. For Kant, analytical unity is the sort of unity achieved by all general concepts (conceptus communes) insofar as they abstract from all differences that subsist between the objects under them, or the lower concepts subordinated to them. 7 A general concept unifies these objects or concepts by means of a common mark or set of marks. Thus Kant's example at CPR A69/B94 of the unification of bodies under the concepts 'body' and 'divisible' is a perfectly representative instance of unification via analytical unity, as the function upon which such concepts "rest." Let us note that the " Norman KempSmith,A CommentarytoKant's "Cr/t~rueofPureReason"(NewYork:HumanitiesPress, 196~). 3 H.J. Paton, Kant's MetaphysicofExperience, 2 vols.(London:George Allenand Unwin,Ltd., 1936). 4 Henry Allison,Kant's TranscendentalIdealum (NewHaven:YaleUniversityPress, 1983), 144 n. 3o. Hereafter KTI. 5 KlausReich,Die Vollst~ndigkeitderKantischenUrteilstafel,3rd. ed. (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986). Hereafter VKU. 6 Paton, Kant's Metaphysic, 1:302. Kant, we should note, does not makethis important logicaldistinctionbetweensubordination... (shrink)

This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductionsto the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself (...) as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant’s aesthetic investigation, which understand Kant’s judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature. (shrink)

The key concept in Kant’s aesthetics is “aesthetic reflective judgment,” a critique of which is found in Part 1 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). It is a critique inasmuch as Kant unravels previous assumptions regarding aesthetic perception. For Kant, the comparative edge of a “judgment” implicates communicability, which in turn gives it a public face; yet “reflection” points to autonomy, and the “aesthetic” shifts the emphasis away from objective properties to the subjective response evoked by the (...) object. Contrary to the view he had inherited, Kant did not treat aesthetic judgments as confused perceptions or inferior cognitions, but rather put them in a category of their own. For Kant, aesthetic reflective judgments implicated not only the processes involved in understanding the empirical world but also the processes involved in ascribing ideas or meaning to experience (which go beyond what is given in perception/cognition). This “going beyond cognition” may have been referred to by Kant as non-cognitive, but it is conditioned on a way of cognizing the object. Kant describes the features of such judgments in the Analytic of the Beautiful before addressing their possibility in subtle ways throughout the Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments. Kant’s critique gives rise to three apparent dichotomies: immediate intuition and prior learning; autonomy and communicability; and non-cognitive response and aesthetic ideas. An interpretation of Kant’s theory can be deemed correct to the degree that it succeeds in showing that the contradictions are only apparent. I will argue that the resulting positive account of Kant’s aesthetic theory offers an understanding of aesthetic reflective judgment that is quite different from the standard formalism that the critics of formalism usually target and by which they misrepresent Kant’s aesthetic theory. When I refer to Kant’s formalism, then, I mean something quite different by this than what is meant by “standard formalism.” The latter is the representation given Kant’s formalism by its contemporary critics and is the typical account of formalism found in the art theory and philosophy of art literature, as will be demonstrated. (shrink)

it is sometimes said that one of Kant’s decisive advances over his predecessors was to have anticipated Frege’s functional theory of concepts, along with its corollary that a concept has significance only in the context of the whole proposition.1 Kant is said to break with a tradition that held that there is a self-standing species of concept-use—called apprehensio simplex, or the conceiving of an idea—in which one represents objects by having a concept before one’s mind, independently of connecting it with (...) other concepts in judgment.2 Since Kant’s use of ‘judgment’ covers what Frege calls judging as well as what he calls grasping a thought, the idea is that according to Kant the only way for a thinker to use a.. (shrink)

Karen Ng's Hegel's Concept of Life tackles one of the hardest problems – the placement and status of the category of life within treatises on epistemology and logic—within what are already two of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. It does so with good attention to contemporary debates surrounding Hegel's logic and metaphysics, and manages to integrate concerns that have been more typically expressed in continental scholarship—such as the influence of (...) Schelling and Hölderlin—with concerns that have come out of the more recent analytic conversation – such as the status of universals and the attributability of inferentialism to Hegel's thought. Ng argues for a distinctive kind of post‐Kantian reading of Hegel, one which emphasizes Hegel's interests in Kant's thoughts about judgment and teleology in the third Critique rather than the categories and dialectic of the first Critique. In the first section, I want to trace a tension in Ng's thought between inflationary and deflationary understandings of ‘life’ and its associated terms. Here I will try to make out the relevant concept of life that makes the living object the promising form of a richer object of judgment for a self‐conscious subject. In the following section, I try to tease out the relation of life to two very closely related notions, namely the notion of an organism and the notion of a purpose. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defends the mathematically deterministic world of physics by arguing that its essential features arise necessarily from innate forms of intuition and rules of understanding through combinatory acts of imagination. Knowing is active: it constructs the unity of nature by combining appearances in certain mandatory ways. What is mandated is that sensible awareness provide objects that conform to the structure of ostensive judgment: “This (S) is P.” -/- Sensibility alone provides no such objects, so (...) the imagination compensates by combining passing point-data into “pure” referents for the subject-position, predicate-position, and copula. The result is a cognitive encounter with a generic physical object whose characteristics—magnitude, substance, property, quality, and causality—are abstracted as the Kantian categories. Each characteristic is a product of “sensible synthesis” that has been “determined” by a “function of unity” in judgment. -/- Understanding the possibility of such determination by judgment is the chief difficulty for any rehabilitative reconstruction of Kant’s theory. I will show that Kant conceives of figurative synthesis as an act of line-drawing, and of the functions of unity as rules for attending to this act. The subject-position refers to substance, identified as the objective time-continuum; the predicate-position, to quality, identified as the continuum of property values (constituting the second-order type named by the predicate concept). The upshot is that both positions refer to continuous magnitudes, related so that one (time-value) is the condition of the other (property-value). -/- Kant’s theory of physically constructive grammar is thus equivalent to the analytic-geometric formalism at work in the practice of mathematical physics, which schematizes time and state as lines related by an algebraic formula. Kant theorizes the subject–predicate relation in ostensive judgment as an algebraic time–state function. When aimed towards sensibility, “S is P” functions as the algebraic relation “t → ƒ(t).”. (shrink)

Following logicism, Frege famously held that logic is a science on its own. Particularly, he held the informativity thesis, viz., that logic is a science because it is deductively informative. This paper aims to understand Frege’s informativity thesis and its connection with the conception of logic as science. For such, it focuses on some features of Frege’s philosophy that are key for understanding this connection, particularly his conception of analyticity, the role of judgments in inferential reasoning, and the use of (...) decomposition of functions as a means for concept-formation, which Frege names as fruitful definitions. Keywords: Gottlob Frege; Informativity of Logic; Judgements; Fruitful Definitions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical EssaysTed KinnamanPaul Guyer, editor. Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment: Critical Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Pp. xxiii + 253. Cloth, $75.95. Paper, $27.95.The volume under review is a collection of essays on a wide range of topics concerning Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. All the papers included here have been published previously, although many (...) of them in places where they might not be easily accessible to English-speaking philosophers. While some of the articles will be familiar to Kant scholars, this collection should be useful to specialists and valuable to students first delving into the third Critique.One essay in the volume, Guyer's own piece on "Kant's Principles of Reflecting Judgment," will be of particular interest to Kant scholars. Guyer's thesis here is that the account of reflecting judgment Kant offers in the Critique of the Power of Judgment is both continuous with the account of regulative principles of reason in the Critique of Pure Reason and the basis of the unity of the third Critique as a whole. He supports this by demonstrating how each of the sorts of judgment discussed in the work can be seen as an application of the broader account of reflecting judgment in general. Guyer identifies five such applications, and shows that each of them has three features central to regulative principles: they set a goal of constructing a system within a certain specific range of cognitions; they require the suitability of objects for attainment of the goal in question, and thus are transcendental [End Page 499] and not merely logical principles; and they supply heuristic advice for the investigation of nature. Thus every form of judgment can with justice be considered as an instance of the general activity of reflecting, that is, finding a universal for a given particular.Several of the essays included here concern the most prominent issues relating to the Analytic of the Beautiful. Nick Zangwill's piece deals with the disinterestedness of aesthetic judgment, while Christopher Janaway's "Kant's Aesthetics and the Empty Cognitive Stock" debunks what he sees as misguided readings of the role of concepts in judgments of taste. In "The Idealism of Purposiveness," an excerpt from his 1993 book Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh, 1993), Anthony Savile criticizes what he calls the "established reading" of Kant's claim that beautiful objects exhibit "purposiveness without purpose." On this reading, to say that a thing is purposive without purpose is to say that it appears to be designed, but to no particular purpose. Savile argues instead that we should take purposiveness without purpose to indicate that an object is suitable for a function, but not as a result of conscious design. Articles by Eva Schaper (from her well-known book on Kant's aesthetics) and Malcolm Budd discuss the distinction between free and dependent beauty and the account of the sublime, respectively.Some of the other selections in the volume are interesting for their focus on somewhat neglected aspects of the third Critique. One such aspect is the role of the imagination in Kant's account of aesthetic appreciation, and by extension in cognition more generally. In "Imaginative Freedom and the German Enlightenment," Jane Kneller argues that appreciation of the role of imaginative freedom in Kant's account of aesthetic judgment helps to connect Kant to the Enlightenment rationalist tradition that saw the value of art in its ability to educate and improve those who appreciate it. This education cannot, of course, be of the most straightforward nature, since Kant emphatically argues that to judge a thing beautiful is altogether different from judging it morally good. Instead, Kneller argues, our awareness of our own imaginative freedom provides us with evidence of our ability to realize the "highest good" on earth, evidence otherwise denied us in Kant's philosophy. Also addressing the theme of imagination is Donald Crawford's "Kant's Theory of Creative Imagination," in which he points out striking parallels between Kant's account of the imagination's role in mathematics and in the creation of fine art.Another aspect of Kant... (shrink)

The study is carried out in five chapters, with the first two offering a reconsideration of the function of the imagination in the Transcendental Deduction and Schematism of the first Critique. The last three follow the order of topics discussed by Kant in the third Critique in regard to judgments of taste, the sublime, and teleology; they conclude with an interpretation of "productive imagination" as a "model for the ideal of intellectual intuition". The comparison between "human and divine spontaneity" is (...) introduced in the first chapter, where Gibbons notes that while we have "Kant's explicit and repeated emphasis on the difference" between these, "in considering the similarity of these types of spontaneity," she wishes "to correct a possible imbalance in Kant's exposition": there are, she suggests, "formal similarities between these types of spontaneity". The main thrust of the first chapter is to respond to a particular reading of Kant—namely, to those unsympathetic interpreters who see in the Deductions an "imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" and also to those who give a "sympathetic reading" but do so in terms of an identification of "all aspects of synthesis with concept application," thereby reducing the "role of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination to that of unifying a manifold of intuition under a concept". Gibbons holds instead that the "theory of synthesis... focuses on the nature of human cognition and what is required for us to know anything about objects" and, further, that it presupposes "the broader function of the imagination as grounding the possibility of concept-application in the first place". (shrink)

I investigate the role of the subject in judgment in Kant, Frege, and Husserl, situating it in the broader and less-often-considered context of their accounts of presentation as well as judgment. Contemporary philosophical usage of “representation” tends to elide the question of what Kant called the constitution of content, because of a reluctance, traced to Frege’s anti-psychologism, to attend to subjectivity. But for Kant and Husserl, anti-psychologism allows for synthesis as the subjective act necessary for both “mere presentation” and judgment. (...) In Begriffshrift, Frege alludes to a significant logical role for the subjective act of judgment, and in later work, traces of this logical role remain in the intensional notions of grasping a thought and judging as acknowledging its truth. But Frege’s anti-psychologism blocks interpreting these subjective notions in term of synthesis. Although similar in certain ways to Frege and equally anti-psychologistic, Husserl’s theory of judgment in the Logical Investigations maintains a role for subjective syntheses for presentations and judgments, and goes beyond Kant in allowing for a kind of objectivity at the level of non-judgment presentations. These two great anti-psychologists at the dawn of the parallel heydays of linguistic and phenomenological analysis are thus differentiated by the fates they assign to the act of synthesis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason by Beatrice LonguenesseMichelle GreerBeatrice Longuenesse. Kant and the Capacity to Judge; Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Translation by Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xv + 420. Cloth, $59.50.Kant and the Capacity to Judge is a translation (...) of Longuenesse’s Kant et Pouvoir de juger, although Longuenesse has revised and added to the original version. The central argument seeks to demonstrate the essential role played by the logical forms of judgment in the arguments of Kant’s first Critique. Longuenesse emphasizes straight away Kant’s efforts (in the Metaphysical Deduction) to deduce a set of pure concepts from the logical forms of judgment. Against many standard readings, she aims to reveal the very “tight” connection between this attempt and subsequent arguments in the Transcendental [End Page 372] Analytic. That Kant takes the functions of judgment to be relevant to these arguments is hardly a novel claim. The originality of Longuenesse’s work, however, stems both from the central and pervasive role she assigns to the logical forms of judgment, and from the impressive, painstaking effort she makes to sustain the close connection between these forms and Kant’s subsequent arguments. According to Longuenesse, any proper understanding of the arguments of the Transcendental Analytic absolutely depends upon relating these “down to the minutest details of their proofs,” to the role of the logical forms (5).These minute details do not escape Longuenesse in her subsequent elaboration on this original thesis. Given the length and detail of her work, I can only highlight a few of the central points and strategies. One should note from the outset, however, that the detail and the scholarship evinced to support her claims constitute much of what is of value in the book. Many of these “supporting arguments” and discussions, which include efforts to trace Kantian conceptions back to their historical/philosophical origins, stand in their own right as independent contributions to Kant scholarship and interpretation.The work is divided into three parts. The first part is essentially propaedeutic. Longuenesse begins by drawing a distinction between the potential or capacity to judge and judgement itself (i.e., the “actualization” of this judgmental capacity under [externally grounded] sensory stimulation) (7). Taking this distinction as her cue, Longuenesse seeks to reveal the way in which the line of argumentation in the transcendental analytic presents an extended investigation into the formal capacity (ibid). The centrality of the logical forms of judgment is secured early on by assigning them a substantive role in the very presentation of something in intuition “as” an “object.” Insofar as she assigns this role to the logical forms themselves, her account clearly undercuts the primary function of the categories in this regard. Relevant here is Longuenesse’s construal of “appearances” as the intentional correlates of our representational capacities and activities (cf. 20–21). Given this, the problem now motivating the transcendental deduction is how to make sense of the relation between this “internalized” object of (indeterminate) empirical intuition (the appearance) and the object corresponding to intuition which concepts allow one to think in a determinate way (the phenomenon). This ability to think the object in a determinate fashion appears to be the essential contribution made by judgement.These preliminary considerations ground Longuenesse’s efforts (in Part Two) to isolate and examine the discursive activity of judgment. Longuenesse stresses the reflective (and not simply the determinative) role of judgment and its forms. Indeed, she suggests that concepts (not merely empirical concepts, but also the pure concepts of the understanding themselves) are formed by reflecting (through acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction) on the “sensible given.” Drawing extensively from the Logic, she interestingly argues that the form of judgment itself carries with it some inherent claim to objectivity. Thus, objectivity is folded into the formal activity of judging by being identified as a “normative propensity” inherent in every judgment by virtue of its form alone (87–88). Longuenesse accordingly eschews efforts to downplay the role of the logical use of the... (shrink)

For Kant, philosophical investigations are inherently analytic. The proper method of philosophy is analysis, and the object of analysis are concepts. Hence, Kant’s short description of philosophy as “rational cognition […] from concepts” (KrV, A 837/B 865) can be substituted by “philosophy is conceptual analysis”. The article shows that Kant follows a representationalism about concepts and a combination of intensional and extensional feature semantics. Against the claim that Kant is a proponent of the concept-judgement-inversion, it is argued that concepts are (...) being articulated in form of singular terms, propositions, and sets of propositions alike. Kant interlinks different kinds of concepts with different kinds of definitions, as the reconstruction of his theory of definitions reveals. Philosophy foremost deals with what Kant calls “given” empirical and pure concepts. Such concepts are object of analysis, i.e., explication and exposition. The article ends with answers to five possible objections. Is philosophy all about analysis? (shrink)

Kant’s aesthetics has strongly influenced contemporary art theory. His doctrine of the judgement of taste as a subjective and not an objective statement broke with the long tradition of normatively established aesthetic systems and opened up a wide discursive space within the field of art in which the need to redefine the concept of art and the work of art became pressing questions of contemporary aesthetic reflection. The aim of this paper is to try to find out whether the sensus (...) communis that Kant assumes in the process of making an aesthetic judgement can be justified within the framework of different theories of art from the past and the present century. Furthermore, the analysis will contrast Kant’s understanding of aesthetics with the tradition established by thinkers of the analytic line of philosophy, in which the performativity of subjective aesthetic judgement has called into question the existence of the concept of sensus communis, thereby asserting an almost unlimited right to the truth of the subject’s terminological determinations of the basic concepts of aesthetics. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic, Vol. I/II; 1893/1903) is a modern classic. Since the 1930s it has belonged to an exclusive class of only eleven works in the history of symbolic logic, which contain the ‘first appearance of a new idea of fundamental importance’ [Church, 1936, p. 122], and its author is the only one whose other major works — Begriffsschrift (1879) and Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) — also belong to this distinguished group. Together with (...) the seminal paper ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ these three monographs represent the essential contributions to one of the most fascinating foundational projects in mathematics, then and now. For decades Frege struggled with the question, ‘how are we to apprehend logical objects, in particular, the numbers? What justifies us in acknowledging numbers as objects?’ [Frege, 2013, ‘Afterword’, p. 265]. His favourite answer, for a long time, was that arithmetic is a complex branch of logic. But since there is no logicism without logic, Frege started in Begriffsschrift with the invention of a nearly perfect formalization of higher-order classical predicate logic. To discover how far we can get in arithmetic by analytic means alone, it was even necessary to clarify the semantic character of the concept of number. This was done in a marvellous way by Frege five years later, in Grundlagen. The next step was nothing less than the complete execution of his logicist project, a monumental undertaking; and it is well known that here Frege failed, due to Russell’s derivation of the antinomy in 1902. But, despite the contradiction, Grundgesetze contains Frege’s legacy to logicism, which became more and more attractive. (shrink)

The infinite judgement has long been forgotten and yet, as I am about to demonstrate, it may be urgent to revive it for its critical and productive potential. An infinite judgement is neither analytic nor synthetic; it does not produce logical truths, nor true representations, but it establishes the genetic conditions of real objects and the concepts appropriate to them. It is through infinite judgements that we reach the principle of transcendental logic, in the depths of which all reality can (...) emerge in its material and sensible singularity, making possible all generalization and formal abstraction. (shrink)

The article considers possibility of applying the concept of descriptive metaphysics to the project of Kant's transcendental philosophy. According to analytical philosophy, descriptive metaphysics is the description of structures of thinking about the world. The basis for describing acts of thinking about the world from Kant's point of view is the description of forms of intuition. Transcendental (descriptive) analysis of understanding must be preceded by transcendental (descriptive) aesthetics as an investigation of pure intuitions of space and time. Phenomenon of time (...) is considered as a condition for determining the concepts "judgment", "category of understanding", "pure understanding" and "object of knowledge". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 406-408 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment Henry E. Allison. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 424. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $24.95. In his new book, Henry Allison provides a study of the two introductions (...) and the first half of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to stand alongside his previous books on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1983) and Kant's Theory of Freedom (1990). Those books showed Allison's commitment to the unity and coherence of Kant's thought, and it is the aim of the present book to demonstrate the connections between the two halves of Kant's third Critique, that is, Kant's aesthetics and his teleology, as well as to demonstrate the connections between Kant's aesthetic theory and both his theoretical and his practical philosophy. In order to defend the unity of the third Critique, Allison defends Kant's characterization of the judgment of taste as a species of reflective judgment, and argues that our judgments of beauty depend upon the principle of the purposiveness of nature that is also the basis for judgments about the systematicity of natural laws. To display the connections between Kant's aesthetics and his theoretical philosophy, [End Page 406] Allison uses the first Critique's distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris to explicate the relation between Kant's "analytic of the beautiful" and his "deduction of pure aesthetic judgment"; he then defends the success of Kant's strategy for the deduction of judgments of taste by grounding them in the general conditions of the possibility of cognition. Finally, in order to explain Kant's connection between aesthetics and morality, Allison interprets Kant's theory of the "intellectual interest" in the beautiful as evidence of nature's amenability to our achievement of the ends of morality, an assurance that we need not be motivated in the first place to act as morality requires, but rather to prevent our motivation to be moral from being undermined by our own predisposition to radical evil. He then defends Kant's thesis that all beauty, and thus natural as well as artistic beauty, can be seen as an expression of aesthetic ideas, and specifically of the morally requisite idea of nature's amenability to the achievement of our moral objectives.There is much in this approach with which I can agree, and some with which I cannot. I agree that there is much in Kant's general conception of reflective judgment that illuminates his conception of judgments of beauty, yet I do not think that the principle of taste is analogous to the principle of the purposiveness of nature, because it does not play a role in making particular judgments of taste analogous to the role the latter principle plays in the conduct of scientific inquiry. My own interpretation of Kant's model for making particular judgments of taste is not fundamentally different from that which Allison offers under the rubric of the quid facti, although we disagree about which of the four "moments" of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" are part of the meaning of a judgment of beauty and which function more as grounds for making judgments with such a meaning. But I am not persuaded by Allison's defense of Kant's deduction of pure judgments of taste, that is, his answer to the quid juris, from the objections that I and others have raised to it. Finally, although there are large areas of agreement between our interpretations of Kant's theory of intellectual interest in the beautiful, the claim that aesthetic experience is evidence of nature's amenability to the realization of the ends that we adopt in the name of morality is only part of the story that Kant develops in the Critique of Aesthetic... (shrink)

Criticizing psychologism about logic in the Foreword of Grundgesetze, Frege examines an answer to the question of how we can justify our acknowledgment of logical axioms as true—the logical laws that cannot be proved from other laws. The answer he entertains states that we cannot reject logical axioms if we do not want to give up our judgment altogether. Suspending his judgment about this answer, Frege points out that it is still compatible with his anti-psychologist conception of logic. There are (...) two issues with this paragraph. First, it is difficult to read this paragraph consistently. Second, it is not clear why Frege brings up this particular view regarding the justification for logical axioms in the middle of his criticism of psychologism. This paper develops a consistent interpretation of this paragraph. The view on the justification for logical axioms, which Frege is dealing with, is neo-Kantian. In the paragraph, Frege is criticizing a psychologistic misunderstanding of the neo-Kantian justification for logical axioms. The way Frege explains away this misunderstanding shows that he takes the neo-Kantian justification for logical axioms to be a non-evidential epistemic warrant if it is an epistemic warrant. It is this notion of non-evidential epistemic warrant that Frege suspends his judgment about. Thus, the paragraph shows that Frege has a reason to have reservations about neo-Kantianism. Furthermore, it turns out that the sole issue between Frege and psychological logicians is whether truth is objective, which provides a different way to explain away a much-discussed tension between Begriffsschrift and Frege's anti-psychologism. (shrink)

The present article considers the problem of the preservation of pleasure in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The problem stems from the fact that the Critique of Judgment contains not one but two distinct definitions of pleasure. In the definition of pleasure in §10 of the Analytic of the Beautiful Kant emphasizes that all pleasure is characterized by the tendency to preserve itself. On the other hand, in the definition of §VII of the unpublished Introduction Kant makes a sharp distinction between (...) interested and disinterested pleasures, whereby only the former kind is defined by the tendency for self-preservation. Yet, how can the disinterested pleasure of the beautiful preserve itself, given that insofar as it is disinterested it can be based on neither desire for its own preservation nor continued existence of the object? In addressing this issue, most commentators erroneously reintroduce desire in the pleasure of aesthetic reflection. By contrast, I propose to resolve this issue by turning to Kant’s account of lingering in §12 of the Analytic of the Beautiful and, more importantly, §§43-53 of the Deduction, where Kant affords his conception of aesthetic ideas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 128-130 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy Robert Hanna. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 2001. Pp. xv + 312. Cloth, $65.00. Robert Hanna's book has an ambitious two-fold agenda. Its historical agenda is to prompt a reassessment of the role Kant played in the foundations (...) of analytic philosophy. The ideological agenda is to reassess the status of the relevant Kantian doctrines--in particular, his views regarding the nature of necessity, the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the nature and scope of the a priori--in the face of what Hanna takes to be the "crisis" (11) facing analytic philosophy today. Hanna views the elements of this two-fold agenda as inextricably [End Page 128] linked: when we see how the analysts failed to appreciate much of the subtlety and power of Kant's arguments, we will be in a position both to appreciate why the early analysts were not able to bring their official projects to completion, and to reassess the plausibility of various Kantian doctrines that have been considered untouchable during the dominance of analytic philosophy.Hanna's Kant, the Kant of the first Critique, is bent on answering two fundamental problems regarding the nature of cognition. Hanna characterizes the first problem as the "modal" problem, that of saying how the same judgment "can... be at once necessarily true, refer to the real or natural world in a substantive way, yet cognizable to creatures minded like us apart from all sense experience" (1). The second problem is the "semantic" problem, that of stating "how meanings are possible" (3). Hanna's book is organized around his characterization of Kant's answers to these questions and his defense of the resulting position in the face of the analytic tradition's reaction.In assessing Kant's role in the analytic tradition, Hanna borrows much from previous historically sensitive philosophers interested in this period. Three such authors figure prominently: Coffa and his seminal book The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap; Friedman (with special attention to his Reconsidering Logical Positivism); and Dummett (whose work on Frege is cited throughout). From Coffa and Friedman, Hanna endorses the thesis that at its core the analytic tradition is a reaction to the Kantian conception of the a priori. Hanna accepts as well that the early analysts were united by the aim of exploiting technical developments in logic and semantics as part of a case against Kant's conception of the a priori. Where Hanna disagrees with, e.g., Coffa is over the status of the analysts' anti-Kantian arguments: where Coffa appears to endorse the cogency of those arguments, Hanna suggests that Kant's position is much more defensible, and the analysts' positions and arguments much more vulnerable, than has previously been thought.It is worth noting some of the many virtues of Foundations. Hanna makes an interesting case for the idea that at a certain level of description there is an important agreement between Kant and Frege regarding the evils of psychologism about logic. This will come as news to those who have treated Kant as among the targets in Frege's critique of psychologism. In addition, Hanna develops Kant's conception of analyticity and presents a robust defense of that conception against some prevalent criticisms; proffers an intriguing comparison between Kant's pure intuition and Wittgenstein's view of the transcendental nature of logic (221-3); and makes a plausible case for the provocative conclusion that the conceptualism of early analytic philosophy is in contrast with Frege's own philosophical attitude (233).At the same time, some complaints are worth registering. To those (like me) who do not encounter Kantian vocabulary on a regular basis, Hanna's reliance on that vocabulary has the effect of rendering many passages heavy-going and difficult to unpack. (While Hanna does attempt to provide explications of the vocabulary, I sometimes found these explications themselves to be difficult to understand.) Secondly, Hanna is sometimes... (shrink)

This book is an expanded version of Joan Weiner's introduction to Frege's work in the Oxford University Press ‘Past Masters’ series published in 1999. The earlier book had chapters on Frege's life and character, his basic project, his new logic, his definitions of the numbers, his 1891 essay ‘Function and concept’, his 1892 essays ‘On Sinn and Bedeutung’ and ‘On concept and object’, the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and the havoc wreaked by Russell's paradox, and a final brief chapter on Frege's (...) influence. To this, Weiner has added two further chapters on Frege's dispute with Hilbert on the foundations of geometry and on the three late essays of his ‘Logical investigations’. There is little change to the content of the earlier chapters, but they have been divided into sections, each with its own heading, which makes it easier to find one's way around.With the two additional chapters, the book provides an excellent introduction to Frege's work from his earliest Begriffsschrift , which gives the first presentation of his new logic, to his three late essays , which expound his views on logic, truth, and thought. As in the earlier version, the focus is on the logicist project that dominated Frege's career: the attempt to demonstrate that arithmetic is reducible to logic. In all her writings on Frege, Weiner has been particularly sensitive to the philosophical …. (shrink)

A theoretical term gets its meaning from a set of meaning-constitutive or 'analytic' sentences of the relevant theory. The meanings of theoretical terms may change when the theories change. After a discussion of Kant and Frege, I propose a broadly Quinean view of analyticity, without adopting Quine's meaning skepticism. A sentence of a given theory in a certain language is called analytic if revising the theory so that this sentence is lost entails the abandonment of the given linguistic (alternatively, of (...) the given theoretical) framework. This solution to the problem of defining analyticity is rooted in intuitive judgements of the members of a linguistic community about the identity of languages or theories. (shrink)

In early analytic philosophy, one of the most central questions concerned the status of arithmetical objects. Frege argued against the popular conception that we arrive at natural numbers with a psychological process of abstraction. Instead, he wanted to show that arithmetical truths can be derived from the truths of logic, thus eliminating all psychological components. Meanwhile, Dedekind and Peano developed axiomatic systems of arithmetic. The differences between the logicist and axiomatic approaches turned out to be philosophical as well as mathematical. (...) In this paper, I will argue that Dedekind’s approach can be seen as a precursor to modern structuralism and as such, it enjoys many advantages over Frege’s logicism. I also show that from a modern perspective, Frege’s criticism of abstraction and psychologism is one-sided and fails against the psychological processes that modern research suggests to be at the heart of numerical cognition. The approach here is twofold. First, through historical analysis, I will try to build a clear image of what Frege’s and Dedekind’s views on arithmetic were. Then, I will consider those views from the perspective of modern philosophy of mathematics, and in particular, the empirical study of arithmetical cognition. I aim to show that there is nothing to suggest that the axiomatic Dedekind approach could not provide a perfectly adequate basis for philosophy of arithmetic. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 161 7 In, respectively, PaciWsm in Britain and Semi-Detached Idealists: the British Peace Movement and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2000). 8 See Monk 2: Chap. 13. FUNCTIONS OR PROPOSITIONAL FUNCTIONS? Alexander Paul Bozzo Philosophy / Marquette U. Milwaukee, wi 53233, usa [email protected] Michael Potter and Tom Ricketts, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Frege. Cambridge, uk: Cambridge U. (...) P., 2010. Pp. vii, 630. isbn 978-0-521-62479-4 (pb). £57.00; £21.99 (pb). us$38.99 (pb). February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 162 Reviews 1 Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge, ma: Harvard U. P., 1991), p. 111. The paragraph contains an expression of Frege’s Context Principle and the need for Hume’s Principle as a criterion of identity in the deWnition of number. 2 There are in fact Wve stated goals. The others are: (iii) to serve as a reference work for students and non-specialists, (iv) to provide a route into the study of Frege historically and to any relevant contemporary concerns in the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics, and mind, and (v) to provide, for new readers, the most convenient detailed guide to Frege currently available. Gottlob Frege is widely recognized as one of the chief progenitors of mathematical logic and philosophy of languagez—zindeed, the importance attributed to Frege’s innovations is such that Michael Dummett, when reXecting on§62 of Frege’s Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, feels compelled to remark that the paragraph therein is “arguably the most pregnant philosophical paragraph ever written.”1 Whether or not one agrees with Dummett on this point, the magnitude of Frege’s inXuence on the current philosophical landscape is incontestable. Frege revolutionized the then dominant Aristotelian conception of logic, introducing a formal language now recognized as the predicate calculus. Central to this end were Frege’s insights on quantiWcation, the notation that expressed it, the logicist project, and the extension of mathematical notions like function and argument to natural language. The long-awaited Cambridge Companion to Frege is a compendium of Fregean scholarship that rigorously explores these and similar topics; editors Thomas Ricketts and Michael Potter have compiled a comprehensive collection of fourteen essays that individually provide focused appraisals of a number of Frege’s most substantial insights. On the advice of this journal’s editor, I have limited my review to the connections (or rather dissimilarities ) that exist between Frege and Russell, relying exclusively on Peter Hylton ’s contribution to the collection, “Frege and Russell”. Following a brief consideration of the volume as a whole, I move immediately into a detailed explication of Hylton’s analysis. The volume includes among its goals the following two aims: (i) to provide, for advanced students and specialists, a conspectus of recent interpretation of Frege, and (ii) to dispel the intimidation felt by readers who confront a diUcult thinker.2 I single out these ambitions because they most clearly represent the volume’s strengths and shortcomings. Enthusiasts of Frege will not be disappointed by the multitude of rigorously and technically written essays, essays that contribute substantially and originally to the collective understanding of Frege and his work. For instance, Thomas Ricketts provides a thoughtful and thorough analysis—an analysis that moves well beyond mere explication—of Frege’s concept/object distinction, in particular its relevance for Frege’s Context Principle and logicism more generally. Similarly, Richard Heck addresses a number of central yet largely unexplored issues pertaining to the overall signiWcance of February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 163 3 I strongly encourage that non-specialists augment The Cambridge Companion to Frege with Joan Weiner’s Frege Explained: from Arithmetic to Analytic Philosophy (Chicago : Open Court, 2004), one of the best available introductory texts on Frege. 4 The essay in fact was available as early as 2005 in Hylton’s Propositions, Functions, and Analysis: Selected Essays on Russell’s Philosophy (New York, ny: Oxford U. P., 2005). The editors of The Cambridge Companion to Frege partially... (shrink)

I develop a new reading of Frege’s argument for the indefinability of truth. I concentrate on what Frege literally says in the passage that contains the argument. This literal reading of the passage establishes that the indefinability argument is an arguably sound argument to the following conclusion: provided that the Fregean conception of judgment—which has recently been countered by Hanks—is correct and that truth is a property of truth-bearers, a vicious infinite regress is produced. Given this vicious regress, Frege chooses (...) to reject that truth is a property of truth-bearers. Frege’s choice leads to a unique version of the Fregean conception of judgment. His unique conception of judgment can cope with Hanks’s recent criticisms against the Fregean conception. (shrink)

This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductionsto the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself (...) as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant’s aesthetic investigation, which understand Kant’s judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature. (shrink)

Frege's advances in the development of quantification have rarely been subjected to historical interpretation. While the characterization of existence as a second-order concept awaited the invention of the Begriffsschrift, important philosophical innovations had taken place since Kant's critique of the ontological argument. In particular, Herbart had re-conceptualized the nature of existential judgement and this was recognized and adopted by Brentano. In this light, thepossible influence of Herbart and Brentano (or their schools) upon Frege's work is elaborated and critically considered.

The question, whether there is a sharp difference between an analytic and a synthetic proposition, is one of the famous philosophical topics of the 20th century. The question, however, urges one to ask following questions: "What is an analytic proposition?", or „What is a synthetic proposition?“. The aim of the paper is to contribute to the discussions of the analyticity in that it tries to answer the first of the two. However, the author does not offer his own conception of (...) analyticity. He rather offers a more detailed view on the definitions and characteristics of an analytic proposition in Kant and Frege. (shrink)

Kant’s ontology of appearances implies that the numerical distinctness of empirical objects is grounded in their appearance-aspect, more precisely in space as pure intuition, in which alone such objects can be given. With distinguishing concepts things can only be thought: in contrast to Leibniz’s complete concepts and to Kripke’s rigid designators, Kant’s general concepts do not entail their referents analytically. They must be applied to intuition, i. e. be completed synthetically. Consequently, Kant’s ontology of merely singular individuals is closely connected (...) with a genuine semantics of synthetic reference via intuition, expressed by irreducible demonstratives such as “this”, “here”, and “now”. Accordingly, the judgment “There can be indiscernibles” is synthetic-apriori, which distinguishes Kant’s view both from skeptical empiricism and from heavyweight ontological realism. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore Frege’s conception of truth. In particular I defend the thesis that Frege in his mature career takes truth to be an object, i.e., the True qua the reference of true sentences. In the literature on truth Frege has been usually taken to be a truth deflationist or a truth primitivist. Indeed Frege leaves a number of comments that sound like typical deflationist claims and his famous indefinability argument is the most discussed argument for primitivism. However, (...) Frege is neither a deflationist nor a primitivist. His deflationist remarks and the indefinability argument are rather his arguments that truth is an object. -/- For Frege judging—and its verbal counterpart asserting—is always acknowledging the truth of a truth-bearer. Thus, if truth is an object for him, his conception of judgment ought to also be adjusted accordingly. Indeed Frege shows how we can understand judgment qua acknowledgment of truth if truth is an object. Specifically, judging that p is identifying the True with the reference of ‘p’ non-judgmentally, i.e., without judging that p is identical with the reference of ‘p’. Frege’s conception of judgment impacts his conception of knowledge because the act of judging is that of producing knowledge. In a nutshell our act of judging and the knowledge we produce by it are epistemically grounded in our objectual knowledge of the True. If we take this point into account, we can develop a new reading of Frege’s claim that logic is the science of truth. -/- The suggested reading of Frege’s conception of truth and related notions can make a contribution to contemporary philosophical problems. First, Frege’s conception of judgment can cope with Peter Hanks’s recent criticisms of the Fregean picture of judgment in general. Secondly, his conception of assertion can explain the connection between truth and assertion in a novel way. Lastly, Frege’s conception of knowledge can be developed into a new theory of knowledge where objectual knowledge is more fundamental than propositional knowledge. (shrink)

One of the most striking differences between Frege's Begriffsschrift (logical system) and standard contemporary systems of logic is the inclusion in the former of the judgement stroke: a symbol which marks those propositions which are being asserted , that is, which are being used to express judgements . There has been considerable controversy regarding both the exact purpose of the judgement stroke, and whether a system of logic should include such a symbol. This paper explains the intended role of the (...) judgement stroke in a way that renders it readily comprehensible why Frege insisted that this symbol was an essential part of his logical system. The key point here is that Frege viewed logic as the study of inference relations amongst acts of judgement , rather than – as in the typical contemporary view – of consequence relations amongst certain objects (propositions or well-formed formulae). The paper also explains why Frege's use of the judgement stroke is not in conflict with his avowed anti-psychologism, and why Wittgenstein's criticism of the judgement stroke as 'logically quite meaningless' is unfounded. The key point here is that while the judgement stroke has no content , its use in logic and mathematics is subject to a very stringent norm of assertion. (shrink)

English title: The Problem of the Synthetic a priori Judgements According to Hermann Lotze. The present article compares Kant’s and Lotze’s concepts of synthetic judgements. Lotze’s aim is a renewing of the Kant’s solutions, what he achieves thanks to introduction of the distinction between analytic (identical) content and synthetic form of these judgements which Kant recognised as synthetic. This distinction makes possible to lay down the concept of intentional sense which has influence over Frege and Husserl.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Heidegger's Concept of Truth Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Heidegger's Concept of Truth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxx + 462. Cloth, $59.95. This somewhat trite and overly generic English title, from a Heideggerian perspective, is better specified by the title of the German original, which was perhaps too provocative for an analytical English (...) audience conditioned by Carnap's critique of Heidegger: "The Prejudice of Logic: Investigations into the Theory of Truth of the Early Heidegger." The author's more-than-literal, amplifying and supplementing translation of his own German text of 1994 aims to face up to all the "hard interpretive decisions" (xxii) that Heidegger poses by leaving no German term uninterpreted or untranslated, including even Dasein as "being-here." The translation is thus more illuminating from the start in the sense in which "logic" too narrowly conceived and claimed to be the sole arbiter of truth becomes a "disabling" prejudice (xvi) rather than the "enabling prejudice" that logic normally is for any discourse and thought. Dahlstrom's focus is on the early and so "logical" Heidegger (1912-29), before he decided to lose even logic (better, "onto-theo-logic") in a more original tornadic "whirl" of abyssal questioning in the "turning." Hence, the opening pages point to Heidegger's quest for a more original philosophical (transcendental, phenomenological, ontological, hermeneutical) "logic of philosophy" (Emil Lask's phrase) that "produces" the fundamental concepts or categories for any field of being, including itself. This original productive logic of category formation "transcends" the formal logic of judgment while founding it.It is the transcendental and material logic that Heidegger found in Kant, which is oriented toward the spatio-temporal schematisms of the imagination that emerge from the transcendental aesthetic to mediate the application of the judicative forms of the understanding into befitting categories of reality. But Dahlstrom does not get around to detail this quasi-Kantian account of material logic, or Lask's version of it, which finds its fundamental stratum in the already categorized (i.e., conceptually interpreted) originally unitary object, prior to its distinction into form and matter, subject and predicate, etc. Lask calls this a priori categorized realm of intentionally structured meaning (intelligibility, truth) a "panarchy of the logos," which Heidegger will readily transform into his "hermeneutics of facticity" (double genitive: "life lays itself out, interprets itself") and identify with the prejudicative, prepredicative temporal realm of truth as "disclosedness" and "unconcealment." [End Page 134]But Dahlstrom does find, in Husserl's unpublished logic courses of the early twenties in which "Analyses of Passive Synthesis" are carried out, a "genetic logic" on the level of the "transcendental aesthetic" in the "complicated intentional systems" of the sensing human body situating itself by constituting the time and space of its world prepredicatively and prejudicatively, a "logic" or logos which accordingly "anticipates much of the analysis of being-in-the-world undertaken in Being and Time" (155). And yet Heidegger, who as Husserl's trusted assistant was granted generous access to such unpublished manuscripts, "remained silent" about these clear anticipations. Instead he criticizes Husserl publicly in his own courses, culminating in Being and Time, for neglecting the question of the "being of intentionality" as well as of the "sense" of being as such, which Heidegger finds in "timeliness" (Zeitlichkeit), the originary time of being-here. Yet in arriving at this temporal sense of being, Heidegger "clearly appropriates the horizonal (allegedly preobjective and presubjective) character of time-consciousness elaborated by Husserl." Why, then, "Heidegger's silence"? "These breakthroughs of Husserl's later thinking are not mentioned by Heidegger because he wants to appropriate them in his own way and without the framework out of which they arose. An injustice and a disservice is thus done to Husserl's phenomenology... [which is] the price of the philosophical maturity of its most famous student... [as] his thinking moves to a plane beyond the reach of Husserlian phenomenology and terminology" (169f).This in-depth discussion of Heidegger's relationship with Husserl... (shrink)

Although the notion of logical object plays a key role in Frege's foundational project, it has hardly been analyzed in depth so far. I argue that Marco Ruffino's attempt to fill this gap by establishing a close link between Frege's treatment of expressions of the form ‘the concept F’ and the privileged status Frege assigns to extensions of concepts as logical objects is bound to fail. I argue, in particular, that Frege's principal motive for introducing extensions into his logical theory (...) is not to be able to make in-direct statements about concepts, but rather to define all numbers as logical objects of a fundamental kind in order to ensure that we have the right cognitive access to them qua logical objects via Axiom V. Contrary to what Ruffino claims, reducibility to extensions cannot be the ‘ultimate criterion’ for Frege of what is to be regarded as a logical object. (shrink)

In the Critique of Fure Reason Kant distinguishes two sorts of conditions of knowledge. First, there are the space and time of pure intuition, introduced in the Transcendental Aesthetic. They are grounded in our dependence on a special sort of perceptual field for the location of objects. Second, there are pure concepts of the understanding, or categories, introduced in the Analytic. In one respect these are grounded in the logical function of the understanding in judgements, introduced in the first chapter (...) of the analytic of concepts: Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding; in another respect, they are grounded in transcendental unity of apperception, which is introduced in the second chapter: Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, or Transcendental Deduction. I shall be concerned with the latter and its contribution to the overall strategy of argument in the analytic. Within the Analytic, Kant distinguishes between an Analytic of Concepts and an Analytic of Principles. This corresponds to a traditional distinction between a doctrine of concepts and judgement. It is arguable that Kant's theory of concepts undermines this distinction. However, I shall not deal with that general issue, but with a more specific issue related to the first two chapters of the Analytic of Principles: the Schematism and the System of Principles. (shrink)

This paper develops its exegetical claim by building mainly on a reconstruction of a central argument in the Critique of Pure Reason and supporting it with material from Kant’s other critical works. It argues that Kant’s philosophy does not permit us any judgment about things in themselves whatsoever. This could be called a form of ignorance, albeit a unique one. On the developed reading, Kant claims that there cannot be any objectively valid judgment about things in themselves, and since so-called (...) judgments without objective validity are actually no judgments at all, there is no judgment about things in themselves available to us – not even a negative one. The paper considers the theses and antitheses of the antinomies, analytic judgments, and the practical postulates as potential candidates for such judgments, each of which fail the objectivity test. It ends by concluding that we should read Kant’s critical writings in such a way that they do not feature any judgments about things in themselves and suggests one way to do so: putative judgments of this sort could be read as higher-order judgments about the concept of a thing in itself. (shrink)

This book remedies the absence in the history of analytic philosophy of a detailed examination of G. E. Moore’s philosophical views as they developed between 1894 and 1902. This period saw the inauguration of analytic philosophy through the work of Moore and Bertrand Russell. Moore’s early views are examined in detail through unpublished archival material, including surviving letters, diaries, notes of lectures attended, papers for Cambridge societies, and drafts of early work, in order to revise the established view that the (...) origin of analytic philosophy at Cambridge was an abrupt split from F. H. Bradley’s Absolute Idealism. Traditional accounts of this period have highlighted the anti-psychologism of Frege’s logic but have not explored the impact of this movement more broadly. Anti-psychologism was a key feature of the work of Moore’s teachers on the nature of the mind and its objects, in their interpretation of Kant, and in ethics. Moore’s teachers G.F. Stout and James Ward were significant contributors to the late 19th century debates in mental science and the developing new science of psychology. Henry Sidgwick’s criticisms of Kant and Bradley and his leading work in ethics were key influences on Moore. Moore’s Trinity Fellowship Dissertations are essential historical evidence of the development of Moore's new theory of judgment, a theory whose defining role in the origins of analytic philosophy cannot be overstated. Moore’s study of Kant in his dissertations ultimately formed the groundwork for his Principia Ethica, which evolved from ideas that manifested in Moore’s earliest Apostles’ papers, developed through his dissertations, and were refined through his Elements of Ethics lectures. This monumental work of early twentieth century ethics is thus shown to be the culmination of Moore’s early philosophical development. (shrink)

The epistomology of the definition of number and the philosophical foundation of arithmetic based on a comparison between Gottlob Frege's logicism and Platonic philosophy (Syrianus, Theo Smyrnaeus, and others). The intention of this article is to provide arithmetic with a logically and methodologically valid definition of number for construing a consistent philosophical foundation of arithmetic. The – surely astonishing – main thesis is that instead of the modern and contemporary attempts, especially in Gottlob Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic, such a definition (...) is found in the arithmetic in Euclid's Elements. To draw this conclusion a profound reflection on the role of epistemology for the foundation of mathematics, especially for the method of definition of number, is indispensable; a reflection not to be found in the contemporary debate (the predominate ‘pragmaticformalism’ in current mathematics just shirks from trying to solve the epistemological problems raised by the debate between logicism, intuitionism, and formalism). Frege's definition of number, ‘The number of the concept F is the extension of the concept ‘numerically equal to the concept F”, which is still substantial for contemporary mathematics, does not fulfil the requirements of logical and methodological correctness because the definiens in a double way (in the concepts ‘extension of a concept’ and ‘numerically equal’) implicitly presupposes the definiendum, i.e. number itself. Number itself, on the contrary, is defined adequately by Euclid as ‘multitude composed of units’, a definition which is even, though never mentioned, an implicit presupposition of the modern concept ofset. But Frege rejects this definition and construes his own - for epistemological reasons: Frege's definition exactly fits the needs of modern epistemology, namely that for to know something like the number of a concept one must become conscious of a multitude of acts of producing units of ‘given’ representations under the condition of a 1:1 relationship to obtain between the acts of counting and the counted ‘objects’. According to this view, which has existed at least since the Renaissance stoicism and is maintained not only by Frege but also by Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Dummett, and others, there is no such thing as a number of pure units itself because the intellect or pure reason, by itself empty, must become conscious of different units of representation in order to know a multitude, a condition not fulfilled by Euclid's conception. As this is Frege's main reason to reject Euclid's definition of number (others are discussed in detail), the paper shows that the epistemological reflection in Neoplatonic mathematical philosophy, which agrees with Euclid's definition of number, provides a consistent basement for it. Therefore it is not progress in the history of science which hasled to the a poretic contemporary state of affairs but an arbitrary change of epistemology in early modern times, which is of great influence even today. (shrink)

Three clusters of philosophically significant issues arise from Frege’s discussions of definitions. First, Frege criticizes the definitions of mathematicians of his day, especially those of Weierstrass and Hilbert. Second, central to Frege’s philosophical discussion and technical execution of logicism is the so‐called Hume’s Principle, considered in The Foundations of Arithmetic . Some varieties of neo‐Fregean logicism are based on taking this principle as a contextual definition of the operator ‘the number of …’, and criticisms of such neo‐Fregean programs sometimes appeal (...) to Frege’s objections to contextual definitions in later writings. Finally, a critical question about the definitions on which Frege’s proofs of the laws of arithmetic depend is whether the logical structures of the definientia reflect our pre‐Fregean understanding of arithmetical terms. It seems that unless they do, it is unclear how Frege’s proofs demonstrate the analyticity of the arithmetic in use before logicism. Yet, especially in late writings, Frege characterizes the definitions as arbitrary stipulations of the senses or references of expressions unrelated to pre‐definitional understanding. One or more of these topics may be studied in a survey course in the philosophy of mathematics or a course on Frege’s philosophy. The latter two topics are obviously central in a seminar in the philosophy of mathematics in general or more specialized seminars on logicism, or on mathematical definitions and concept formation. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege criticized Kant's use of the term "representation" in a footnote in the Foundations of Arithmetics. According to Frege, Kant used the term "representation" for mental images, which are private and incommunicable, and also for objects and concepts. Kant thereby gave "a strongly subjectivistic and idealistic coloring" to his thought. The paper argues that Kant avoided the kind of subjectivism and idealism which Frege hints in his remark. For Kant, having "Vorstellungen" requires the capacity of synthesis, by virtue of (...) which the mind goes beyond its subjective states, and its modifications become presentations of an independent world. (shrink)

The objective of the present work is to understand and elucidate Kant’s notion of category and how he derived the categories from a single transcendental principle. Kant did not put forward any definition of categories. He believed that categories cannot be defined without perpetrating a circle. Thus, he began his discourse with certain features of categories in his work Critique of Pure Reason. We have discussed the characteristic features of Kantian categories. An important point to be noted here is that (...) the categories, in the fullest Kantian sense of the term, must have a distinct property, namely that it should necessarily be applicable to all objects of knowledge. However, we are not concerned with the necessary applicability of concept to all objects of knowledge here in this paper. The analysis about the Kantian notion of categories, more importantly, necessitates a discussion about how he derived them from a single transcendental principle. Kant referred to the single principle which guides the search for the categories as “the clue to the discovery of the categories.” The specific and clear formulation of the principle which served as the transcendental clue to the discovery of the categories for Kant is that to every form of judgment there corresponds a pure and basic concept of the understanding. The forms of judgments and the categories both originate from the same source, namely, the function of the understanding, i.e., thinking. It may be noted here that the understanding is the power or faculty of knowing and thinking or judging is the function of understanding. Kant argued that the twelve logical forms of judgments provided the clue to the origin of twelve corresponding a priori concepts or categories. Two arguments provided by Kant in support of the principle serving as a transcendental clue to the discovery of the categories are analysed. An orthodox view held by some philosophers that for Kant the forms of judgment are forms of analytic judgment has been critically analyzed and is interpreted as erroneous. Keywords: category, judgment, understanding, categorematic, syncategorematic. (shrink)