In his new book the eminent Kant scholar Henry Allison provides an innovative and comprehensive interpretation of Kant's concept of freedom. The author analyzes the concept and discusses the role it plays in Kant's moral philosophy and psychology. He also considers in full detail the critical literature on the subject from Kant's own time to the present day. In the first part Professor Allison argues that at the centre of the Critique of Pure Reason there is the foundation for (...) a coherent general theory of rational agency. The second part employs this account of rational agency as a key to understanding Kant's concept of moral agency and associated moral psychology. The third part focuses on Kant's attempt to ground both moral law and freedom in the Groundwork and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is a major contribution to the interpretation of Kant which will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students of Kant's moral theory. (shrink)

This book constitutes one of the most important contributions to recent Kant scholarship. In it, one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Kant, Henry Allison, offers a comprehensive, systematic, and philosophically astute account of all aspects of Kant's views on aesthetics. The first part of the book analyses Kant's conception of reflective judgment and its connections with both empirical knowledge and judgments of taste. The second and third parts treat two questions that Allison insists must be kept distinct: the normativity (...) of pure judgments of taste, and the moral and systematic significance of taste. The fourth part considers two important topics often neglected in the study of Kant's aesthetics: his conceptions of fine art, and the sublime. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

Since Ramsey, much discussion of the relation between probability and belief has taken for granted that there are degrees of belief, i.e., that there is a real-valued function, B, that characterizes the degree of belief that an agent has in each statement of his language. It is then supposed that B is a probability. It is then often supposed that as the agent accumulates evidence, this function should be updated by conditioning: BE(·) should be B(·E)/B(E). Probability is also important in (...) classical statistics, where it is generally supposed that probabilities are frequencies, and that inference proceeds by controlling error and not by conditioning. I will focus on the tension between these two approaches to probability, and in the main part of the paper show where and when Bayesian conditioning conflicts with error based statistics and how to resolve these conflicts. (shrink)

Henry Allison is one of the foremost interpreters of the philosophy of Kant. This new volume collects all his recent essays on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. All the essays postdate Allison's two major books on Kant, and together they constitute an attempt to respond to critics and to clarify, develop and apply some of the central theses of those books. Two are published here for the first time. Special features of the collection are: a detailed defence of the (...) author's interpretation of transcendental idealism; a consideration of the Transcendental Deduction and some other recent interpretations thereof; further elaborations of the tensions between various aspects of Kant's conception of freedom and of the complex role of this conception within Kant's moral philosophy. (shrink)

Although only one aspect of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's diverse oeuvre, his religious thought had a significant influence on thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and present-day liberal Protestant theologians. His thought is particularly difficult to assess, however, because it is found largely in a series of essays, reviews, critical studies, polemical writings, and commentary on theological texts. Beyond these, his correspondence, and a few fragmentary essays unpublished during his lifetime, we have his famous drama of religious toleration, Nathan the Wise, (...) and his philosophical-historical sketch, The Education of the Human Race. In these scattered texts, Lessing challenged the full range of theological views in the Enlightenment, from Protestant orthodoxy, with its belief in Biblical inerrancy, to a radical naturalism, which rejected both the concept of a divine revelation and the historically based claims of Christianity to be one, as well as virtually everything in between. Since he refused to identify himself with any of these parties, Lessing was an enigmatic figure, and a central question from his time to today is where he stood on the issue of the truth of the Christian religion. Now back in print, and with the addition of two supplementary essays, Henry E. Allison's book argues that, despite appearances, Lessing was not merely an eclectic thinker or intellectual provocateur, but a serious philosopher of religion, who combined a basically Spinozistic conception of God with a sophisticated pluralistic conception of religious truth inspired by Leibniz. (shrink)

Community custom has played a limited but important role in the law of property. In addition to a few major historic examples such as mining camp rules and whaling, property law sometimes relies on community custom, for example in adverse possession, nuisance law, and beach access. This Article proposes an informational theory of custom in property law. Custom is subject to a communicative tradeoff in the law: all else being equal, informationally demanding customs require an audience with a high degree (...) of common knowledge. General customs already known throughout society do not require much extra publicity from the law, and the law can easily draw on such customs. By contrast, customs that vary by community raise the question of the need for processing by non-expert audiences, i.e., outgroup dutyholders and government officials. This tradeoff helps explain the differential receptiveness to various customs and the process by which they are formalized if they are adopted into the law. The information-cost theory suggests that enthusiasts and skeptics of custom have both tended to ignore this process. The theory is then applied to some suggestive evidence from grazing customs and the pedis possessio doctrine in mining law, under which miners have pre-discovery rights to the spot being worked. Finally, the information-cost theory of custom sheds some light on the history and controversies over the numerus clausus and on the question of baselines of property entitlements in the law of takings. (shrink)

This essay examines the main line of argument of Yirmiyahu Yovel's The Adventures of Immanence. Expressing general agreement with Yovel's central thesis that Spinoza's ?immanent revolution? marked an important tuming?point in the history of modernity and profoundly influenced subsequent thought, I none the less take issue with some of the details of the story. In particular, I question his omission of Lessing, his account of the relationship between Spinoza and Kant, and his treatment of Marx. In a final section I (...) present some objections to Yovel's guiding conception of a philosophy of immanence. (shrink)

Authors and printers together created the New Book of Nature—the printed literature of science—in early modern Europe. Careful attention has been given in recent years to the development of literary and rhetorical techniques in science. This article proposes that these developments were linked to printing technology and the typographic culture that produced the early printed book of science. We focus on several cases in which the roles of author and printer-publisher were joined and thereby highlight connections between knowledge production and (...) reproduction during the Scientific Revolution. Examples include Regiomontanus, Tycho Brake, Galileo, William Leybourn, Joseph Moxon, and the collective practices and privileges of the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences. (shrink)

This volume presents seventeen essays by one of the world's leading scholars on Kant. Henry E. Allison explores the nature of transcendental idealism, freedom of the will, and the concept of the purposiveness of nature. He places Kant's views in their historical context and explores their contemporary relevance to present day philosophers.

Quantitative laws are more typical of science than are generalizations involving observational predicates, yet much discussion of scientific inference takes the confirmation of a universal generalization by its instances to be typical and paradigmatic. The important difference is that measurement necessarily involves error. It is argued that because of error laws can no more be refuted by observation than they can be verified by observation. Without much background knowledge, tests of a law mainly provide evidence for the distribution of errors (...) of measurement of the quantities involved. With more background knowledge, the data may contribute either to our knowledge of the error distributions, or to the grounds we have for accepting or rejecting the law. With enough background knowledge, data may verify as well as refute laws. (shrink)

Henry E. Allison presents an analytical and historical commentary on Kant`s transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. He argues that, rather than providing a new solution to an old problem, it addresses a new problem, and he traces the line of thought that led Kant to the recognition of the significance of this problem in his 'pre-critical' period. In addition to the developmental nature of the account of Kant`s views presented (...) here, two distinctive features of Allison's reading of the deduction are a defense of Kant`s oft criticized claim that the conformity of appearances to the categories must be unconditionally rather than merely conditionally necessary and an insistence that the argument cannot be separated from Kant`s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Bishop Butler, [Butler, 1736], said that probability was the very guide of life. But what interpretations of probability can serve this function? It isn’t hard to see that empirical (frequency) views won’t do, and many recent writers-for example John Earman, who has said that Bayesianism is “the only game in town”-have been persuaded by various dutch book arguments that only subjective probability will perform the function required. We will defend the thesis that probability construed in this way offers very little (...) guidance, dutch book arguments notwithstanding. We will sketch a way out of the impasse. (shrink)

Although a good deal has been written about Kant's conception of free will in recent years, there has been no serious attempt to examine in detail the development of his views on the topic. This book endeavours to remedy the situation by tracing Kant's thoughts on free will from his earliest discussions of it in the 1750s through to his last accounts in the 1790s. This developmental approach is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it shows that the (...) path that led Kant to view freedom as a transcendental power that is both radically distinct from and compatible with the causality of nature was a winding one. Second, it indicates that, despite the variety of views of free will that Kant held at various times, the concept occupied a central place in his thought, because it was the point of union between his theoretical and practical philosophy. (shrink)

There are a number of reasons for being interested in uncertainty, and there are also a number of uncertainty formalisms. These formalisms are not unrelated. It is argued that they can all be reflected as special cases of the approach of taking probabilities to be determined by sets of probability functions defined on an algebra of statements. Thus, interval probabilities should be construed as maximum and minimum probabilities within a set of distributions, Glenn Shafer's belief functions should be construed as (...) lower probabilities, etc. Updating probabilities introduces new considerations, and it is shown that the representation of belief as a set of probabilities conflicts in this regard with the updating procedures advocated by Shafer. The attempt to make subjectivistic probability plausible as a doctrine of rational belief by making it more flowery — i.e., by adding new dimensions — does not succeed. But, if one is going to represent beliefs by sets of distributions, those sets of distributions might as well be based in statistical knowledge, as they are in epistemological or evidential probability. (shrink)

To date, our knowledge of Rift Valley fever disease spread and maintenance is still limited, as flooding, humid weather and presence of biting insects such as mosquitoes, have not completely explained RVF outbreaks. We propose a model that includes livestock, mosquitoes and ticks compartments structured according to their questing and feeding behaviour in order to study the possible role of ticks on the dynamics of RVF. To quantify disease transmission at the initial stage of the epidemic, we derive an explicit (...) formula of the basic reproductive number, $$R_0$$ R 0. Using the concept of Metzler matrix, we state necessary conditions for global asymptotic stability of the disease-free equilibrium. Results suggest that although host-ticks interactions may serve as disease reservoirs or disease amplifiers, the Aedes reproductive number should be kept under unity if disease post-epizootics activities are to be controlled. Results of both local and global sensitivity analysis of selected model parameters indicate that $$R_0$$ R 0 is more sensitive to the ticks attachment and detachment rates, probability of transmission from ticks to host and from host to ticks, length of infection in livestock and ticks death rate. Furthermore, when comparing the mean value of $$R_0$$ R 0 with that from previous studies which did not include ticks we found that our $$R_0$$ R 0 is very much larger resulting in an increase in the exponential phase of an outbreak. These findings suggest that if ticks are capable of transmitting the virus, they may be contributing to disease outbreaks and endemicity. (shrink)