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According to current philosophical lore, Kant rejected the notion that philosophy can progress by psychological means and endeavored to restrict it accordingly. This book reverses the frame from Kant the anti-psychological critic of psychological philosophy to Kant the preeminent psychological critic of non-psychological philosophy.
In a 2005 editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian, Kant was declared "the undefeated heavyweight philosophy champion of the world" because he had the "insight ... to remove psychology from epistemology, arguing that knowledge is inevitably mediated by space, time and forms within our minds." This is an accurate reflection of the consensus view of philosophers and scientists that Kant's accounts of space, time, nature, mathematics, and logic in the Critique of Pure Reason are rationalist, normativist, and nativist. Here, Wayne Waxman argues that this is untrue. Kant neither asserted nor implied that Euclid and Newton are the final word in their respective sciences. Rather than supposi...
Wayne Waxman here presents an ambitious and comprehensive attempt to link the philosophers of what are known as the British Empiricists--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--to the philosophy of German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Much has been written about all these thinkers, who are among the most influential figures in the Western tradition. Waxman argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Kant is actually the culmination of the British empiricist program and that he shares their methodological assumptions and basic convictions about human thought and knowledge.
This book presents an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a priori psychologism. It groups Kant’s philosophy together with those of the British empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—in a single line of psychologistic succession and offers a clear explanation of how Kant’s psychologism differs from psychology and idealism. The book reconciles Kant’s philosophy with subsequent developments in science and mathematics, including post-Fregean mathematical logic, non-Euclidean geometry, and both relativity and quantum theory. It also relates Kant’s psychologism to Wittgenstein’s later conception of language. Finally, the author reveals the ways in which Kant’s philosophy dovetails with contemporary scientific theorizing about the natural phenomenon of consciousness and its place in nature. This book will be of interest to Kant scholars and historians of philosophy working on the British empiricists.
A comprehensive analysis and re-evaluation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature.
The Democracy Manifesto is about how to recreate democracy by replacing elections with government that is truly of, by and for the people. Written in engaging and accessible dialogue form, the book argues that the only truly democratic system of government is one in which decision-makers are selected randomly (by sortition) from the population at large, operating much the way trial juries do today, but 100% online, enabling people to govern together even across great distances. Sortition has a storied history but what sets The Democracy Manifesto apart is its comprehensive account of how it can be implemented not only across all sectors and levels of government, but throughout society as wel...
This book argues that Kant's transcendental idealism has been misinterpreted: it denies not simply the super-sensory reality of space, time, and appearances, but their reality outside imagination as well. After adducing extensive and explicit textual evidence in its favor, Waxman shows this interpretation to be essential to the Transcendental Deduction, the affirmation of things in themselves, and the attempt to surmount Hume's scepticism. He further argues that Kant's much-neglected claim that, besides himself, "no psychologist has so much as even thought that the imagination might be a necessary constituent of perception," should be construed so that even our consciousness of sensation itself (visual, tactile, etc.) is impossible without imagination. A compelling and original contribution to Kantian scholarship, Kant's Model of the Mind will also bear close examination by students and scholars of Hume, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science.
Comprised of twenty-nine specially commissioned essays, A Companion to Hume examines the depth of the philosophies and influence of one of history's most remarkable thinkers. Demonstrates the range of Hume's work and illuminates the ongoing debates that it has generated Organized by subject, with introductions to each section to orient the reader Explores topics such as knowledge, passion, morality, religion, economics, and politics Examines the paradoxes of Hume's thought and his legacy, covering the methods, themes, and consequences of his contributions to philosophy
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is something of a maverick figure in the history of philosophy. He produced a unique theory of the world and human existence based upon his notion of will. This collection analyses the related but distinct components of will from the point of view of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. This volume explores Schopenhauer's philosophy of death, his relationship to the philosophy of Kant, his use of ideas drawn from both Buddhism and Hinduism, and the important influence he exerted on Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein.
Thomas C. Vinci aims to reveal and assess the structure of Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason called the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories." At the end of the first part of the Deduction in the B-edition Kant states that his purpose is achieved: to show that all intuitions in general are subject to the categories. On the standard reading, this means that all of our mental representations, including those originating in sense-experience, are structured by conceptualization. But this reading encounters an exegetical problem: Kant states in the second part of the Deduction that a major part of what remains to be shown is that empirical intuitions are subject to the categor...