Reviews for The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy

The average rating for The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-17 00:00:00 Brian Henderson Reading this book is what happens when it's mid-July and I'm five months removed and 2 months away from football season--I ordered this book because of a genuine curiosity propped up by some spare time. --- After he wrote, no one could ever again think of either science or morality as a matter of the passive reception of entirely external truth or reality This is a companion to help you understand Kant's life work of forming the complete foundation of science and morality. --- There are things out there that we see by applying our way of seeing onto them (space, time, colors, shapes etc.) the very fact that the universal validity of the foundational principles of the scientific worldview, including that of universal causation, can be proved only for the appearances of things means that we can at least coherently consider the possibility that things as they are in themselves may not be governed by these laws; in particular, we can coherently consider that at the deepest level we ourselves are free agents bound only by the laws of morality and not by the deterministic laws of nature If parts of objects (objects in themselves) could exist beyond what we can sense or see, then parts of us could too. Perhaps in that realm these unseen parts of ourselves are not governed by physical laws but moral ones. The parts of us we cannot sense'residing in Ultimate Reality'could be the parts which drive us to be more than primal creatures of nature. The Critique never denies that there are items other than our mind, and it even notes that what we at first characterize as a mind can have an underlying reality that is not psychological at all "A rational being must therefore regard itself as an intelligence (therefore not from the side of its lower powers) as belonging to the world of understanding, not of sense" A part of this "intelligence" is our innate freedom, a freedom that enables us to know the world unlike any other Being. This power of freedom, Kant believes, is a kind of proof that we are the culminations of Nature as opposed to merely its inhabitants: Mankind is 'the only natural being in whom a super-sensible faculty (of freedom) can be known,' and only as 'the subject of morality' can humanity constitute a 'final purpose to which the whole of nature is teleologically subordinated.'…Human freedom is not to be seen just as a force entirely external to nature, but as the ultimate aim of nature itself. Kant explored the ultimate questions about existence and touched on subjects that are shunned in today's scientific and empirical mindset. He wanted to show that ultimate Truth was an unknowable entity. The best we can do is approach it: …the search for empirical law is necessarily open-ended. Thus we can approach but never actually reach certainty about any individual law of nature… Truth lies not in objectivity, but in an always evolving human agreement. --- Each author in this companion gets about 30-40 pages to give you their understanding of an aspect of Kant's philosophy. As you read you will notice there is a Kantian vocabulary you should familiarize yourself with, and you can get a head start here: [Also worth keeping as a reference: the Table of Judgements and Table of Categories: ] --- Chapters 1 through 9 deal with Kant's theoretical philosophy, that is, his theory of knowledge in general and of mathematics and natural science in particular… Chapter 4: Kant on a priori Concepts The Ground of Unity: Each moment our senses are bombarded by intuitions that contain anything and everything. There is something in our consciousness that "brings synthesis to" and focuses this seemingly chaotic experience. For example, intuitions like: 'hot', 'pungent odor', 'tar-like', and 'black' by themselves mean nothing but by bringing them together with our "ground of unity" we get: coffee. How does this ability to synthesize, this "ground of unity," apply itself to objects in the world around us? Kant doesn't know. He thinks this mysterious ability to unify chaotic experience into a knowable world is a feature of ourselves which resides in a realm foreign to our senses (the same realm that contains our morally governed soul.) In the meantime, since we can't know exactly how we apply our ground of unity to objects, Kant makes up a table of categories to help explain how this synthesis is occurring. If I understand correctly, this table shows how we turn 'intuitions' into 'concepts' which are then formed into 'judgements' and these judgements have relations to one another: "possibly true," "necessarily true," "necessarily false," etc. Future philosophers such as Hegel, Heidegger and Frege elaborated on Kant's "ground of unity." Hegel concludes that there is something in common with how we organize objects to our senses and how they are organized "in themselves," there is a fundamental relation (in need of clarification) between the structural features of the acts of judging and the structural features of objects. The difference between Hegel's view and Kant's view is that Hegel takes this relation to be a fact about being itself, and the structures thus revealed to be those of being itself, whereas Kant takes the relations between judging and the structures of being to be a fact about the way human beings relate to being, and the structures thus revealed to be those of being as it appears to human beings Hegel sees a God-like quality in the commonalities between the structures of our perception and the structures of objects, while Kant sees nothing more than a world conditioned by our own faculties of unification. Heidegger saw this unification, or "ground of unity," as an avenue that human beings use to access existence (or Being.) He saw our unity of concepts and intuitions as having a "common root": the synthesis of imagination in which human beings develop a unified view of themselves and of other entities as essentially temporal [time-based] entities. Three titles of Kant's table (quantity, quality, relation) deal with how we form a judgement: from senses (intuitions) to concepts to judgement, but a fourth part of that table is "modality" and modality: concerns not the judgement individually, but rather its relation to other judgements Kant's definition of "modality" influenced Frege's system of Logic. Whereas Kant defines Logic as how we view the world, Frege sees logic as the laws that connect our thoughts, Kant, according to Frege, is confused in maintaining that Logic deals with the rules we (humans beings) follow in thinking, rather than with the laws that connect thoughts independently of the way any particular thinker or group of thinkers actually think. For a primer on Logic as fathered by Frege, click here The author of this chapter argues that Frege cannot dismiss Kantian logic because Kant is building the metaphysical foundation for the statements that Frege's logic expands on, And we might say that [Kant]…should help us understand how the very states of affairs by virtue of which Frege's propositions stand for True or False are perceived and recognized as such. The author claims that Frege is not trying to accomplish what Kant is trying to accomplish, which is: to explain how our knowledge of objects is possible in general, and thus explain why any attempt at a priori metaphysics on purely conceptual grounds is doomed to fail. Chapter 6: Kant's Proofs of Substance and Causation ...it is his arguments about substance and cause that have attracted most attention since. Critics have often felt that there is something in these arguments...they remain the subject of much discussion Cause: At any time r, r1 precedes r2, therefore r2 emerges out of'is caused by'r1. The very fabric of time itself has cause built into it. The only problem is that we cannot see time, so how can we know this cause to exist? Through the rule of "objective succession" (or irreversibility) of our sensory representations. This rule states that our sensory representations are governed by an order: it is legitimate for me to first react to occurrence r1 and then occurrence r2, but not legitimate to first react to occurrence r2 and then occurrence r1: Kant is holding that the necessary time order (that previous times force, or necessarily advance to, succeeding times) has to be represented with or between occurrences. It cannot be that the succession just happens to come after the preceding occurrence if the necessary advance of times is to be represented in the series of occurrences themselves. So the cue ball that hits the eight-ball on a pool table occurs to us in a certain time order'the eight-ball does not move prior to being hit by the cue ball. The "objective succession" of these pool balls is given to us via our sensory representations and this objective succession is rooted in the fabric of time. We cannot see time or the cause woven into it, but we can see their sensory representations (i.e. the objective succession of cue ball to eight ball.) Substance: Substance is kind of like the spirit of an object, or better yet: The experience of any change requires not only the perception of the altered qualities that constitute the change but also the concept of an underlying substance which persists through this alteration. (E.g., in order to know by experience that the classroom wall has changed in color from blue to yellow, I must not only perceive the different colors'blue then, yellow now'but also suppose that the wall itself has endured from then until now.) Thus, Kant supposed that the philosophical concept of substance…is an a priori condition for our experience. The very things that emit sensory representations are themselves rooted in time via their essence'or substance. The "whiteness" of a cue ball or the "blackness" of a eight-ball is a "determination" of the substance. Substances exist to us only through their determinations. …necessary advancement of time still obtains. Now, however, it obtains because they are states of a substance [eight-ball] with a nature under the influence of a second substance [cue ball] with a nature. (I think what substance provides is:) Whereas sensory representations exist moment-to-moment and can change, "substance" gives objects a past and present. Not only, then, is substance the basis of representing past time, but it is the basis of representing proper [sensory representations] in past time Substance gives sensory representations a trackable existence, for ex: the cue ball on its journey from the pool stick to the eight-ball. And this trackable existence gives us sensory representation of "objective succession." The moment-to-moment sensory representations of Pool stick to cue ball to eight-ball represents the causality embedded in the fabric of time (it must be represented because we cannot actually see time.) The last two sections of this chapter deal with modern views of cause and substance. Kant's 'cause-effect' derived from linear time is placed against lack of causation in quantum mechanics and its 'many-worlds' interpretation. Also, modern views on causation are shown to take certainty out of the equation; instead of cause necessarily advancing to its effect, cause lies on a spectrum of probability regarding its intended effect, It seems to me that enough fissionable material precisely does not make the explosion happen; it only makes it incredibly probable. Meanwhile, Quine denies any "flat-out" truth to the existence of substances, stating they are born out of a misguided faith in our language. The author of this chapter argues that Quine has misunderstood Kant's use of "substance." Chapter 9: Philosophy of Natural Science Chapter 9 marks the pivot from Kant's theoretical philosophy (metaphysics, mathematics, knowledge, natural science) to his practical philosophy'his moral and political thought. This world is thereby seen to be much more than a theater for objective human experience and knowledge…it is also, and primarily, a vehicle for the realization of the moral law. The author shows how Einstein's application of non-Euclidian geometry to the science of nature effectively ended the spiritual and metaphysical questions of logical empiricism (a large part of the life work of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Descartes) and shifted meaningful research to the natural sciences themselves. The author of this chapter argues for aspects of Kant's work that can remain relevant today even in the face of developments from Quine (web of belief) and Einstein (theory of relativity.) He argues that as science progresses, so too do the a priori principles that frame our empirical and theoretical knowledge. Chapters 10-18 I tried to get through these chapters but ended up skimming most of them'one chapter is called "Kant on sex and marriage right," so…yeah. There were two chapters that I read all the way through: Chapters 14 and 16, "Kant's theory of peace" (still referenced in today's world politics) and "Kant's ambitions in the third Critique." There is a lot of useful material in most of these chapters, but I just couldn't bring myself to find any interest in them. --- For me, Chapters 1-9 alone were worth the price of admission. Overall, I thought this was a very clear and thorough companion to Kant's work.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-10 00:00:00 Winifred Cooper Suprisingly accessible. I am not a Philosophy student but I found this mostly readable. There was a few chapters that were either way too complex for me, or required some more background reading, or were just written pooring, but overall it was very interesting, and I really enjoyed reading it. I'd recommend to pick this up if you are looking for a more in-depth introduction to Kant's ideas beyond other philosophy introductions, or youtube videos. However I'd suggest you do two things, first read up on Hume before hand as a lot of Kant it a reaction to Hume's Empiricism and Skeptism. Secondly, take notes as you read! This helps solidify ideas such as a priori which are used in all of Kant's thought. Every chapter is relevant to another as Kant's ideas were a system, not a collection of independant discussions.