Interpreting Kant's Critiques

360 Pages·2003·2.92 MB·English

by  Karl Ameriks

Interpreting Kant's Critiques
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InterpretingKant's Critiques
KARL AMERIKS
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Acknowledgements
I thank the editors at Oxford University Press, and especially Peter Momtchiloff, for their invaluable assistance with
this volume. On innumerable specific points I am heavily indebted to my colleagues at Notre Dame, and to the
audiences for whom earlier versions of many of the chapters were presented. A major inspiration for this volume
comes from the interests and questions of my students over the years, and I especially hope that this book can be of
help to them and other students of Kant in the future.
I acknowledge permission to reprint materials from the following publications:
Introduction (and Chapter 11): portions of ‘On Being Neither Post- Nor Anti-Kantian: A Reply to Breazeale and
Larmore Concerning “The Fate of Autonomy” ’, Inquiry 46 (2003), 272–92.
Chapter 1: ‘Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument’, Kant-Studien, 69 (1978), 273–85.
Chapter 2: ‘Recent Work on Kant's Theoretical Philosophy’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 19 (1982), 1–24.
Chapter 3: ‘Kantian Idealism Today’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1992), 329–42.
Chapter 4: ‘The Critique of Metaphysics:Kant and Traditional Ontology’, inThe Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul
Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 249–79.
Chapter 5: ‘Kant and Short Arguments to Humility’, in Kant's Legacy: Essays in Honor of L. W. Beck, ed. Predrag
Cicovacki (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2000), pp. 167–94.
Chapter 6: ‘Kant's Deduction of Freedom and Morality’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981), 53–79.
Chapter 7: ‘Kant on the Good Will’, in Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Otfried Höffe (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1989), pp. 45–65.
Chapter 8: ‘Kant and Hegel on Freedom: Two New Interpretations’, Inquiry 35 (1992), 219–32.
Chapter9:‘ZuKantsArgumentationzudrittenAbschnittderGrundlegung’,inSystematischeEthikmitKant,ed.Carsten
Held and Hans-Ulrich Baumgarten (Freiburg: Alber, 2001), pp. 24–54.
vi
Chapter 10: ‘ “Pure Reason of Itself Alone Suffices to Determine the Will” ’, in Immanuel Kant: Kritik der praktischen
Vernunft, ed. Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), pp. 99–114.
Chapter 11: ‘On Schneewind and Kant's Method in Ethics’, Ideas y Valores 102 (1996), 28–53.
Chapter 12: ‘How to Save Kant's Deduction of Taste’, Journal of Value Inquiry 16 (1982), 295–302; and ‘Kant and the
Objectivity of Taste’, British Journal of Aesthetics 23 (1983), 3–17.
Chapter 13: ‘New Views on Kant's Judgment of Taste’, in Kants ästhetik/Kant's Aesthetics/L'esthétique de Kant, ed.
Hermann Parret (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 431–47.
Chapter 14: ‘Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity’, in Kant Actuel, ed. F. Duchesneau, G. LaFrance, and C. Piché
(Montréal/Paris: Bellarmin/Vrin, 2000), pp. 141–61.
Contents
Introduction: The Common Ground of Kant's Critiques 1
Part I: The First Critique and Kant's Theoretical Philosophy 49
1 Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument 51
2 Recent Work on Kant's Theoretical Philosophy 67
3 Kantian Idealism Today 98
4 The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology 112
5 Kant and Short Arguments to Humility 135
Part II: The Second Critique and Kant's Practical Philosophy 160
6 Kant's Deduction of Freedom and Morality 161
7 Kant on the Good Will 193
8 Kant and Hegel on Freedom: Two New Interpretations 212
9 Kant's Groundwork III Argument Reconsidered 226
10 ‘Pure Reason of Itself Alone Suffices to Determine the Will’ 249
11 On Two Non-Realist Interpretations of Kant's Ethics 263
Part III: The Third Critique and Kant's Aesthetics 283
12 How to Save Kant's Deduction of Taste as Objective 285
13 New Views on Kant's Judgment of Taste 307
14 Taste, Conceptuality, and Objectivity 324
Index 345
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Introduction
The Common Ground of Kant's Critiques
1. Interpretive Prolegomena
Like the well-known and continually frustrating academic search for ‘the historical Jesus’, the interpretation of Kant's
philosophy can besaid tobeundergoing a ‘third wave’ inour time. The first waveofKantscholars offered extensive
1
synoptic treatments, culminating with Hermann Cohen's three volumes on the three Critiques ; later, Norman Kemp
Smith and H. J. Paton provided relatively abbreviated English versions of this largely apologetic and historical
approach. In a second period, in the heyday of positivistic analytic philosophy in the 1960s, the work of outstanding
original thinkers such as P. F. Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars, and Jonathan Bennett introduced a very different approach,
emphasizing a criticalreconstruction ofargumentsthatweresometimes connected onlylooselytotheoriginaltextbut
very effectively engaged central issues in contemporary analytic philosophy (e.g. the private language argument, the
linguistic turn, the verification principle). However noteworthy its irreversible achievements, this second period
remained caught at times in its own particular interests, somewhat like the ‘second-wave’ mid-century theologians,
whose very concern to be modern (in this case, ‘existential’) may now seem to some readers to be the most outdated
feature of their work. The new Kantians' focus on rigor and current issues came with the cost of leaving most of the
original context of Kant's work out of sight, and of usually going only so far as to consider the first of Kant's three
Critiques—and, even then, only a little more than half of that work, or, in the case of practical philosophy, little more
than the first half of the Groundwork.
The contemporary third wave of Kant scholars, represented in the United States by interpreters such as Henry E.
Allison and Paul Guyer, and in part anticipated by the work of leading postwar German philosophers such as Dieter
1 Cf.JohnP.Maier,AMarginalJew:RethinkingtheHistoricalJesus,vol.2(NewYork,1994),1.Allthis,ofcourse,istheworkoflatergenerationsofhistoricalscholarstryingto
reconstructthesignificanceofanoriginal‘master’,anditisofaverydifferentcharacterthanthelivelydisputesamongsuccessorswhobeganwritingwhenthemaster,orat
leasthisimmediatestudents,werestillalive.ThestoryofKant'simmediate receptionhasitsownbiblicalparallels,anditisthefocusofmyearlierstudy,KantandtheFateof
Autonomy:ProblemsintheReceptionoftheCriticalPhilosophy (Cambridge,2000).