To Be or Not to Be a Kantian
Projecto The Bounds of Judgement – Frege, cognitive agents and human thinkers (PTDC/FIL-FIL/109882/2009)
To Be or Not to Be a Kantian
Fridays, Room 208, 13: 30 h
This research seminar, starting february 2013, will center on Kant’s theory of judgment, in order to be able to compare it with Frege’s. We claim that the conception of what being a thinker is Frege puts forward is completely different from that of Kant. In order to fully understand this claim we need to look closely at Kant on thinking and judging. Thus, we have decided this seminar should start with the discussion of Beatrice Longuenesse’s Kant and the capacity to judge – sensibility and discursivity in the transcendental analytic of the critique of pure reason).
The first sessions of the seminar will be dedicated to the discussion of the book. Only under that light can we understand the full extent of what we are claiming: we are claiming that Frege offers a substantial advance over Kant in our understanding of experience and its role in thought, an advance few so far have taken up. Part of that advance lies in the opposing views of a judgment (a posture towards the world) and of a thought (a content for such a posture). Kant draws a parallel between one supposed task to be performed—that of forming the unity of a judgment out of ‘the ideas (or concepts) of which it is formed’—and another—that of forming a particular sort of unity, a synthesis, out of those elements which form an ‘intuition’ (‘Anschauung’), for example, a visual experience (we will call this ‘Kant’s slogan’). For a judgment (or, correlatively, a thought), as Frege conceives this, there is no unifying work to be done of the sort Kant envisions in the first half of his parallel.
We claim thus that Kant’s slogan breaks down before it starts. One should begin with whole thoughts—it is whole thoughts which may be decomposed into parts. Also, we claim that for them to enter into logical relations just is for them to admit of such decomposition. But the parts on a given decomposition can do no other than add up to the whole. There is no intelligible task of unifying them; there’s no such thing as ‘a psychological function of unity of a judgment’.We see the proposals above as being Fregean, and we see tem as being revolutionary in contrast with against Kant’s way of approaching thought-world relations, as to be found in his ideas of (i) judgment as synthesis, and (ii) it is the same function which gives unity to the various ideas in a judgment and gives unity to the mere synthesis of various ideas in an intuition.
The ultimate aim of this seminar is to understand how questions concerning unity (of judgment, of thought) reflect on how mind-dependence is conceived by Kant, in contrast with Frege.