Timothy Rosenkoetter

The launching point for this chapter is Kant’s striking claim that all and only mathematical cognition is “evident.” After proposing the hypothesis that “evident” propositions are a proper subset of “obvious” propositions (namely, the subset of the obvious grounded in a priori intuition), the chapter fills a lacuna in the secondary literature by developing a systematic account of when and why Kant conceives of this or that proposition as “obvious.” The core idea is that certainty regarding an obvious truth is accessible to any subject who possesses “common human understanding.” The fact that there are two modes of access available to a subject who currently lacks that certainty (or is outright mistaken)—one through rule-based instruction, the other through measures that regain the healthy use of common human understanding—partitions the obvious into two classes, including most of mathematics in the former class and truths such as the causal principle, basic moral principles, and tau...

Kant’s theory of cognition appeals to a host of for ms, representational contents, faculties, and synthetic acts. One thing to which Kant’s interpreters aspire is a better understanding of how these various explanatory grounds relate to one another. In some cases we are given substantial hints. For instance, there can be little doubt that the fact that our understanding operates by actualizing certain “functions” – such as the disjunctive function that is used when we judge disjunctive propositions – explains our possession of the categories, in this case the category of community. Yet even here Kant is content to leave us to fill in the details. The functions are doubtless only a partial explanation of the categories and it is less clear what else is required for a full explanation. Worse, the explanatory dependence of the categories upon the functions stands out for the amount of explicit attention that Kant devotes to it. The explanatory relations between most other explananda ar...

This paper offers a novel solution to the long-standing puzzle of why the Canon of Pure Reason maintains, in contradiction to Kant’s position elsewhere in the first Critique, both that practical freedom can be proved through experience, and that the question of our transcendental freedom is properly bracketed as irrelevant in practical matters. The Canon is an a priori investigation of our most fundamental practical capacity. It is argued that Kant intends its starting point to be explanatorily independent of transcendental logic and the ontic more generally, an independence that would be compromised if transcendental freedom were included in that starting point, even in a mode of supposition. In a different sense, however, practical reason precisely is dependent on the ontic: it can be realized only in beings. This species of dependence is used to explain the puzzling claim that practical freedom can be experienced.

This paper offers a novel solution to the long-standing puzzle of why the Canon of Pure Reason maintains, in contradiction to Kant’s position elsewhere in the first Critique, both that practical freedom can be proved through experience, and that the question of our transcendental freedom is properly bracketed as irrelevant in practical matters. The Canon is an a priori investigation of our most fundamental practical capacity. It is argued that Kant intends its starting point to be explanatorily independent of transcendental logic and the ontic more generally, an independence that would be compromised if transcendental freedom were included in that starting point, even in a mode of supposition. In a different sense, however, practical reason precisely is dependent on the ontic: it can be realized only in beings. This species of dependence is used to explain the puzzling claim that practical freedom can be experienced.

... As Peter Hylton helpfully describes Russell's bind, “[his] attitude…was that any component of the proposition would be—well, just one ... I argue against this reading in Rosenkoetter (Forthcoming 1). Second, existential judgments would indeed require a second‐level concept if ...

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object.

This paper introduces a referential reading of Kant’s practical project, according to which maxims are made morally permissible by their correspondence to objects, though not the ontic objects of Kant’s theoretical project but deontic objects (what ought to be). It illustrates this model by showing how the content of the Formula of Universal Law might be determined by what our capacity of practical reason can stand in a referential relation to, rather than by facts about what kind of beings we are (viz., uncaused causes). This solves the neglected puzzle of why there are passages in Kant’s works suggesting robust analogies between mathematics and ethics, since to universalize a maxim is to test a priori whether a practical object with that particular content can be constructed. An apparent problem with this hypothesis is that the medium of practical sensibility (feeling) does not play a role analogous to the medium of theoretical sensibility (intuition). In response I distinguish two separate Kantian accounts of mathematical apriority. The thesis that maxim universalization is a species of construction, and thus a priori, turns out to be consistent with the account of apriority that informs Kant’s understanding of actual mathematical practice.