Rational Psychology

In this paper we present and discuss the main Romanian attempts in philosophical psychology in the first decades of the 19th century, with a special focus on the mind–body problem. Whereas the issue of the relationship between the mind or soul and the body, comprising the existence or inexistence of the soul, its materiality or immateriality, its mortality or immortality etc. is discussed in sufficient detail by the authors of this epoch, the narrow mind–body problem, concerning the difficulty for a material thing and an immaterial thing to causally interact, is curiously underestimated and unsatisfactorily treated. We explain this by the interplay of a sensualist philosophical outlook and a pre-modern, basically religion-informed, world-view. The resulting thought, we argue, misses the modern concept of Spirit, hence of mind as spiritual. Therefore, the narrow mind–body problem does not arise for it.

According to the standard interpretation of the first paralogism, its fallacy is based on a confusion between two meanings of the term 'subject', namely that of 'thinking subject' and that of 'subject of predication'. The paper argues that this interpretation is incorrect and that Kant in fact explains the illusion of cognizing ourselves as thinking substances by a misinterpretation of a certain logico-semantical feature of the representation 'I', namely that of non-predicability. This interpretation puts the first paralogism in accord with the other paralogisms, all of which are claimed by Kant to stem from a confusion between 'logical' and 'real' features of the self. It also allows us to relate the chapter on the paralogisms to Kant's views on the connection between the ideas of pure reason and the progress towards the unconditioned in chains of prosyllogisms.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of Dreams of a Spirit-seer elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics from 1766 for the development of Kant's theoretical philosophy and particularly to his conception of metaphysics. On one hand, we will stress that the insoluble problems of rational psychology in Dreams, led Kant definitely to realize the impossibility of the metaphysical system proposed in his early work, published between 1746 and end of 1750. This is seen through the inconsistency of some of its fundamental concepts such as space, active forces and spirits. On the other hand, we will show that this prospect led Kant to leave the optimism of 1764 in relation to the reconstruction of metaphysics as deductive science and ontology. Accordingly, the first insights into the effective impossibility of the traditional concept of metaphysics and consciousness of the need for reform in its significance will emerge. Thus, some important steps will be taken toward his mature thought from this.

The ontological identity theory is a contradictory position based on the untenable notion of two perspectives from which one would be able to consider the conscious mind. The only viable road to the conscious mind is the subjective one. The conscious mind is not really something physical.

In this paper we will try to clarify some systematic points related to the double structure of Wolff’s most mature natural theology. By sketching the relations between the two parts of this theology, we hope to shed some light on the reasons that pushed Wolff to adopt such a structure for the final part of his system. In order to pursue this goal, we shall begin with a schematic presentation of the a posteriori and a priori demonstrations of God’s existence in the first and second parts of Natural Theology respectively. We will then take a step backwards, focusing on the argumentative structure of the German Metaphysics, in order to point out the premises that the systematization adopted by Wolff in the Latin writings moves from. We will then pore over the a priori argument in order to assess, on the one hand, its argumentative framework and, on the other hand, the enrichment it can bring to natural theology. Finally, we will propose some considerations on the advantages and disadvantages that in terms of systematic consistency can derive to the Wolffian system from the adoption of this double structure.

Malgrado il termine “ontologia” non compaia con particolare frequenza negli scritti a stampa di Kant, egli si confronta ampiamente con questo concetto sia nella fase precritica del proprio pensiero sia nei passaggi cruciali della svolta critica. Nei manuali accademici in uso nella Germania del Settecento, l’ordo expositionis della metafisica segue il modello wolffiano, in cui l’ontologia rappresenta la metafisica generale, a cui segue la metafisica speciale, composta da cosmologia, psicologia e teologia. Durante la propria attività didattica, che abbraccia tutta la seconda metà del diciottesimo secolo, Kant sceglie di tenere le proprie lezioni di metafisica commentando la Metaphysica di A. G. Baumgarten. Si tratta di un testo che, pur seguendo l’impostazione generale wolffiana, se ne distanzia per diversi aspetti, ricercando spesso soluzioni originali circa i principi cardine della metafisica. Commentando questo testo Kant ha modo di ampliare il respiro della propria analisi, confrontandosi con i protagonisti del dibattito metafisico del proprio tempo e rimettendo in discussione lo statuto stesso della metafisica e del suo metodo. Il “laboratorio” delle lezioni consente di riconoscere l’ordito sotteso a molti dei passaggi metodologici che conducono alla concezione critica del trascendentale, la pietra angolare nel ripensamento kantiano della metafisica.

Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer has puzzled most of its readers since its publication in 1766. Herder complained in general terms about the lack of unity and coherence of the book as well as Kant’s dialectical method of presenting both sides of a problem without offering his own solution. Mendelssohn was in doubt about whether Kant wanted to ridicule metaphysics or make a case for Swedenborg’s visions. Another exegetical puzzle has not been noted yet: Dreams discusses not one, but three different versions of a ‘metaphysics of spirits’. All of them are mutually incompatible. In other words, the two versions of a metaphysics of spirits that Kant criticises in the first part of the book are both of them different from Swedenborg’s own claims, as they are discussed in the second part. And the two versions discussed within the first part are not homogeneous, either: the metaphysics discussed in the first chapter of the first part (the ‘tangled knot’) and those that seem to form the foundation for the second chapter of the first part (the ‘fragment of occult philosophy’) are again incompatible. And neither of them fits with what Kant analyses as Swedenborg’s metaphysical position in the second part: The position of the ‘tangled knot’ can tentatively be labelled as ‘crypto-materialist’. Swedenborg’s own position is characterised in the text as ‘idealist’. The ‘fragment of occult philosophy’ in contrast is probably best described as ‘dualist’. If this diagnosis is correct, it reinforces Herder’s complaints about the lack of coherence of Dreams as well as Mendelssohn’s worry about its targets. And it adds the additional challenge to explain how there can be a ‘crypto-materialist’ metaphysics of spirit-seeing. I propose to weaken the impact of these problems by identifying a second target of Kant’s scorn in Dreams – a metaphysical position Kant could be sympathetic with as far as its fundamental intentions are concerned, but that draws his ire because of an equally comprehensive failure in the realisation of these intentions. This target is Georg Friedrich Meier who published the second edition of his metaphysics in 1765, one year before the publication of Dreams.

In the debate on causality in eighteenth-century Germany, Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony plays a central role. This theory presupposes important metaphysical assumptions, such as the monadological structure of the world, and represents a radical alternative to the theory of physical influx. This paper provides an overview of the debate in the period between C. Wolf and A.G. Baumgarten. While the former is skeptical about the monadology and accepts pre-established harmony as a valid hypothesis only concerning the soul-body relationship, the latter endorses the monadological theory and therefore adopts pre-established harmony in its universal value. A further conclusion is that Leibniz's Essais de Théodicée can be taken as a robust point of reference to highlight the main metaphysical topics at stake in this lively intellectual scene.

In his pre-critical lectures on rational psychology, Kant employs an argument from the I to the transcendental freedom of the soul. In the (A-edition of the) first Critique, he distances himself from rational psychology, and instead offers four paralogisms of this doctrine, insisting that ‘I think’ no longer licenses any inferences about a soul. Kant also comes alive to the possibility that we could be thinking mechanisms - rational beings, but not agents. These developments rob him of his pre-critical rationalist argument for freedom. In the Groundwork, this is a serious problem; if we are not free, morality will be a phantasm for us. In Groundwork III, Kant attempts to overcome this by offering a new argument for our freedom, involving the standpoint of practical reason. In this paper, I detail these developments and present a practical and phenomenological reading of Kant’s approach in Groundwork III. I also venture a defence of this new argument.

Kant argumentiert in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, dass der Materialismus ebenso " zur Erklärungsart meines Daseins untauglich ist " wie der " Spiritualism " der rationalen Seelenlehre (B 420). In der Literatur werden Kants Argumente hierzu auch als ‚Widerlegung' des Materialismus bezeichnet. Auf materialistische Denker des 18. Jahrhunderts wird dabei kaum eingegangen. Der Vortrag versucht zu zeigen, dass Kants Verhältnis zum (psychologischen) Materialismus komplexer ist als es in der Literatur oft dargestellt wird, und er bewertet und würdigt dieses Verhältnis in einem anderen, etwas positiverem Licht. Mit Joseph Priestley bezieht der Vortrag einen der wichtigsten Materialisten der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts in die Diskussion ein. Es wird zu zeigen versucht, dass Priestley, mit dessen Position Kant offensichtlich vertraut war, einige von Kants Argumenten gegen die rationale Psychologie antizipiert. Schließlich wird gegen die weit verbreitete Auffassung argumentiert, wonach Kants Zurückweisung des Materialismus ihn auf eine immaterialistische Seelenmetaphysik verpflichtet.

In the last decades, scholars have aptly pointed out the limits of J.N. Tetens’ contribution to the rise of Kant’s critical theory of knowledge. Less attention has been paid to the possibility of recognizing a further, possibly more consistent, contribution by Tetens to Kant’s thought, namely, to the development of Kant’s anthropology. The present paper aims to test some possible research lines in this direction. After an overview on the observational method shared by Tetens’ gnoseological framework and Kant’s anthropological approach, we will more specifically dwell on some topics that seem to allow a continuity-claim between Tetens’ psychological analysis of the human cognitive faculties and Kant’s anthropological project. The main issues at stake in this investigation are the faculty of empirical productive imagination (Dichtkraft/Dichtungsvermögen), the figure of the genius, and the relationship between language and Denkungsart.

In this paper, I argue for a more profound philosophical continuity between Meier and Kant. As I show, a consideration of Meier’s treatises on rational psychology reveals a perspective on the basis for our certainty of the soul’s immortality that not only serves to distinguish his views within the broader Wolffian tradition, but that also constitutes a clear anticipation of Kant’s own distinctive claim that the immortality of the soul is (merely) an object of a moral belief.

Выявляется сущность проблемы трансцендентального субъекта в философии И. Канта. Показывается особое место понятия трансцендентального субъекта в трансцендентально-критическом проекте немецкого мыслителя. При этом во внимание принимается не только теоретическая философия И. Канта, где впервые был заявлен трансцендентальный субъект, но и практическая философия, в рамках которой наиболее полно раскрывается потенциал и предназначение этого субъекта, далеко не тождественного субъекту мышления, но и не являющегося просто рудиментом докантовской метафизики. Содержание понятия трансцендентального субъекта оказывается сложным преломлением различных представлений из рациональной психологии, метафизики субстанции и собственно критического проекта.
The essence of the problem of transcendental subject in Kant’s philosophy is considered. The special place of this subject in Kant’s transcendental critical project is defined. The author takes into account not only Kant’s theoretical philosophy, within frame of which the transcendental subject has been first stated, but also practical philosophy, in which the potential and purpose of this subject most completely fulfil. The concept of the transcendental subject is not identical to the subject of thinking, as well as it is not a vestige of pre-Kantian metaphysics. The concept of the transcendental subject is complicated refraction of different representations from rational psychology, metaphysics of substance and critical project in itself.

This volume sheds new light on Immanuel Kant’s conception of anthropology. Neither a careful and widespread search of the sources nor a merely theoretical speculation about Kant’s critical path can fully reveal the necessarily wider horizon of his anthropology. This only comes to light by overcoming all traditional schemes within Kantian studies, and consequently reconsidering the traditional divisions within Kant’s thought. The goal of this book is to highlight an alternative, yet complementary path followed by Kantian anthropology with regard to transcendental philosophy. The present volume intends to develop this path in order to demonstrate how irreducible it is in what concerns some crucial claims of Kant’s philosophy, such as the critical defense of the unity of reason, the search for a new method in metaphysics and the moral outcome of Kant’s thought.

Der Vortrag erkundet die vielförmige Beziehung zwischen dem Apriori und dem Aposteriori in Kants transzendentaler Theorie kognitiver Gegenstandsbeziehung. Die Erörterung erfolgt in sechs systematischen Schritten, die jeweils einen Hauptaspekt der theoretischen Gegenstandsbeziehung bei Kant behandeln. Die Sachtitel der sechs Abschnitte lauten: Das Empirische und das Metaempirische, Empirischer Anfang und nicht-empirischer Beitrag, Reiner Ursprung und empirischer Gebrauch, Empirischer Anlass und apriorische Generation, Genesis und Geltung sowie Gebrauch a priori und Gebrauch a posteriori. Jeder Abschnitt wird von einem Schlüsselzitat Kants eröffnet, dem dann systematische Überlegungen auf der textlichen Grundlage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft folgen.

This is the final submitted manuscript. The printed version can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/kantyb-2014-0103

The majority of Kant scholars has taken it for granted that for Kant the soul is in some sense present in space and that this assumption is by and large unproblematic. If we read Kant’s texts in the context of debates on this topic within 18th century rationalism and beyond, a more complex picture emerges, leading to the somewhat surprising conclusion that Kant in 1770 can best be characterised as a Cartesian about the mind. The paper first develops a framework for describing the various positions on the place of the soul in space as varieties of ‘localism’, since German philosophers of the 18th century all agreed on the fact that the soul is in some sense present in space. Strong localists (Crusius, Knutzen) maintain that the soul occupies a place that cannot at the same time be occupied by a material substance. The Königsberg Wolffian Christian Gabriel Fischer is an ‘epistemic localist’ defending the view that our knowledge about the presence of the soul in space is limited. Bilfinger holds that the soul only represents itself as being present in space, he is a ‘representational localist’. The Cartesians, including Leonhard Euler and his teacher Samuel Werenfels, assume that the soul is effective in a region of space without truly being present there. They are ‘virtual localists’. Kant’s attitude towards this problem before the 1760s is a bit unclear. But his writings in this period are at least compatible with the strong localism defended by Knutzen. In the Herder transcripts (1762-1764) and other texts after 1760, Kant begins to distance himself from this view, but he does not articulate clearly his own position. This trend culminates in Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), where Kant oscillates somewhat uneasily between epistemic and virtual localism and criticises explicitly the Cartesian thesis that the soul’s presence in the body is limited to a determinate region. The dissertation from 1770 marks another radical change in Kant’s views on the place of the soul. Here, he subscribes to virtual localism and its concomitant thesis that the soul itself is, properly speaking, nowhere. Together with the thesis that the soul knows that it belongs to the mundus intelligibilis this makes Kant in 1770 a Cartesian about the mind.

The present paper aims to explore the possibility of rethinking the concept of objectivity by abandoning the idea that it cannot be defined except by its opposition to subjectivity. The leading idea is that such a dependence upon the contrast to the subjective dimension has impoverished the investigation prospects on the concept of objectivity. In order to propose this new way to look at the concept of objectivity, we will start from the early twentieth-century debate between Neo-Kantianism (Natorp) and Phenomenology (Husserl). This is a meaningful example of the way in which objectivity depends on subjectivity, and even more on the relationship between subjectivity and temporality. Then we will refer to G. Abel’s philosophy of signs and interpretation, as a very perspicuous perspective, which allows to disentangle the subject from temporality within the process that brings to the construction of what we call «objective reality». This methodological paradigm’s overturning sets the stage for an idea of objectivity, which relies on the basic assumption that, in a sense, the objects can be taken as having their own life.

Wie bekannt unterscheidet Kant eine Anthropologie »in physiologischer Hinsicht« und eine »pragmatische« Anthropologie, aber die Anthropologie bleibt doch stets ein empirisches Wissen und besitzt
eindeutig keine apriorische Universalität. Umso mehr muss man sich über eine Reflexion aus dem handschriftlichen Nachlass wundern, wo Kant eine »anthropologia transcendentalis« erwähnt. Bei allen Vorbehalten
wegen der Singularität dieser Formulierung besitzt die Stelle eine wichtige Bedeutung und erfordert eine genauere Analyse. Denn in jener Reflexion erklärt Kant auch, dass der Gelehrte vermeiden müsse,
ein »Cyclop« zu werden, das heißt die Phänomene mit nur einem Auge zu betrachten. Dies sei nämlich die Haltung des »Egoisten der Wissenschaft «, der »seinen Kräften zu viel zutraut«.
Jeder Arzt, Theologe, Jurist, selbst Geometer hat Kant zufolge »noch ein Auge nötig, welches macht, dass er seinen Gegenstand noch aus dem Gesichtspunkte anderer Menschen ansieht«. Dieser Gesichtspunkt
steht hier ausdrücklich mit der »Critik« und der »Selbsterkenntnis« des menschlichen Verstandes und der menschlichen Vernunft in Verbindung: die Anthropologie wird hier also nicht nur als »transzendental
« charakterisiert, sondern sie wird auch in direkten Zusammenhang mit dem anderen entscheidenden zentralen Titelwort der reifen kantschen Philosophie gebracht: »Kritik«.