Synthetic a Priori

Here I bewail the slapdash and confusing way in which philosophers bandy about the word ‘incoherent’ (and ‘incoherence’ and ‘incoherently’).  To some it appears to mean: inconsistent; to others: pragmatically self-defeating; and to yet others: nonsensical, i.e. meaningless.  And often one is left guessing.

This chapter construes Kant’s contention that a categorical imperative is a synthetic a priori principle as equivalent to Gewirth’s claim that such an imperative is a dialectically necessary principle (a strict requirement of agential self-understanding). It is not concerned to defend either Kant’s or Gewirth’s argument for a categorical imperative, but to elucidate the “dialectically necessary method” (which rests on the dialectical necessity of a principle making it categorically binding) and to defend this method against David Enoch’s critique of “constitutivism” (taken as trying to show that transcendental arguments for morality, construed as dialectically necessary ones, are futile, even if they can be successful, because normativity cannot be constituted in dialectical necessity). In the process, it relates the dialectically necessary method to internalism, naturalism, foundationalism, coherentism, and realism.

Beyleveld, Deryck (2017). Transcendental Arguments for a Categorical Imperative as Arguments from Agential Self-Understanding. In Transcendental Arguments in Moral Theory. Brune, Jens Peter Stern, Robert & Werner, Micha H Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. 141-159.

In the Introduction to the Critique, Kant tells us that his task will be to explain the
possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. Before we can talk about why this task is
philosophically important, we have to explain the terminology. What we have here are two
terms, “synthetic” and “a priori,” both of which must be understood in contrast to its opposite.
So, we have two distinctions to clarify, that between “analytic” and “synthetic,” and that between
“a priori” and “a posteriori.”

I consider the dispute, not with a view to reaching a final verdict, but for the light it sheds on the notion of philosophical nonsense.  How does it look to a sceptic about philosophical nonsense?  It is generally agreed that the Tractatus is an unsatisfactory work, if the traditional reading of, for example, G. E. M. Anscombe or Peter Hacker is correct.  But is it any better on the ‘resolute’ reading of Cora Diamond or James Conant?  I maintain that it is more difficulty to handle the concept of nonsense than nonsensicalists of any stripe realise.  If the ‘ineffable truths’ and ‘important nonsense’ of traditional readings raise problems, so too do the contrast between meaningful frame and nonsensical core, Diamond’s idea that one can imaginatively identify with the nonsense-talker and the mysterious new entity, ‘transitional’ nonsense.  Meaning and communication, I suggest, keep reappearing precisely where they should not.

Susan Haack, The Legitimacy of Metaphysics: Kant’s Legacy to Peirce, and Peirce’s to Philosophy Today.”

Abstract: Part of Kant’s legacy to Peirce was a lasting conviction that metaphysics can and should be set “on the secure path of a science.” However, Peirce’s understanding of “scientific metaphysics,” unlike Kant’s, uses the method of science, i.e., of experience and reasoning; but requires close attention to experience of the most familiar kind rather than recherché experience needed by the special sciences. This distinctively plausible reconstruction of what a genuinely scientific metaphysics would be is part of Peirce’s legacy to philosophy today, enabling us to steer clear both of apriorism and of scientism—the Scylla and Charybdis of recent metaphysics.


Keywords: Kant; Hume; Peirce; metaphysics; pragmatism; positivism; analytic/synthetic; phenomenology; categories; Synechism; agapism; objective idealism.

In this critical review of Robert Hanna's ingenious book (2006), I aim to support Hanna " s main insightful reading of Kant, namely what he calls " a priori truth with a human face," without appealing to Kant's divide between a priori and a posteriori and analytic and synthetic truths. My suggestion is that transcendental propositions are necessary neither in the usual epistemological sense that analytic propositions are, let alone in the metaphysical sense that some empirical propositions are. Instead, they are necessary in the theoretical domain in the weak alternative sense that they make possible the empirical recognition of appearances as an object as an indispensable condition of our self-consciousness experience, and they are a priori in the practical domain in the sense that their truth is vital for our self-comprehension as human beings.

This paper aims at recasting the so-called Schlick-Husserl quarrel as to the possibility of synthetic a priori propositions. In order to do so, it fleshes out an approach divergent from the one so far adopted : rather than discussing and focusing attention on the notions of form and formalism, thereby of analytic judgment (as is often the case in the Anglo-American world), it tackles the issue from the perspective of the « synthetic a priori ». After providing the reader with an overview of Schlick’s nonnegotiable rejection and with some Kantian remarks, it elaborates on Husserl’s Third Investigation and his understanding of the notion of synthesis.