Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

Selected Topics: Kant’s Metaphysics

 [Note: this course is to be taught concurrently with PHIL 451W.]

Important note regarding enrollment: All seats are reserved for Philosophy Graduate students. Enrollments from other departments will be considered only upon submission of the Graduate Course Add Form, and with instructor's permission. All such enrollments will be done in or after the first week of classes.

It is customary to divide Immanuel Kant’s philosophical work into the “pre-critical” period and the “critical” period, and the division is marked by the appearance of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Kant’s pre-critical works are characterized by a set of metaphysical views about traditional topics (e.g., modality, substance, causality, God) underwritten by a rationalism that guarantees the intelligibility of the cosmos. But in the critical period, Kant counts among his signature achievements a non-dogmatic epistemology that appears to severely limit the reach and content of metaphysics. Famously, Kant claims in 1781 that human cognition reaches only the “appearances” of things and leaves untouched “things in themselves.” Most interpreters have taken the Critique of Pure Reason and its “epistemological turn” to constitute a decisive break with Kant’s pre-critical rationalist metaphysics and have taken Kant to deny that any “transcendent metaphysics” is possible. However, a good deal of recent work has shown that the true story is not so simple. Many pre-critical doctrines survive in modified form in the Critique of Pure Reason, and there is significant evidence that Kant remained committed to significant systematic claims about the nature of things in themselves. Our general aim shall be to understand the entire scope of Kant’s metaphysics, from 1755 to 1787. In particular, we shall aim to understand the relation between these two periods in Kant’s thought, and to understand what role, if any, there is for metaphysics in Kant’s critical period.

We shall spend roughly the first third of the course tracing the development of Kant’s metaphysical views in the early part of his career. We will begin with Kant’s New Elucdation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Cognition (1755), in which he aims to undermine Leibniz’s basic cosmological views and defend an interactive cosmology. We shall then turn to The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (1763), in which Kant aims to reject the traditional ontological argument and offer instead an argument for God’s existence based on an actualist account of modality and a distinction, novel in his own time, between logical and metaphysical modality. Finally, we shall read Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation (1770), a key transitional text that combines intellectual cognition of the intelligible world with the mind-dependence of space and time and the phenomenality of the empirical world. In the second half of the course, we shall be occupied primarily with selections from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787), and we will focus on Kant’s account of space and time, his mature accounts of modality and cognition, and his accounts of causality, freedom, and God. We shall supplement our study of the Critique of Pure Reason with unpublished writings from Kant’s lectures and his fragments.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Successful completion of this course will satisfy the “History of Philosophy” distribution requirement toward the MA degree for Philosophy graduate students.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Students must have access to internet and a computer/other device that permits streaming video, word processing and teleconferencing with Zoom.

REQUIRED READING: