PHIL 451/854 10-1 KANT: FINAL ESSAY

Write an essay of about 3000-3500 words on one of the following topics. To be submitted by 4:00 PM, Friday, April 16^th, the last day of classes. It is worth 50% of your final grade. The paper title should be followed by an abstract, single-spaced, in italics, just a few sentences long, which clearly and succinctly says what the paper is about, identifying its main points, lines of argument, or conclusions. Make sure to include proper references for all sources used. If you are an undergraduate and for any reason you anticipate not being able to meet this deadline, I would like to know this well in advance.

1. Write on a topic of your choice, that has my prior approval no later than (absolute deadline) Wed. April 7^th (-- not that you should wait that long!). To facilitate my approval, the proposed topic should be written up as a paragraph and submitted by e-mail. Ideally it will be a topic that includes or touches on issues taken up in the Dialectic. (Grad students: the topic may also build on issues that arose from your class presentation, but it cannot simply be a rehash.)

2. Kant critiques the metaphysical employment of reason by the traditional rationalist. He critiques their positing of extravagant, dogmatic metaphysical ontologies (along side those of empirical science), such as monads, immortal souls, God, platonic forms, or completed infinitudes. Metaphysics must instead by about the proper regulative employment of reason, as constrained by the formal – synthetic a priori – structure of human cognition. So this is a kind of a priori rationalism, then, being put forward by Kant; a so-called ‘critical rationalism’. And this rationalism does not simply flush away many of the central traditional ideas of rationalist metaphysics, but instead recasts them in a new, practical, regulative role. It identifies a new kind of legitimacy that they may have. It can even be said that our aims as theorists and as persons are best advanced by acting ‘as if’ these ideas of reason were theoretically, ontologically significant. Interpreting these ideas in an ‘objectifying’ way may help to catalyse their regulatory function. This is hardly aid and comfort to the metaphysical skeptic. But what is it? Elaborate and critically discuss, drawing on Kant’s discussion in the Dialectic, and on secondary materials.

3. Collin’s realist interpretation of Kant draws on the distinction between inner and outer sense, how the latter is not for Kant reduced to the former, how the objects of outer sense are mind-independent, though we can only know them through our mind-dependent representations of them, how our having any subjective experience at all presupposes their existence , and so on. Being a subjectivisit does not commit Kant, it is argued, either to idealism or to phenomenalism. It commits him at most to a kind of perspectivalism, and perhaps a kind of ‘verificationism’. Do a kind of philosophical cost-benefit analysis of this reading of Kant, both as a reading of Kant and as a philosophical stance. You may, if you wish, write this up as a ‘critical notice’ of the sort that you would find in, say, the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, (but keeping to your word limit, of course!).

4. There are three transcendental ideas: the soul, the world as a completed totality, and God; and in Kant’s ‘just so’ story in the Dialectic, they get elaborated by rationalist metaphysics in three theories: ‘transcendental psychology’, ‘transcendental cosmology’, and ‘transcendental theology’. Choose just one of these theories, explain its commitments according to Kant, critically review Kant’s main lines of argument against it, and (most important) critically review, juxtaposed against it, Kant’s proposed alternative positive account of the self, of the world, or of ‘God’, respectively. Please tie your paper in appropriate ways to the primary text. You are encouraged also to draw on critical discussion in secondary sources.