
Contents
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1 Introduction 1 Introduction
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2 Kant’s Account of Cognition 2 Kant’s Account of Cognition
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3 Kant’s Criticism of Traditional Metaphysics 3 Kant’s Criticism of Traditional Metaphysics
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4 Conclusion 4 Conclusion
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References References
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13 Kant’s Criticism of Metaphysics
Get accessEric Watkins is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He has published dozens of articles in leading international journals as well as two monographs, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality in 2005 and Kant on Laws in 2019, both with Cambridge University Press. He has also edited Kant and the Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2001) and translated Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and (with several others) Immanuel Kant: Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
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Published:22 October 2024
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Abstract
This chapter presents a novel interpretation of one line of Kant’s critique of the claims of traditional metaphysics. In its first section, it presents a series of conditions on cognition, according to which cognition requires not only that the object to be cognized must be given in intuition and thought through concepts (the givenness and thought conditions), but also that it be possible to show that the positive properties thought through the relevant concepts are exhibited by the object given in intuition so that an object we are aware of is thereby rendered intelligible (the real possibility, positive content, and subjective sources conditions). In the second section, it shows how Kant argues that even if the most important objects of traditional metaphysics—the soul, God, and freedom—might be thought to satisfy the givenness and thought conditions, they cannot satisfy the other conditions. For it turns out that of the objects of which we can be aware (e.g. by them being given in intuition), we cannot be aware of them as exhibiting the positive properties represented by the concepts of the objects of traditional metaphysics, for there is a fundamental mismatch between how we represent objects that are given to us and the content represented in the concepts of the objects of traditional metaphysics.
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