{Research interests}
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My dissertation ties together three domains of philosophy: Kant-interpretation, the history of philosophy of logic, and contemporary issues in philosophy of logic. In the immediate future, this project will yield a series of essays in which I further sharpen the focus upon certain aspects of Kant’s logical doctrines that I was able to achieve in my dissertation work. The first of these will be drawn from the writing sample that is included in this dossier, ‘Kant on the Nature of Logical Laws’. In this essay I address the question of the correct way to describe Kant’s view of the relation that obtains between logical law and our capacity for thinking. Here I am especially concerned to raise worries about whether (as many have suggested) an appeal to the language of ‘normativity’ is the most appropriate way to cash out Kant’s understanding of the absolute universality and necessity of logical law. The second essay that
will emerge from my dissertation
will be devoted to an analysis of Kant’s understanding of the logical
essence
of a concept. More specifically, I will
argue that, because Kantian concepts are thoroughly intensional
entities,
serious difficulties will face those who wish to understand Kant’s
treatment of
concepts by way of contemporary extensionalist models of conceptuality. I show how a more productive model for
interpretive analysis can be found once Kant’s doctrines are
recontextualized
within the Aristotelian syllogistic tradition, particularly as it is
inherited
and transformed by what Kant calls ‘the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy’. I have already presented a good portion of
this material in various workshops and conferences under the titles: ‘Umfang
as a Technical Term in Kant’s Logic’ and ‘Logic and Individual Objects:
Kant
and Frege’. (Please see my list of presentations for further information.)
In a third essay that will emerge from my
dissertation
(especially from material contained in the second chapter, entitled
‘The
Formality of Logic’), I suggest that much of the significance of the
role of
formal logic within Kant’s transcendental idealism can be brought out
about by
viewing it through a proto-Carnapian lens. That
is, the essay will show how Kant’s pure general logic
can be construed
as Kant’s attempt at a purely syntactical specification of the forms in
which
thinking (or ‘understanding as such’) is possible.
I then further extend the analogy with a Carnapian project
by
suggesting as well that the introduction of a ‘transcendental’ element
into
these forms (which Kant thinks occurs in a ‘transcendental’ logic) can
be
usefully understood as a transition from a syntactical to a semantical
analysis
of thinking ‘in general’. This, in turn,
gives us a way to recast Kant’s central anti-Rationalist insight, which
can now
be stated as the claim that no sufficient conditions for securing
semantic
values for thought can be derived from reflection upon thinking alone. Rather, this reflection must always be
supplemented to take into account those further conditions that are
placed upon
the human mind due to its finitude and its essential dependence on
sensible-receptive capacities for the provision of ‘objective’
representations. I intend to submit each of these three essays
for
publication within the next year, and intend, more generally, to
reintegrate
the fruits of this labor back into monograph form, with the intention
that
these later, ‘mature’ expressions of the content of my dissertation
will grow
into my first book, which will focus upon Kant’s theory of logic and
its place
in the modern logical tradition. With
this goal in mind, in addition to the more immediate work that will be
necessary to prepare the aforementioned essays for journal publication,
I plan
to devote much of my research time in the next several years to an
intensive
study of the history of philosophy of logic in the 18th and
19th
centuries, especially in the German context. I
have already mentioned the central importance of the
‘Leibniz-Wolffian’ school upon Kant’s development of his logical
doctrines, and
I plan to pursue a careful study (and where English editions are not
available,
a translation) of those logic textbooks, treatises, and other relevant
writings
from this school with which Kant was (or may have been) familiar, most
notably
the works of Leibniz and Christian Wolff themselves, but also Georg
Meier’s Vernunftlehre
(‘Doctrine of Reason’), which (in its abridged version (Auszug aus
der
Vernunftlehre)) served as the textbook upon which Kant based his
own logic
lectures. In the longer term, as I see things now, my
second
book-length project would build directly off of this first study, by
exploring
the influence which Kant himself had upon his successors in the
philosophy of
logic, both upon those writing immediately in the wake of his
Copernican
revolution, but also those responding to his views throughout the rest
of the
19th century. To this end, I
will also be concerned in future research to trace the reception
history of
Kant’s views in the following three stages: first, in the
period from
1790-1830, in the immediate aftermath of Kant’s publications, as his
influence
is manifest in the work of J.G.C. Kiesewetter, Salomon Maimon, J.F.
Fries, and
J.F. Herbart, but also in the writings of his most famous successor in
this
period, G.W.F. Hegel; second, in a period which runs, roughly,
from
1830-1880, and comprises works by thinkers such as Adolf Trendelenburg,
Bernhard Bolzano, Christoph Sigwart, and Hermann Lotze, thinkers who
have been
studied (when at all) mostly due to the substantial formative effects
their
thought had upon the two most well-known figures from the third
period
of 19th century German philosophy of logic (1880-1900),
Gottlob
Frege and Edmund Husserl.
My interest in the Kantian
(and anti-Kantian) threads that run through these periods will be
guided in
particular by a more general project, one which aims to uncover the
historical
moments that are responsible for setting in motion what might be called
the
progressive ‘flight from intension’ within philosophy of logic. By this I mean the gradual ascent of an
extensional interpretation of the Boole-Schröder algebra of
classes throughout
the second half of the 19th century, a trend which reaches
its most
rigorous (but also, perhaps, its most problematic) form in Frege’s
1893/1903 Grundgesetze. My working
hypothesis is that it is a
reaction against (especially Hegelian) idealist construals of logic
that
underlies the extreme extensionalism that prevailed for much of the
middle part
of the 20th century, most directly exemplified by Quine’s
efforts to
supercede what he saw as the residual intensionalism of Russell and
Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. It
has
already been made clear that, by returning to the pre- or non-Fregean
tradition, we will be able recover insights that might contribute to
the
further rehabilitation and technical development of intensional
logics. To
the extent that Kant’s logic, too, is an intensional one, it might be
hoped
that a recovery of his doctrines would contribute to contemporary
intensionalist
projects in a similar fashion, and I definitely intend to explore this
possibility. But
what I am even more interested to explore in my future work is the
extent to
which either an extensional or an intensional logic
will be able
to pass ‘critical’ muster (in Kant’s sense of the term), and, more
generally,
whether a return to an intensionalist framework will be able to avoid a
broader
commitment to some form of idealism (transcendental or otherwise).
Of course, at this point, I have begun to describe something on the scale of a life-long project, rather than anything that one might hope to accomplish in the short-term. In this, I only hope to convey a sense of the broader intellectual context in which my interests in Kant have been developing. At its most general level, this context is organized around a fairly ambitious attempt to take Kant’s philosophical lexicon as a sort of lingua franca which can allow for a re-integration of the two (so-called) ‘traditions’ (‘analytic’ and ‘continental’) of 20th century Western philosophy, traditions whose diverging spirits we can only hope to fully understand by looking back to the writings of their founders. By orienting my present work toward an eventual comparative analysis of the divergent reactions of Frege and Husserl to their shared intellectual traditions, I hope that, in the long run, my work will be of service to those who are committed to the cause of establishing a healthy, vigorous and respectful dialogue between what continue to be largely non-communicating traditions. ***
In general, then, all of these historical interests are
meant to subserve a fairly ambitious attempt to deploy Kant’s
philosophical lexicon as a sort of lingua franca (to
borrow a thought from Sellars) which
might allow for the re-integration of the two traditions.
I hope to achieve this by
drawing together responses from all sides to the following
question: what is the correct form of inheritance (revision, rejection,
rehabilitation?) of Kant’s philosophical problematic – that is, what
are we, in the 21st century, to make of Kant’s
‘Enlightenment’ claims for the ‘formal’ autonomy of
practical and theoretical rationality, either as the basis for a
coherent philosophical anthropology, or as a judgment of value, of that
which gives each of us our dignity and worth as human beings?
In this regard, it is my hope that a specific focus upon
the developing conceptions of logic in
the two traditions will provide a particularly strategic point
of reference, given the fact that it has in many ways already provided
a sort of locus communis
for many of the better-known trans-tradition exchanges – e.g., between
Frege
and Husserl, Carnap and Heidegger, Russell and Meinong, and so on. |