​​Andrew Stephenson

My diagram of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason​

Link

In Progress ​(papers will be removed when under submission)

​Activity and Action in Fichte: Towards a Metaphysics of the Self-Positing I

This paper argues that Aristotle's metaphysics of activity (energeia) can help us understand some of the puzzling things Fichte says about the self or I, specifically that it is the object of an intellectual intuition that is active and self-knowing in a way that seems to prefigure Anscombe's famous knowledge condition on intentional action. For Fichte, the act or action of self-positing does not have the structure of a Davidsonian event. Rather it has the structure of a substance-like activity: it can change, it is mereologically and modally robust, and it is wholly present at every point at which it exists. Moreover, its form or principle of individuation is given by its intention and telos, which in turn gives it the characteristic direction-of-fit of practical knowledge: the subject's representing is the cause of the represented subject.

Existence in Kant​: a Quantifier and a Modality

Does Kant think of existence as a quantifier? Some have objected to this widespread view on the grounds that Kant clearly separates his quantifiers from his modalities and treats existence as a modality (Rosefeldt 2020, Bader 2020, Kannisto 2017). This paper explains why the objection is mistaken. First, the standard reading need only claim that Kant’s account of existence prefigures the modern, broadly Fregean existential quantifier. They need not claim that Kant’s own quantifiers prefigure Frege’s. Kant’s own quantifiers are the traditional binary quantifiers operating on two predicates, not Frege’s unary quantifiers taking a single argument, and Kant did not anticipate Frege’s translation of the former into the latter. Second, the distinction between modern quantifiers and modal operators is not as sharp as the objection supposes, especially when it comes to the monadic fragment of first-order quantificational logic, which is most plausibly the most Kant anticipated with his treatment of existence. Possible-world semantics shows us how to think of modality in terms of quantification, and it should not be surprising that we can do the reverse, treating quantifiers as modal operators. Kant can think of existence along the lines of a modern existential quantifier while also thinking of it as a (unary, sentential) modal operator that is fundamentally distinct from his (binary, predicate) quantificational operators.

On the Practical Necessity of the Categories

A follow-up paper to 'On the Necessity of the Categories'. We ask whether Kant thinks we can settle the question raised there from the practical point of view. Put aside the question of whether, for Kant, we can have theoretical knowledge of whether or not there could be finite rational beings who think in ways fundamentally different to our own. Kant seems to think we have practical grounds to believe that all finite rational beings are subject to the moral law and are therefore free and must think of themselves as free. He also thinks of freedom as a kind of causality, which if one of the categories or forms of thought. Does he therefore think that we can have practical grounds to believe that all finite rational beings share the same forms of thought?