Reflection in the anatomy of the Kantian mind

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1999

There are two prevailing interpretations of the status which Kant accorded his claims in the Critique of Pure Reason: 1) he is analyzing our concepts of cognition and experience; 2) he is making empirical claims about our cognitive faculties. I argue for a third alternative: on Kant's account, all cognition consists in a reflective consciousness of our cognitive faculties, and in critique we analyze the content of this consciousness. Since Strawson raises a famous charge of incoherence against such a position, I begin by showing that this charge is misplaced.

Kantian Review, 2009

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2021

Kant’s distinction between the determining and reflecting power of judgment in the third Critique is not well understood in the literature. A mainstream view unifies these by making determination the telos of all acts of judgment (Longuenesse 1998). On this view, all reflection is primarily in the business of producing empirical concepts for cognition, and thus has what I call a determinative ideal. I argue that this view fails to take seriously the independence and autonomy of the ‘power of judgment’ [Urteilskraft] as a higher cognitive faculty in its own right with its own a priori principle. Instead of seeing merely reflecting judgments as failed or incomplete acts of judgment, I argue that these are in fact paradigmatic of the activity of the power of judgment. More precisely, the reflecting power of judgment just is the power of judgment. Accordingly, reflecting judgment takes precedence over determining judgment; while the former operates according to a law that it gives itself, the latter requires another higher cognitive faculty to provide its principle. On my view, reflecting judgment should be understood as the capacity for purposive subsumption—most clearly seen in the activity of mere reflection.

2016

ABSTRACT: This paper examines Moran’s argument for the special authority of the first-person, which revolves around the Self/Other asymmetry and grounds dichotomies such as the practical vs. theoretical, activity vs. passivity, and justificatory vs. explanatory reasons. These dichotomies qualify the self-reflective person as an agent, interested in justifying her actions from a deliberative stance. The Other is pictured as a spectator interested in explaining action from a theoretical stance. The self-reflective knower has authority over her own mental states, while the Spectator does not. I highlight the implications of this construal for a theory of action, and call attention onto some other interesting normative relations between the self-reflective agent and the Other that escape both the first-person and the third-person approach. My contention is that the authority of self-reflection (and of reason) is best understood as a relation of mutual recognition be-tween self and other...

Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 8: 102–121, 2023

How does one bridge the epistemological gap between the imperfections and ambiguities of everyday experience and the exacting demands of judgment posed by Immanuel Kant? In this essay, I provide an answer to that question. More specifically, I argue that Kant is a cognitive gradualist. That is, he subscribed to a remarkably process-based, pragmatic and nuanced view of our various types of knowledge, their relations and their interplay in our cognition. Nowhere else is this nuance better visible than in two concepts that Kant repeatedly utilized, but that both remain exceedingly broad, protean and sometimes even ambiguous: imagination and reflection. To reflect seems to be a capacity that we can exercise on whatever object or theme we choose. But what is reflection exactly? In particular, what is Kantian reflection exactly, and how should we understand the role it plays in our cognitive processes? I examine four of Kant’s definitions of reflection in detail, highlighting where they overlap and diverge. once this definitional foundation is in place, then we’ll have in hand a reasonably clear idea of how the various aspects of reflection relate to the ways in which experience emerges and unfolds, even if there are still gaps to be filled in. Correspondingly, I’ll examine two ways in which Kant can be viewed as a cognitive gradualist. First, I’ll examine how the notion of reflection surfaces in the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. Second, I’ll examine the critical charge of circular reasoning in Kant’s account of reflection, since it is closely related to the distinction that Kant introduced between the sensible world and the intellectual world, or the worlds of empiricism and rationalism.

Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy: Vol. 75, 2018

The concept of ‘transcendental reflection’ has been under-studied despite its crucial significance for Kant’s philosophical system. Kant’s transcendental reflection is an instrument inherent in our consciousness. Without this instrument, one would be unable to distinguish between representations/ fantasies and the reality; to have self-consciousness; to identify the functions of the human soul; to distinguish between the effects of the senses, the understanding, and reason within these functions, including identifying the a priori forms of the senses, the understanding, and reason; and to classify representations by the faculty of cognition to which they belong. This study aims to reconstruct the main features of Kant’s ideas of transcendental reflection and to define this notion through analysing the Critique of Pure Reason and the other fundamental works of Kant.

Estudos Kantianos [EK]

This paper aims at presenting the Kantian consideration of the subject regarding the possibility of his theoretical-scientific determination and his practical-moral self-determination as well as the problematization of the relationship of these determinations. Initially, in view of the argumentation that characterizes the subject in the 1st Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued that such determination culminates in a subjectivist stance. Then, bearing in mind the characterization of the subject in the 2nd Edition of the Critique, it is argued that Kant structures a logical approach to the subject that enables the justification of his (self) determination. It is taken into consideration, afterwards, Kant's attempts to prove the relationship of these determinations and the result, attested in the Critique of Practical Reason, of his self-sufficiency. Finally, regarding the Critique of the Power of Judgment, the systematic outcome of the approach to the relationship ...

Filosofia Unisinos, 2017

One main quandary that emerges in the context of Immanuel Kant's moral ideal, The Highest Good, is that on the one hand Kant sets it as a moral demand, that is, as a principle that must be comprehended as an attainable end for man in practice while, on the other hand, it is set as a moral ideal, i.e. as something that cannot be concretized and realized within the empirical world. The main goal of this paper is to argue for the realizability of the moral ideal by means of the principle of reflective judgment as a form of judgment that in fact clarifies human limitation. I assert that the very recognition of this limitation constitutes the possibility for hope in that ideal, or for striving towards it, and that this striving is the only way that the moral ideal can be concretized. I examine man's recognition of self-limitation as a response to the moral demand to realize the moral ideal and the necessity of the power of imagination for this, used reflectively.