Philosophy

This essay examines the impact of the Göttingen review on Kant. Taking up each of the charges laid down in this first, critical review of the Critique of Pure Reason, I will argue that these criticisms stem largely from Kant's account in his discussion of the Paralogisms, before going on to defend Kant from the claim that he altered his stance on realism—in reaction to the review—as the only hope for distinguishing transcendental idealism from the immaterialism of George Berkeley.

Abstract: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how ‘sensible intuition’ becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an ‘intellectual intuition’ for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic achievement and what were taken to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems interpreted to be resolvable only via an appeal to ‘intellectual intuition’. Part three begins with Kant's subsequent return to the question of freedom and nature in his Critique of Judgment. With Goethe's contemporaneous Metamorphoses of Plants as a contrast case, it becomes clear that whereas Goethe can embrace the role of an intuitive understanding in his account of nature and within the logic of polarity in particular, Kant could never allow an intuition of nature that in his system would spell the very impossibility of freedom itself.

Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy, traces the decisive role played by eighteenth century embryological research for Immanuel Kant’s theories of mind and cognition. I begin this book by following the course of life science debates regarding organic generation in England and France between 1650 and 1750 before turning to a description of their influence in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. Once this background has been established, the remainder of Kant’s Organicism moves to the influential role played by models of embryological development for Kant’s approach to understanding the cognitive processes responsible for the generation of knowledge, with special attention paid to Kant’s Precritical writings in the 1760s and 1770s. The book closes with a reinterpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason.

This essay focuses on the attention paid to Prometheus by Goethe and Schlegel.  Prometheus serves as an archetypal figure for Goethe, in particular, and as such the Titan can be viewed as a figure whose various appearances represent genuine metamorphoses or transformations of the archetype in much the same manner that Goethe takes the archetypes of leaf or vertebrae to function in the plant and animal kingdoms.  Schlegel’s treatment of Prometheus takes the organic analogy even further.  In his fragmentary work Lucinde Schlegel exploits the metaphorical possibilities provided by plant life when thinking about not only the sessile structure of the text as a whole but indeed the internal literary devices capable of simulating the environmental impacts required for the flowering of the plot.  The fact that Goethe and Schlegel deliberately leave their discussions in a fragmentary form is discussed in the final section of the essay in a manner that ties the open-ended quality of such productions to Gadamer’s discussion of the Vollzug or performative character of poetry and other works of art.

John Locke’s theory of classification is a subject that has long received scholarly attention.  Little notice has been taken, however, of the problems that were posed for taxonomy by its inability to account for organic processes.  Classification, designed originally as an exercise in logic, becomes complicated once it turns to organic life and the aims of taxonomy become entangled with processes of generation, variation, and inheritance.  Locke’s experience with organisms—experience garnered through his work in botany and medicine—suggested to him both the dynamism of nature and the artificiality of any a priori system of classification.  This reinforced Locke’s critique of classification in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and by tracing its influence it is possible to approach Locke’s nominalism from a fresh perspective.

In this essay I lay out the textual materials surrounding the birth of physical anthropology as a racial science in the eighteenth century with a special focus on the development of Kant's own contributions to the new field.  Kant’s contributions to natural history demonstrated his commitment to a physical, mental, and moral hierarchy among the races and I spend some time describing both the advantages he drew from this hierarchy for making sense of the social and political history of inequality between peoples, and the obviously problematic relationship that such views would entail for Kant’s universalism as he began to formulate his ethical program in the 1780s.  While there is continued scholarly debate regarding a purported moral “turn” made by Kant once he dropped his commitment to a racial hierarchy in the 1790s, what the narrative as a whole reveals is not only the manner by which questions of racial difference defined physical anthropology from its outset, but the easy and uncomplicated manner by which whole member groups of the population could be excluded from lofty pronouncements regarding the “rights of man”—a fact that was as true for Kant in Königsberg, as it was for Jefferson and Hamilton in Philadelphia.

Kant’s 1772 letter to Marcus Herz is celebrated for its marking the “critical turn” in Kant’s thought. It is here that Kant famously asks the question concerning the relationship between concepts and objects, telling his former pupil that the answer to this question “constitutes the key to the whole secret of hitherto still obscure metaphysics.” But while the letter to Herz is clearly itself a key to what Kant takes to be the ‘secret of metaphysics,’ the questions Kant formulates in this letter pose interpretive problems which need to be addressed.  My own interpretation will be driven by three concerns: first, how was Kant initially led to the question concerning concepts and objects as a problem to be resolved; second, is it in fact the objects with which Kant is concerned in this question, or, as some have argued, is he concerned instead to show the possibility of concepts that are a priori; and third, what might we guess Kant’s solution, his ‘key to the whole secret of metaphysics,’ to have been? Only once these questions are answered, I will argue, can we have a secure sense that Kant’s “critical turn” of 1772 was indeed just that, and that the letter to Herz can be rightly seen as setting much of the agenda for the objective portion of the deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason to come.

Bioethics courses traditionally adopt one of two strategies when it comes to their material. They can begin with an account of moral principles-principles regarding patient autonomy, informed consent, beneficence-and then apply them to specific issues facing medical specialists: testing protocols, advance directives, allocation, etc. The second strategy provides students with a "talking heads" approach wherein experts provide brief viewpoint essays which attempt to lay out the moral contours of a given issue. Both of these strategies can be successful, particularly when they incorporate case studies or "real life" examples along the way. This course will incorporate aspects of both of these strategies but it will seek to broaden such discussions by incorporating the methods used by medical anthropologists when investigating the large variety of socioeconomic , political, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical interests in play when it comes to the medical industrial complex. Our semester will begin with time spent on the history of medicine, and in particular on the role played by medical authorities in the eugenics programs established at the beginning of the twentieth century. The frequent abuse of power on the part of medical personnel-from Auschwitz to Tuskegee-are indeed the historical grounds upon which bioethics as a field has been erected. After reviewing these historical precedents we will turn to current events. In recent years there has been contentious debate regarding studies conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins on the effect of lead paint on children (Lead Wars), there has been good research on the correlation between income and health outcomes (Mama Might be Better off Dead), on the roles played by industry and government when it comes to the manufacture, testing, and approval of new drugs (Big Pharma), and finally, on the moral urgency of demands for a more just allocation when it comes to health provisions on a global scale (Pathologies of Power). Our discussion of these texts will be enriched throughout by a number of newspaper articles, documentaries, podcasts, and films, all of which should work together to provide a good framework for understanding the need everywhere for informed ethical discourse in today's world.

Environmental studies represents a growing and diverse field of research and reflection, an area as enriched by ideas from scientists and professional conservationists as it is from writers, gardeners, bloggers, and urban farmers-today's incarnations of the naturalists of yesteryear. As in the case with bioethics, an environmental ethics aims to apply the particular insights and acumen of a philosophical perspective to a broader field by contributing its own kinds of questions to the discussion, questions that can be abstract-'what makes something an object of moral consideration'-or concrete-'how do your food choices implicate you as a moral being?' In the latter case, it is an obvious but easily overlooked fact that the food you put into your mouth begins with the soil and ends up as either a plant or an animal. In this sense, the food you choose to eat is your most constant ethical contact with the environment. The first part of the course will focus on the concrete environmental impact of food production in terms of sustainability, worker safety, animal welfare, and corporate responsibility. The second half of the semester will move to a larger theoretical framework and consider the position advanced by ecological ethics and its call for a new ethical paradigm, one responsive to ecocriticism's concerns with both the biocentrism of the animal welfare movement and the managerialist anthropocentrism of the mainstream response to the current Eco crisis facing the earth. Throughout the semester we will use environmental racism-the way environmental harms are disproportionately borne by politically disenfranchised communities of colour-as an important lens for us when focusing on the ethics of corporate regulation, worker safety, chemical disposal, and affordable food and housing.

When I began to think about a book on Kant and the life sciences, the idea that Kant would ever have been influenced by the ideas coming out of this field seemed impossible to believe. In fact, I spent an entire Summer determined to prove that my thesis was wrong. The problem was, I kept finding evidence in support of it (fully one third of Kant’s Organicism is devoted to a glut of historical research filling up the endnotes, research stemming, for the most part, from an initial disbelief in my own hypothesis). Most of the scholars who had considered this connection before me had had their training in the history of science. My situation was different, I had been trained in philosophy. I knew my Descartes but I had never read Harvey; I had written on Locke but I had never heard of Ray…

This essay traces the central role played by the notion of seeds and
germs for understanding the complex metaphysics at work in both
Ficino’s reinterpretation of Greek philosophy for a Humanist
audience, and in Kant’s own efforts to describe the moral shaping
of humankind that he took to be the heart of the Enlightenment
project.

This essay will lay out the historical case for a broader assessment of Kant’s relationship to Blumenbach by focusing first on Kant’s review of Herder in 1785 as the best lens through which to understand not only their respective theories of generation but indeed the specific motivation leading to Kant’s support for Blumenbach at all. The results of this inquiry will suggest that while Kant might have been interested in gaining the support of the rising star of the Göttingen medical faculty, Blumenbach’s own theories did little to influence Kant’s approach to either generation-theory or race.

Berkeley and Kant are known for having developed philosophical critiques of materialism, critiques leading them to propose instead an epistemology based on the coherence of our mental representations. For all that the two had in common, however, Kant was adamant in distinguishing his own " empirical realism " from the immaterialist consequences entailed by Berkeley's attack on abstract ideas. Kant focused his most explicit criticisms on Berkeley's account of space, and commentators have for the most part decided that Kant either misunderstood or was simply unfamiliar with the Bishop's actual position. Rather than demonstrate that Kant understood Berkeley perfectly well—an argument that has already been forcefully made by Colin Turbayne—I want to take a different tack altogether. For it is by paying attention to Berkeley's actual account of space, an account oriented by his rejection of spatial " geometers " like Descartes, and spatial " absolutists " like Newton, that we discover an account of embodied cognition, of spatial distance and size that can only be known by way of the body's motion and touch. Perhaps even more striking, I will want to suggest, is the manner in which Kant's approach to the problem of incongruent counterparts will equally need to rely on a proprioceptive cognition, one requiring a different geometry of position altogether. My discussion proceeds in three stages, with stage one focused on Kant's efforts to distinguish his philosophical project from Berkeley's own idealist system, and stages two and three describing the manner in which their approach to spatial orientation both challenges and extends the traditional narrative of their differences as laid out in stage one.

Focusing on Immanuel Kant's lectures on anthropology, the essay endeavors to address long-standing concerns regarding both the relationship between these empirical investigations and Kant's better known universalism, and more pressingly, between Kant's own racism on display in the lectures, and his simultaneous promotion of a universal moral theory that would unhesitatingly condemn such attitudes.