The University of Chicago Making Kant's Empirical
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MAKING KANT’S EMPIRICAL REALISM POSSIBLE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY BY SIMON ROSS GUROFSKY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2018 “[…] transcendental idealism is realism in an absolute sense.” –Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, 21:99 ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Minimal Genuine Empirical Realism ..........................................................30 Chapter Two: Getting Kant’s Empirical Realism into View .............................................70 Chapter Three: Kant’s Conceptual-Semantic Terminological Toolkit ............................108 Chapter Four: Phenomena and Noumena and Kant’s Conceptual-Semantic Theory ......144 Chapter Five: The Thing in Itself as the Non-Referring Concept of an Intelligibile .......203 Chapter Six: The Immanent Use of the Theoretical Ideas ...............................................257 Chapter Seven: The Immanent Use of the Practical Ideas ...............................................287 Chapter Eight: Kant’s Transcendental Idealism ..............................................................325 References and Abbreviations .........................................................................................361 iii Acknowledgements When I try to explain what I get out of studying Kant, I often resort to aesthetic considerations. This will seem bizarre to many, but I find profound beauty in the Critical philosophy. The best way I can describe the phenomenon is that to read Kant’s philosophy is to feel the earth move beneath my feet. I had that sensation, though I would not have been able to put it that way, from my first encounter with Kant, in a first-year undergraduate survey of the history of philosophy taught by Richard Manning in 2005-06. Thus long before I was in a position to have anything like the thoughts that I agreed with Kant or accepted his ultimate conclusions, or even just that I by and large understood what he was trying to tell me (all things I should perhaps still be cautious about saying), I had a firm faith that time spent with his philosophy would always reward, which, to date, has proven well placed. This dissertation is my attempt to articulate whatever it is that spoke to me way back in 2006 and has continued to do so ever since. If it helps another to be moved by Kant’s philosophy as I am, dayenu! Many people deserve thanks for their help on my path here. From my undergraduate days at Carleton University, I particularly thank my former professors Andrew Brook, Gordon Davis, Roy Laird, Gregory MacIsaac, and Kimberly Stratton. Each of them was, in their own way, instrumental to my making it to the University of Chicago for my PhD. My fellow undergraduates Patrick Eldridge and Tiffany Tsantsoulas, each of whom has also pursued doctoral work in philosophy, formed with me a small community of philosophers in Carleton’s interdisciplinary Bachelor of the Humanities program at a time when my conception of what doing philosophy even is was embryonic. I was also very fortunate to have been educated not only in the Humanities department but also in two very different Philosophy departments, iv Carleton’s and the Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where I spent 2007-08. At Chicago, I formed deep and (I hope) lasting friendships with a number of my fellow doctoral students, many of whom significantly influenced the dissertation you see before you. Here I want especially to single out the members of my cohort Jessica Tizzard and Andrew Werner, who shared my interest in Kant and German Idealism, and Arnold Brooks and Katie Howe. For several years a group of doctoral students carried on a reading group dedicated to Kant’s three Critiques, whose value for my philosophical development is difficult to overstate. Many participated on and off, but here I should again mention Jessica Tizzard and Andrew Werner as well as Tom Evnen, Ben Pierce, and Daniel Smyth. For friendship and insight (philosophically and otherwise), I also thank Pascal Brixel, Octavian Busuioc, Shana Crandell, Dusty Dallman, Chrissy Downing, Claire Kirwin, Nic Koziolek, Serena Lai, Rory O’Connell, Andrew Pitel, and Matt Teichman. I owe immense thanks to the members of my dissertation committee: Robert B. Pippin, who served as chair, Michael Kremer, and Andrew Brook. All three have a virtue that, I gather, is rare in an advisor but was immensely valuable to me: They clearly distinguished the degree of their agreement with me from their assessments of the quality of my work. As a result, the dissertation feels wholly like my own idea, and there is not one sentence of it with which I do not alone stand or fall. I am especially grateful for Robert’s encouragement of my research direction at a time when I was filled with uncertainty. Before I had produced even a first chapter, members of my committee, including Robert, had made several deep objections to the course I was charting. I asked Robert if the upshot was that I should consider a change of thesis. He emphasized that that v was not the right lesson—what I should take away was rather that I had a philosophical obligation to take those objections seriously and reply to them convincingly. And over the years he remained unwavering in his commitment to the principle that my job was not to say things that he or the committee agreed with but to argue responsibly and persuasively for what I believed to be true. I have come more and more to appreciate how that approach to advising has helped me to stand on my own two feet as a philosopher. Before joining my dissertation committee, Michael Kremer supervised what they call at Chicago my Preliminary Essay, and before that, he ran the First-Year Seminar for my cohort in the Philosophy department. He was always a responsible teacher and a careful reader of my work, and he was able to offer me feedback from a philosophical perspective somewhat outside of Kant scholarship—though, as it happens, he also has a real knack for finding difficult passages in Kant for me to wrestle with. As I mentioned above, I first met Andrew Brook during my undergraduate studies, when he taught an upper-year seminar on the first Critique. My final paper for that class was also the writing sample that I submitted to doctoral programs and earned me my spot at Chicago. Six or so years later, I presented a version of the first chapter of this dissertation as a talk at Carleton. Andrew generously spent a couple hours of his time giving me detailed comments, and although it was clear that we read Kant quite differently, and he, indeed, quite differently from the prevailing trends at Chicago, for that very reason his comments were especially helpful. I decided then to invite him to join the committee, and he was consistently generous with his time and attention throughout the remainder of the dissertation process. One other faculty member at Chicago who bears mentioning is Jim Conant. Jim is not a member of my committee, and most of my philosophical interaction with him during the PhD vi consisted of a class of his I sat in on in my fifth year. That, however, somewhat understates the influence that his views have had on this dissertation. Those views, both about Kant and in other areas of philosophy, were in heavy circulation among graduate students at Chicago during my time there, and consequently I learned much from Jim at one remove. The same is true of Robert, though of course I also had the opportunity to learn from him more directly in his capacity as committee chair. (Needless to say, any philosophical missteps herein are mine, not theirs.) Michael Forster gave me helpful comments on several chapters of the dissertation, and through him I was able to spend a research year in Bonn in 2015-16. That gave me a valuable opportunity to write without distraction as well as to practice my German and attend the 2016 International Summer School in German Philosophy, organized by him and Markus Gabriel. Owen Ware kindly met with me several times to discuss Kant’s practical philosophy and gave me helpful comments on the fourth and especially the seventh chapters of the dissertation. I am fortunate to have made a number of valuable friendships earlier in life, without which doing a PhD in philosophy would have been a much stranger and more isolating experience. I am grateful to all of you for giving me a grounding in the world outside academia, for offering your support when I needed it, and for reminding me that academic philosophy can at most be only part of a well lived life, a sine qua non of which is good friends. My father and mother, neither of them philosophers by training, have both gamely talked and argued philosophy with me from the moment I discovered it (and arguing about matters political, philosophical, and otherwise has been a family sport since before I was born), and my father even read drafts of several chapters with a view to tightening up the prose. Thanks to both of them for their encouragement, enthusiasm, and willingness to indulge me when I occasionally vii go on a bit. And thanks also to Rachel and Nathan Gurofsky, my older sister and brother, who have been putting up with me for a long time now. And finally, my deepest thanks to Haley Brennan for her love and encouragement and for her constructive opposition to my approach to Kant. Needless to say, what she has meant to me goes far beyond that and is probably impossible to express in only a few words. Haley, you have changed my life and how I understand myself, and I will be forever grateful.