The University of Chicago Kant's Conception of Logic
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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO KANT’S CONCEPTION OF LOGIC VOLUME ONE 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 CLINTON TOLLEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2007 © 2007, Clinton Tolley TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME ONE List of Tables....................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... vi Abstract.............................................................................................................................. xii INTRODUCTION: WHY KANT’S LOGIC NOW?................................................ 1 §I. Rethinking Kant’s Debt to Aristotle............................................................. 1 §II. Avoiding Anachronism and Compartmentalism ...................................... 5 §III. Kant’s Logic: Influence and Prospects ................................................... 17 §IV. The Historical Context of Kant’s Logical Doctrines............................ 25 §V. Kant’s ‘Writings’ on Logic .......................................................................... 38 CHAPTER I: THE PLACE OF LOGIC IN KANT’S ARCHITECTONIC...... 45 A. Preliminary Remarks (§1).............................................................................. 45 B. Pre-Kantian Disciplinary Classifications of Logic (§§2-3)....................... 52 C. Logic in the Kantian Architectonic (§§4-7)................................................ 70 D. Logic as a Systematic Science (§§8-10).....................................................102 CHAPTER II: THE FORMALITY OF LOGIC ....................................................127 A. General and Transcendental Logic (§§11-12)..........................................127 B. Logical Form as the Syntax of Thought (§§13-15) .................................149 C. Logical Form as the ‘realitas formalis’ of Thought (§§16-18)...............175 D. Form, Category, Schema (§§19-20)...........................................................201 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME TWO CHAPTER III: THE LOGICAL ESSENCE OF JUDGMENT.........................216 A. Judgment as the ‘Locus’ of Truth (§§21-24)............................................216 B. Judgment, Subjectivity, and Meaningfulness (§§25-26)..........................254 C. Consistency vs. Truth (§§27-28).................................................................275 CHAPTER IV: KANT’S DOCTRINE OF CONCEPTS.....................................301 A. Predicative Unity without Objects (§§29-30)...........................................301 B. Determinacy and Generality (§§31-32) .....................................................328 C. Conceptual Containment and the ‘Porphyrian’ Hierarchy (§§33-35) ..346 CHAPTER V: CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS AND INFERENTIAL ARTICULATION ............................................................................383 A. Division, Abstraction, and Analysis (§§36-38) ........................................439 B. Identity, Contradiction, and Substitution (§§39-41) ...............................410 C. Quantity and Existence in a Syllogistic Context (§§42-44)....................439 VOLUME THREE CHAPTER VI: OUR RELATION TO LOGICAL LAWS..................................470 A. Apprehending Logical ‘Content’ (§§45-46)..............................................470 B. Normative vs. Constitutive (§§47-52) .......................................................494 C. The Ground of the Validity of Logical Laws (§§53-54).........................551 BIBLIOGRAPHY .........................................................................................................577 iv LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1: Encyclopaedic Introduction to Philosophy............................................... 89 Table 1.2: The Logical Functions of Understanding in Judgment.........................123 Table 2.1: Correlation of Function, Category, Schema............................................213 Table 2.2: The Moment of ‘Relation’ in the Three ‘Logics’....................................214 Table 3.1: The Formal-Logical Articulation of a Judgment....................................253 Table 5.1: Aristotelian and Fregean Categorical Judgments....................................449 Table 5.2: Aristotelian and Fregean Immediate Inferences.....................................449 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My indebtedness to my dissertation committee – Michael Kremer (chair), Charles Larmore, Jim Conant, and Robert Pippin – runs much deeper than I can hope to express in this context. On every front, at every stage, with every page, they have each been so extraordinarily generous with their time, energy, and counsel, their written and oral feedback (always extremely perceptive, always encouraging, even when critical), as well as with all sorts of other resources – I cannot imagine having had a more wonderful set of advisors. I am delighted to be able to look forward to the future development (for many years to come!) of the intellectual and personal relationships which have been forged through this process. I will always have very warm memories of my time in the Chicago department, will be very sad to leave such a vibrant intellectual milieu, and have many debts of gratitude to record. Michael Forster gave lectures on Kant during my early years at Chicago, which first set me on the present course of research. Arnold Davidson has been an unfailing source of intellectual support and encouragement. Jonathan Beere treated me to several extremely productive vi Acknowledgements vii rounds of discussion concerning the link between Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics. At several key points in the development of my project, Bill Tait pointed me in quite helpful directions, concerning Kant’s relation to Leibniz and Frege. I would also like to thank Dan Garber for introducing me to the historiography of Rationalism, Yitzhak Melamed for sharpening my conceptions of Leibniz and Spinoza, Jason Bridges and David Finkelstein for helping me learn how to talk about my project to the philosophical world at large, and David Wellbery (an all-but-honorary member of the department) for opening my eyes to the intellectual and aesthetic beauty (even: sublimity) of German romanticism. I will always be grateful as well to the department for inviting Jocelyn Benoist to Chicago for the Spring quarter of 2006, since this made possible his brilliant pair of courses on 19th century Austrian philosophy of logic and language, which have in many ways set the course for my future work. I am also grateful that they extended an invitation to Sebastian Rödl, whose very stimulating lectures on the first Kritik I had the pleasure to enjoy (along with very helpful discussions afterwards) during his stay in the department in the Winter of 2004. Among my more immediate ‘colleagues’, I will not ever be able to stop saying ‘thank you’ to Thomas Land, with whom I have shared all of my thoughts about Kant, first to last, best to worst, clearest to darkest. In addition to guiding me for the first time through the perils and pitfalls of the Transcendental Acknowledgements viii Deduction, and introducing me to the wonderful world of German Kant- scholarship, Thomas has been gracious enough to read many-too-many of my drafts, has been unfailingly patient with my near-constant constant barrage of German translation questions, and so has in multiple ways helped me find better words to express what is contained in what follows. Thomas also had the courage (folly!) to look over every page of the present work in its last stages, giving extremely helpful comments (as always) along the way. I hope that the next draft of this text will be able to rise to meet more of his challenges, as they are all important ones. I want to thank Matthew Shockey as well, for helping me to begin to imagine what a truly ‘philosophical’ anthropology might look like, during wide-ranging conversations on the possibility of writing our very selves into ‘one’s’ texts (via cartesiana). I was also fortunate enough to share extremely rich and fruitful discussions with Timothy Rosenkoetter about Kant’s logic, at both the beginning and end of my career at Chicago. My first attempts at a systematic account of Kant’s logic came into being during a reading group on the Transcendental Dialectic with Thomas Land, Nathan Bauer, David Forman, and Clark Remington. I also learned much from reading various works in the ‘intensional’ tradition in the history of logic with Tupac Cruz, especially through recent conversations about Husserl. I would like to thank Joshua Schwartz for rejuvenating my interests in Carnap, the neo-Kantians, and Quine, and for helping Acknowledgements ix me think through the philosophical presuppositions of modern logic. I have also benefited from discussions of the third Kritik (and much else) with Gregory Freeman. Many thanks as well to Paul-Jon Benson, Aaron Lambert, Rafeeq Hasan, Arata Hamawaki, Gideon Manning, Karl Hefty, Joe Schear, Sheela Kumar, Keren Gorodeisky, Colin Patrick, and (not least for his technological wizardry) Paki Reid-Brossard. For discussion of earlier drafts of portions of this text, I would like to thank members of the wonderful set of Workshops (Contemporary Philosophy, Contemporary European Philosophy, Wittgenstein, Early Modern Philosophy) that are organized every year within the Chicago Philosophy department. I would also