Kant's Standpoint Distinction

Markus Kohl, GSI in philosophy department

Kant famously, or infamously, thinks that human beings have two standpoints from which they can view objects in general and, in particular, themselves. This appeal to standpoints gives rise to many puzzles, including the following:

(1) What, in general, are standpoints, and what does occupying a standpoint amount to or require, in Kant?
(2) How, in particular, are Kant's two standpoints to be understood?
(3) How does Kant's standpoint distinction in the Transcendental Aesthetic relate to his standpoint distinction in the Groundwork?
(4) If both standpoints can be occupied by human beings, why does Kant designate only one of them as 'the human standpoint'?
(5) How can it be that the beliefs held from the two standpoints – most notoriously, the beliefs, 'I am free from causal determination' and 'I am causally determined' - do not contradict one another?
(6) What is the role of Kant's standpoint distinction in his overall critical philosophy?

I will mainly be concerned with (1)-(4). I will try to argue that for Kant, standpoints are deliberative perspectives from which we raise certain distinctive questions and adopt certain distinctive beliefs concerning the object of deliberation. I will also suggest that, contrary to a very common interpretation of Kant's standpoint distinction, it is a mistake to attribute to him a contrast between a 'practical' and a 'theoretical' standpoint.

Recommended readings:

a) Critique of Pure Reason, B42-44/A26-28; B570-585/A542-558.
b) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section 3

Thursday, 4/29/10, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Barrows 50

Aesthetics as the Locus of Redemption

Justin Hauver 

Capitalism seems to have taken a decisive turn in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The rise of monolopies and the increasing organization of capitalism along scientific principles absorbed the cultural sphere into the economic sphere. In their essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer describe the increasing dominance of economics within all facets of life. Organized capitalism turns man into consumer, and enslavement within the logic of the system follows. Aesthetics, however, holds the door open for negative dialectics. The possibility of redemption is to be found in the autonomous work of art.

Tuesday, 4/20/10, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

Kant’s Solution to the Problem of the Unity of Judgment

Laura Davis, Eric Teszler

How should we understand Othello's relation to the concepts 'Desdemona', 'loves', and 'Cassio' when he comes to believe that Desdemona loves Cassio? The problem of how to understand a person's relation to the various concepts he uses to make a judgment so that the judgment can be seen as having a unity - and hence as having a truth-value - has been studied in one form or another by philosophers since antiquity, most notably by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. We will argue that Kant had the solution in his notion of the spontaneity of synthesis. Focusing on the Transcendental Deduction of his Critique of Pure Reason, we will show how Kant's synthetic unity of apperception serves the function of the copula in predicative judgments.

Thursday, 4/15/10, 6:00 – 8:00 pm

Barrows 80

The Undergraduate Colloquia in Philosophy Series:

The Role of “Common Sense” in Kant’s Theory of Aesthetic Judgment

Beatrice Balfour

Kant tells us in the Critique of Judgment that judgments of beauty “must have a subjective principle, which determines what pleases or displeases only through feeling and not through concepts, but yet with universal validity. Such a principle, however, could only be regarded as a common sense…” (5:328) This notion of an aesthetic “sense” shared by all human beings – which seems to play a central role in his theory of judgments of beauty – are given seemingly incompatible descriptions: as a feeling, a faculty, and a judgment of universal communicability. The secondary literature is divided over the role and coherence of this notion in Kant’s theory. Paul Guyer, for example, calls it a “needless complexity.” Beatrice will explain and defend an interpretation of “common sense” in which it unifies the four central aspects of judgments of beauty, underlines the deep connection between normativity and the feeling of pleasure in such judgments, and fits naturally with a “one-act” view of judgments of beauty.

Tuesday, 4/6/10, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

Barrows 80