Kant's Dog provides fresh insight into Borges's preoccupation with the contradiction of the time that passes and the identity that endures. By developing the implicit logic of the Borgesian archive, which is most often figured as the universal demand for and necessary impossibility of translation, Kant's Dog is able to spell out Borges's responses to the philosophical problems that most concerned him, those of the constitution of time, eternity, and identity; the determination of original and copy; the legitimacy of authority; experience; the nature of language and the possibility of a decision; and the name of God. Kant's Dog offers original interpretations of several of Borges's best known and most important stories and of the works of key figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Saint Paul, Maimonides, Hume, Locke, Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida. This study outlines Borges's curious relationship to literature and philosophy and, through a reconsideration of the relation between necessity and accident, opens the question of the constitution of philosophy and literature. The afterword develops the logic of translation toward the secret at the heart of every culture in order to posit a Borgesian challenge to anthropology and cultural studies.

This landmark book is now reissued in a rewritten & updated edition that takes account of recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the 'Third Analogy', an expanded discussion of Kant's 'Paralogisms' & new chapters on Kant's theory of reason, theology & the 'Appendix to the Dialectic'.

This book is both a careful study of Immanuel Kant’s work and the context of that work in the movement known as early modern philosophy. The chief interest of the author concerns the philosophy of perception that is manifest in Kant’s doctrines of the transcendental aesthetic and the concept of phenomena. Philosophy bears a crucial relationship to the public in terms of the evidence that it identifies as original and binding. In the early modern period, philosophy repudiated its dependence on ordinary perception, and on language as ordinarily used, in the setting forth of its own authority. This historiographical fact is presently of immense interest, as public discourse finds itself rudderless and without agreed upon common facts for deliberation to settle on. It was not the view of the ancient Greeks that philosophy could so emancipate itself from the perception of common facts as the original evidence for higher investigations. The Early Modern era, beginning with Bacon but now more furiously in the work of Kant, has anchored a general indictment of ordinary perception in a remnant of natural philosophy. Human beings, in Kant’s philosophy, are not capable of knowing what objects, external objects, are in themselves. We may only know what are called "appearances," and Kant refers to these appearances as phenomena. Yet this claim is complicated by the a priori knowledge which Kant claims to possess as regards these phenomena: that they must all be eternal substances. The book freely moves back and forth between Greek antiquity and the Early Modern period to illustrate the full nature of the rupture on this ground of the metaphysics of fact determination. For Aristotle, the founder of the theory of substance, substances are just the perishable bodies commonly perceived. Kant’s phenomena, which claims to embody what appears to the generality of the human race, cannot be that, for the human race does not perceive eternal objects.

A critque and analysis of Kant's Analytic.

While Immanuel Kant’s account of human reason is well known and celebrated, his account of human animality (Thierheit) is virtually unknown. Animality and reason, as pillars of Kant’s vision of human nature, are original and ineradicable. And yet, the relation between them is fraught: at times tense and violent, at other times complementary, even harmonious. Kant on the Human Animal offers the first systematic analysis of this central but neglected dimension of Kant’s philosophy. David Baumeister tracks four decades of Kant’s intellectual development, surveying works published in Kant’s lifetime along with posthumously published notes and student lecture transcripts. They show the crucial role that animality plays in many previously unconnected areas of Kant’s thought, such as his account of the human’s originally quadrupedal posture, his theory of early childhood development, and his conception of the process of human racial differentiation. Beginning with a delineation of Kant’s understanding of the commonalities and differences between humans and other animals, Baumeister focuses on the contribution of animality to Kant’s views of ethics, anthropology, human nature, and race. Placing divergent features of Kant’s thought within a unified interpretive framework, Kant on the Human Animal reveals how, for Kant, becoming human requires that animality not be eclipsed and overcome but rather disciplined and developed. What emerges is a new appreciation of Kant’s human being as the human animal it is.

This book reinterprets key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason in view of Kant's sustained engagement with Wolffian metaphysics.

Thomas C. Vinci aims to reveal and assess the structure of Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason called the "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories." At the end of the first part of the Deduction in the B-edition Kant states that his purpose is achieved: to show that all intuitions in general are subject to the categories. On the standard reading, this means that all of our mental representations, including those originating in sense-experience, are structured by conceptualization. But this reading encounters an exegetical problem: Kant states in the second part of the Deduction that a major part of what remains to be shown is that empirical intuitions are subject to the categories. How can this be if it has already been shown that intuitions in general are subject to the categories? Vinci calls this the Triviality Problem, and he argues that solving it requires denying the standard reading. In its place he proposes that intuitions in general and empirical intuitions constitute disjoint classes and that, while all intuitions for Kant are unified, there are two kinds of unification: logical unification vs. aesthetic unification. Only the former is due to the categories. A second major theme of the book is that Kant's Idealism comes in two versions-for laws of nature and for objects of empirical intuition-and that demonstrating these versions is the ultimate goal of the Deduction of the Categories and the similarly structured Deduction of the Concepts of Space, respectively. Vinci shows that the Deductions have the argument structure of an inference to the best explanation for correlated domains of explananda, each arrived at by independent applications of Kantian epistemic and geometrical methods.