Kant’s Inferentialism draws on a wide range of sources to present a reading of Kant’s theory of mental representation as a direct response to the challenges issued by Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature. Kant rejects the conclusions that Hume draws on the grounds that these are predicated on Hume’s theory of mental representation, which Kant refutes by presenting objections to Hume’s treatment of representations of complex states of affairs and the nature of judgment. In its place, Kant combines an account of concepts as rules of inference with a detailed account of perception and of the self as the locus of conceptual norms to form a complete theory of human experience as an essentially rule-governed enterprise aimed at producing a representation of the world as a system of objects necessarily connected to one another via causal laws. This interpretation of the historical dialectic enriches our understanding of both Hume and Kant and brings to bear Kant’s insights into mental representation on contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. Kant’s version of inferentialism is both resistant to objections to contemporary accounts that cast these as forms of linguistic idealism, and serves as a remedy to misplaced Humean scientism about representation.

Explores the distinctive features of the Prolegomena, and casts Kant's critical philosophy in a new light.

The thought of Immanuel Kant is fundamental to understanding Western philosophy. Spanning epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and religion, the sheer scope and originality of Kant’s ideas have decisively shaped the history of modern philosophy. The Kantian Mind is an outstanding guide and reference source to Kant's thought and a major new publication in Kant scholarship. Comprising forty-five chapters by a stellar team of contributors, the collection is divided into four clear parts: Background to the Critical Philosophy Transcendental Philosophy (Critique and Doctrine) Posthumous Writings and Lectures Kant and Contemporary Kantians. In addition to coverage of Kant's main works, the volume contains chapters on a broad range of topics including Kant's views on logic, mathematics, the natural sciences, anthropology, religion, politics, and education. The concluding chapters cover the influence of Kant's thought on contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. Including suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, The Kantian Mind is essential reading for all students and scholars of Kant and contemporary Kantian thought. It will also be extremely helpful to those in related humanities and social sciences disciplines such as religion, history, politics, and literature.

This book argues that the philosophical significance of Kant’s aesthetics lies not in its explicit account of beauty but in its implicit account of intentionality. Kant’s account is distinct in that feeling, affect, or mood must be operative within the way the mind receives the world. Moreover, these modes of receptivity fall within the normative domain so that we can hold each other responsible for how we are "struck" by an object or scene. Joseph Tinguely composes a series of investigations into the philosophically rich but regrettably neglected topics at the intersection of Kant’s aesthetics and epistemology, such as how we orient ourselves in the world, whether tonality is a property of the subject or object, and what we hope to accomplish when we quarrel about taste. Taken together, these investigations offer a robust and defensible picture of mind, which not only resolves tensions in a Kantian account of intentionality but also offers a timely intervention into contemporary debates about the "aesthetic" nature of the way the mind is in touch with the world. Kant and the Reorientation of Aesthetics will appeal to scholars and students of Kant, as well as those working at the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy of mind.

This book addresses the problem of self-knowledge in Kant’s philosophy. As Kant writes in his major works of the critical period, it is due to the simple and empty representation ‘I think’ that the subject’s capacity for self-consciousness enables the subject to represent its own mental dimension. This book articulates Kant’s theory of self-knowledge on the basis of the following three philosophical problems: 1) a semantic problem regarding the type of reference of the representation ‘I’; 2) an epistemic problem regarding the type of knowledge relative to the thinking subject produced by the representation ‘I think’; and 3) a strictly metaphysical problem regarding the features assigned to the thinking subject’s nature. The author connects the relevant scholarly literature on Kant with contemporary debates on the huge philosophical field of self-knowledge. He develops a formal reading according to which the unity of self-consciousness does not presuppose the identity of a real subject, but a formal identity based on the representation ‘I think’.

This book examines the influence of Hume, Reid, Smith, Hutcheson, and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers on Kant’s philosophy. It begins with the influence of these thinkers on Kant, then moves to an examination of the relationship between truth, freedom, and responsibility and its connection to Kant’s metaphysics and aesthetics.

Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language (or thought) acquires meaning (or content) in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom’s landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom’s version of inferentialism has received wide attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book’s four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism’s historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers—including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin—this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language.