Publications

In this article I argue that Kant considered Hume’s account of causality in the Enquiry to be primarily relevant because it undermines proofs for the existence of God and, moreover, that this interpretation is plausible and text-based. What the Prolegomena calls ‘Hume’s problem’ is, I claim, the more general question as to whether metaphysics can achieve synthetic a priori knowledge of objects at all. Whereas Hume denied this possibility, I show ...

Commentaries on the B-Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason tend to focus on Kant’s so-called Copernican turn. Much less attention has been paid to the fact that the B-Preface compares the achievement of the Critique to two different scientific procedures: the act of demonstrating a counter-intuitive hypothesis and the act of verifying its correctness by means of a cross-check. Whereas the first procedure seeks to prove that objective ...

In the Prolegomena, Kant contrasts the synthetic procedure employed in the Critique of Pure Reason with the analytic procedure carried out in the Prolegomena itself. Given the tangle of analyses, arguments, and alleged proofs that make up the Critique itself, however, it is hard to relate Kant’s remarks on the method to the way he actually proceeds in this work. Unlike Merritt and Gava, among others, I argue that Kant’s innovative use of the ...

Kant’s pursuit of the conditions of a priori knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) cannot be appreciated without considering his account of the multifaceted activities carried out by the imagination. As is well-known, his critical philosophy aimed to dismiss both the rationalist view that knowledge is acquired by the understanding alone and the skeptical challenges of Hume that a priori cognition is impossible. I show that this ...