Kant and the Claims of Knowledge

by Paul Guyer

This book offers a radically new account of the development and structure of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the defense of the objective validity of such categories as substance, causation, and independent existence. Paul Guyer makes far more extensive use than any other commentator of historical materials from the years leading up to the publication of the Critique and surrounding its revision, and he shows that the work which has come down to us is the result of some striking and only partially resolved theoretical tensions. Kant had originally intended to demonstrate the validity of the categories by exploiting what he called 'analogies of appearance' between the structure of self-knowledge and our knowledge of objects. The idea of a separate 'transcendental deduction', independent from the analysis of the necessary conditions of empirical judgements, arose only shortly before publication of the Critique in 1781, and distorted much of Kant's original inspiration. Part of what led Kant to present this deduction separately was his invention of a new pattern of argument - very different from the 'transcendental arguments' attributed by recent interpreters to Kant - depending on initial claims to necessary truth.

Genres: Philosophy

500 pages, Paperback

First published December 25, 1987

About the author

Paul Guyer is an American philosopher. He is a leading scholar of Immanuel Kant and of aesthetics and has served as Jonathan Nelson Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Brown University since 2012.

Guyer has written nine books on Kant and Kantian themes, and has edited and translated a number of Kant's works into English. In addition to his work on Kant, Guyer has published on many other figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others. Guyer's Kant and The Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press) is widely considered to be one of the most significant works in Kant scholarship. Recent works by Guyer include Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (Princeton University Press), and The Cambridge Companion to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press).

His other areas of specialty include the history of philosophy and aesthetics. His three-volume work A History of Modern Aesthetics was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2014. Guyer was President of the American Society for Aesthetics in 2011–13. Guyer was also President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2011-12.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book from Guyer, very helpful. Answered some of my questions regarding Kant's argument in the Refutation; that is, why Kant thinks that the mere acquaintance with the succession of representations in experience is not sufficient to ground the recognition of that succession. Guyer answers this quite well by turning to some of Kants unpublished notes and fragments. Essentially the idea is that there is no inherent temporal order markers in recollections of experiences, and instead the recollection is grounded in the correlation with an enduring external object of experience. Although, I do think Guyer takes this too far by arguing this also applies to present experience. It is true Kant did not explicitly endorse a Humean account of vividness but I think we can safely assume that Kant did not reject it either.

[Sasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

When I thought about going back to grad school, I tried reading this book as a test of whether I could hack it.

I'm still in the private sector.

[Dan DalMonte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strong book, although it gets dense in some passages and also I do not agree with Guyer's separability thesis, i.e. that transcendental idealism can be easily detached from the transcendental theory of experience. Guyer is very sympathetic to the Analogies of Experience and the Refutation of Idealism, which are transcendental arguments for the necessity of certain a priori structures, as well as spatial objects outside of us, to account for the basic phenomena of time-determination. Since we cannot perceive time itself, we need a structure of substances and causation to establish objective grounds for time-determination. Guyer dismisses arguments for the transcendental ideality of time and space, and especially in the Antinomies, he accuses Kant of assuming transcendental idealism in the argument for the antinomies and thus begging the question. I think he is being really uncharitable here and misunderstands Kant's arguments.

[Jonathan Hockey · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better interpretations of Kant's ideas I have come across.

Paul Guyer neither historically revises Kant to fit with his own modified pet Kant, as we see in many other accounts, nor does he engage in either caricaturing or being an apologist to Kant. He takes seriously Kant's attempt to reconcile the scientific and personal perspective of reality, with an overall and coherent ontological and metaphysical account, rather than trying to reduce Kant to some simplistic conceptualist or protagoraean set of definitional truisms. He shows the direction for a successful approach to the basis for a transcendental theory of temporal experience and demarcates this from what he sees as some of the erroneous transcendental idealist elements of Kant's philosophy.

[Julian Meynell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good critical work on Kant's epistemology and the First Critique. It won't make things that much clearer in that it is a take no prisoners kind of interpretation, but if you can get through the Critique it will be child's play.

Quite a good interpretation and a good model about what interpretations of philosophers should be like.