Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
PHILOSOPHY
Michael Friedman and Graham Bird
IMichael Friedman
This paper considers the extent to which Kants vision of a
distinctively transcendental task for philosophy is essentially tied to his views
on the foundations of the mathematical and physical sciences. Contemporary
philosophers with broadly Kantian sympathies have attempted to reinterpret his
project so as to isolate a more general philosophical core not so closely tied to the
details of now outmoded mathematical-physical theories (Euclidean geometry and
Newtonian physics). I consider two such attempts, those of Strawson and
McDowell, and argue that they fundamentally distort the original Kantian impulse.
I then consider Buchdahls attempt to preserve the link between Kantian
philosophy and the sciences while simultaneously generalizing Kants doctrines
in light of later scientific developments. I argue that Buchdahls view, while not
adequate as in interpretation of Kant in his own eighteenth century context, is
nonetheless suggestive of an historicized and relativized revision of Kantianism
that can do justice to both Kants original philosophical impulse and the radical
changes in the sciences that have occurred since Kants day.
ABSTRACT
112
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
113
I
No-one within the analytic tradition has done more to reawaken
interest in Kantian transcendental philosophy than P. F. Strawson.
In his classic essay, The Bounds of Sense, Strawson sets out to
effect a separation or division between what remains fruitful and
interesting [in Kants Critique] and what no longer appears
acceptable, or even promising, in its doctrines.2 Among the
obstacles to sympathetic understanding, of course, is the state
of scientific knowledge at the time at which Kant wrote, which
inclined him, in particular, to a belief in the finality of Euclidean
geometry, Newtonian physics, and Aristotelian logic.3 Strawsons
2. P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 16.
3. Op. cit., p. 23.
114
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
115
116
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
The question as to the precise nature of the peculiarly philosophical enterprise, wherein we attempt to articulate what the
limiting features must be of any notion of experience which we
can make intelligible to ourselves, is here rather abruptly
dismissed.
In Skepticism and Naturalism, however, Strawson returns to this
question, and in a way, I believe, that is particularly revealing.
Prompted largely by Quines attack on the very notion of a special
realm of necessary conceptual connections, Strawson
acknowledges that there is indeed a philosophical problem about
the character of abstract and general thinking which at least
appears to concern itself directly with concepts or universals, as
in philosophy itself, or with other abstract objects, as in
mathematics.11 The kind of hard naturalism represented by
Quine rejects the existence of a peculiar domain of objective
9. P. F. Strawson, Skepticism and Naturalism (New York: Columbia, 1985), pp. 2223.
10. The Bounds of Sense, p. 44.
11. Skepticism and Naturalism, p. 86.
117
118
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
II
A more recent attempt at importing central Kantian themes into
contemporary philosophical discussion is John McDowells Mind
and World,14 which, as McDowell points out, is very strongly
influenced by Strawsons reading of Kant in The Bounds of Sense.
Instead of focusing on the problem of philosophical scepticism,
however, and the Strawsonian project of delineating, in response,
the minimal necessary conditions of any intelligible experience,
McDowell concentrates rather on the fundamental Kantian
distinction between concepts and intuitions, understanding and
sensibility, spontaneity and receptivity. For McDowell, Kants
most important insight is that understanding and sensibility,
spontaneity and receptivity, must always be integrated together.
There is no room, in particular, for either unconceptualized
sensory input standing in no rational relation to conceptual
thought, or purely intellectual thought operating entirely
independently of all rational constraint from sense experience:
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts
are blind (A51/B75). And it is only by fully assimilating this
Kantian insight, according to McDowell, that we can escape the
otherwise interminable philosophical dialectic or oscillation
between Coherentism and the Myth of the Given: the temptation,
on the one hand, to picture the understanding as a self-contained
conceptual sphere with no rational relation to an independent
empirical world, or, on the other, to invoke bare unconceptualized
sensory presences acting on the understanding from outside the
conceptual sphere.
In response to this philosophical dialectic, McDowell
recommends an alternative picture of sensible experiences,
products of our receptivity, as nonetheless thoroughly infused with
conceptual content: In experience one takes in, for instance sees,
that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one can also,
for instance, judge.15 In this way, experiences themselves are
14. J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard, 1994).
15. Op. cit., p. 9.
119
120
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
121
122
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
III
From these examples, it appears that we cannot so easily abstract
Kants characteristic conception of transcendental philosophy
from the scientific context of his time. It appears, in particular, that
we cannot so easily leave aside Kants preoccupation with
synthetic a priori mathematical-physical knowledge without
distorting his own philosophical impulse entirely beyond
recognition. So it is especially significant, in this context, that there
have also been attempts within the analytic tradition to reconstruct
and rehabilitate Kants philosophy of science as well, perhaps the
most interesting of which, from the present point of view, is that
undertaken by Gerd Buchdahl.21 For one of Buchdahls principal
21. G. Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).
123
124
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
125
IV
Buchdahls interpretation of the constructive activity of scientific
theorizing, by contrast, is quite insightful and suggestive, for it in
fact indicates a way in which the Kantian conception of synthetic
a priori knowledge can be illuminatingly generalized beyond its
Euclidean-Newtonian context. Indeed, such a generalization of the
Kantian a priori, whereby it loses its rigidly fixed character but
retains its essential constitutive function with respect to empirical
knowledge, was actually common coin within early twentieth
century scientific philosophy.
Thus Henri Poincar, for example, developed a radically new
interpretation of the status of geometry, based on his own
fundamental work on non-Euclidean spaces, according to which
geometry is neither (pace Kant) a synthetic a priori product of our
pure intuition nor (pace Gauss and Helmholtz) a straightforward
empirical description of what we can experience in nature.
Establishing one or another system of geometry rather requires a
free choice, a convention of our own in order to bridge the
irreducible gulf between our crude and approximate sensory
experience and our precise mathematical descriptions of nature.
And Hans Reichenbach, to take a second example, accordingly
distinguished two meanings of the Kantian a priori: necessary and
unrevisable, fixed for all time, on the one hand, and constitutive
of the concept of the object of knowledge, on the other.27 He
argued, on this basis, that the great lesson of the theory of relativity
is that the former meaning must be dropped while the latter must
be retained. Relativity theory, that is, involves a priori constitutive
principles as necessary presupposition of its properly empirical
claims, just as much as did Newtonian physics, but these principles
have essentially changed in the transition from the latter theory to
the former. So what we end up with, following out both of these
suggestions, is a relativized and dynamical conception of a priori
mathematical-physical principles, which change and develop
27. H. Reichenbach, Relativittstheorie und Erkenntnis Apriori (Berlin: Springer, 1920).
126
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
127
128
IMICHAEL FRIEDMAN
129