Beatrice Longuenesse – författare

Kant claims to have established his table of categories or "pure concepts of the understanding" according to the "guiding thread" provided by logical forms of judgment. By drawing extensively on Kant''s logical writings, Béatrice Longuenesse analyzes this controversial claim, and then follows the thread through its continuation in the transcendental deduction of the categories, the transcendental schemata, and the principles of pure understanding. The result is a systematic, persuasive new interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason. Longuenesse shows that although Kant adopts his inventory of the forms of judgment from logic textbooks of his time, he is nevertheless original in selecting just those forms he holds to be indispensable to our ability to relate representations to objects. Kant gives formal representation to this relation between conceptual thought and its objects by introducing the term "x" into his analysis of logical forms to stand for the object that is "thought under" the concepts that are combined in judgment. This "x" plays no role in Kant''s forms of logical inference, but instead plays a role in clarifying the relation between logical forms (forms of concept subordination) and combinations ("syntheses") of perceptual data, necessary for empirical cognition. Considering Kant''s logical forms of judgment thus helps illuminate crucial aspects of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole, while revealing the systematic unity between Kant''s theory of judgment in the first Critique and his analysis of "merely reflective" (aesthetic and teleological) judgments in the third Critique.

For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant''s writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so influential that it has often been difficult to see these predecessors on any terms but Kant''s own. In Kant and the Early Moderns, Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse bring together some of the world''s leading historians of philosophy to consider Kant in relation to these earlier thinkers. These original essays are grouped in pairs. A first essay discusses Kant''s direct engagement with the philosophical thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, or Hume, while a second essay focuses more on the original ideas of these earlier philosophers, with reflections on Kant''s reading from the point of view of a more direct interest in the earlier thinker in question. What emerges is a rich and complex picture of the debates that shaped the "transcendental turn" from early modern epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind to Kant''s critical philosophy. The contributors, in addition to the editors, are Jean-Marie Beyssade, Lisa Downing, Dina Emundts, Don Garrett, Paul Guyer, Anja Jauernig, Wayne Waxman, and Kenneth P. Winkler.