Wayne Waxman - Böcker

Waxman here presents an ambitious and comprehensive attempt to link the philosophers known as the British Empiricists--Locke, Berkeley, and Hume--to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Much has been written about all these thinkers but Waxman argues that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Kant is actually the culmination of the British empiricist program and that he shares their methodological assumptions and basic convictions about human thought and knowledge.

In a 2005 editorial in the British newspaper The Guardian, Kant was declared "the undefeated heavyweight philosophy champion of the world" because he had the "insight ... to remove psychology from epistemology, arguing that knowledge is inevitably mediated by space, time and forms within our minds." This is an accurate reflection of the consensus view of philosophers and scientists that Kant's accounts of space, time, nature, mathematics, and logic on the Critique of Pure Reason are rationalist, normativist, and nativist.Here, Wayne Waxman argues that this is untrue. Kant neither asserted nor implied that Euclid and Newton are the final word in their respective sciences. Rather than supposing that the psyche derives its fundamental forms from epistemology, he traced the first principles of ordinary, scientific, mathematical, and even logical knowledge to the psyche. Aristotelean logic, in particular, exhausts the sphere of the logical for Kant precisely because he deduced it entirely from psychological principles of the unity of consciousness, resulting in a demarcation of logic from mathematics that would set virtually everything regarded as logic today on the mathematical side of the ledger. Although Kant derived his conception of the unity of consciousness from Descartes, he gave it new life by eliminating its epistemological and metaphysical baggage, reducing it to its logical essence, and grounding what remained on a wholly original conception of the a priori unity of sensibility. Thus, far from departing from the course charted by British Empiricism, Kant's anatomy of the understanding is continuous with, indeed the culmination of, the psychologization of philosophy initiated by Locke, advanced by Berkeley, and developed to its empirical outrance by Hume."This is a superb and very important book. It is certainly one of the best books written on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." -Klaus Steigleder, Professor of Applied Ethics, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

This book presents an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a priori psychologism. It groups Kant’s philosophy together with those of the British empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—in a single line of psychologistic succession and offers a clear explanation of how Kant’s psychologism differs from psychology and idealism. The book reconciles Kant’s philosophy with subsequent developments in science and mathematics, including post-Fregean mathematical logic, non-Euclidean geometry, and both relativity and quantum theory. It also relates Kant’s psychologism to Wittgenstein’s later conception of language. Finally, the author reveals the ways in which Kant’s philosophy dovetails with contemporary scientific theorizing about the natural phenomenon of consciousness and its place in nature. This book will be of interest to Kant scholars and historians of philosophy working on the British empiricists.

This book presents an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a priori psychologism. It groups Kant’s philosophy together with those of the British empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—in a single line of psychologistic succession and offers a clear explanation of how Kant’s psychologism differs from psychology and idealism. The book reconciles Kant’s philosophy with subsequent developments in science and mathematics, including post-Fregean mathematical logic, non-Euclidean geometry, and both relativity and quantum theory. It also relates Kant’s psychologism to Wittgenstein’s later conception of language. Finally, the author reveals the ways in which Kant’s philosophy dovetails with contemporary scientific theorizing about the natural phenomenon of consciousness and its place in nature. This book will be of interest to Kant scholars and historians of philosophy working on the British empiricists.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis and re-evaluation of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. Kant viewed Hume as the sceptical destroyer of metaphysics. Yet for most of this century the consensus among interpreters is that for Hume scepticism was a means to a naturalistic, anti-sceptical end. The author seeks here to achieve a balance by showing how Hume's naturalism leads directly to a kind of scepticism even more radical than Kant imagined. In the process it offers the first systematic treatment of Humean associationalist psychology, including detailed exploration of his views on time-consciousness, memory, aspect-seeing, and the comparison with animal reason. Within this framework, Hume's views on language, belief, induction, causality, and personal identity emerge in a novel and revealing light.