Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered

536 John H. Zammitoa priori truths. The collapse of traditional philosophy of science, and with itthe old illusion of ‘‘first philosophy’’ that there exist a priori standardsagainst which philosophers could hold scientific achievements to assay theirworth, was a striking feature of the fin de siècle we have just undergone. AsPhilip Kitcher has observed, naturalists have concluded ‘‘the failure ofappeals to conceptual truth, to analyticity, is fully general.’’ Accordingly,‘‘virtually nothing is knowable a priori, and, in particular, no epistemologicalprinciple is knowable a priori.’’ 32 Since, instead, ‘‘knowledge isembedded in the history of human knowledge, and not detachable from it,’’we are ‘‘ineluctably dependent on the past.’’ He concludes, ‘‘the denial of thea priori thus leads … to a position whose emphasis on the growth ofknowledge invites the title ‘historicism.’’’ 33As Kornblith infers, ‘‘if there are no a priori truths, then [traditional]epistemology is misguided. Epistemology cannot precede science.’’ He offersthe naturalist alternative: ‘‘we wish to know what it is about us that allowsus to understand the world [and] we wish to know what it is about the worldthat allows it to be known.’’ That means ‘‘it is the investigation ofknowledge as a phenomenon in the world which distinguishes naturalismfrom other approaches to knowledge.’’ 34 Epistemology must be continuouswith science, asking how it is possible that knowledge has in fact occurred. 35But this is human knowledge in this world, not a priori knowledge in allpossible worlds. 36 As Nicholas Rescher puts it, ‘‘Science as we have it—theonly ‘science’ that we ourselves know—is a specifically human artifact thatmust be expected to reflect in significant degree the particular characteristicsof its makers.’’ 37 The work of the last fifty years has demolished the unifiedtheory of ‘‘science’’ which logical positivism/empiricism projected uponactual natural-scientific practices and presumed to discredit the very idea ofthe human sciences. 38To bring this directly back to Kant, when he asked how our knowledgewas possible, he argued that it was only possible because of the synthesis ofspontaneous a priori forms of reason with sensations received and arrayed ina priori space-time intuition. The famous slogan went: ‘‘Thoughts withoutcontent are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’’ (A51/B75). 39 Butthe real question is the a priori character of both understanding andsensibility: how were these and only these necessary and necessarily known?The issue arises most clearly in the revised version (1787) of the firstCritique: ‘‘This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a prioriunity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only such andso many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just theseand no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the onlyforms of our possible intuition’’ (B145-6). This same ‘‘inscrutability’’ wasfully entailed in the 1781 version of the first Critique, with its speculativegesture to a common but unknown root of sensibility and understanding(A15/B29).

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 537The question is whether when Kant went transcendental he did not, infact, go transcendent. Just this suspicion provoked the controversy in the1990s over John McDowell’s Mind and World. McDowell claimed that Kantshould and could have been a natural epistemologist (in McDowell’sparticular ‘‘relaxed’’ sense), but he didn’t because transcendental idealismremained, despite Kant, yet another ‘‘rampant Platonism.’’ 40 Such anallegation roused the Kantian community to fierce objections, and it is not acoincidence that two of these Kantians should also have been among ourthree presidents seeking to orchestrate the funeral rites of naturalism:Michael Friedman and Henry Allison. Nor, finally, is it surprising that thefirst salvo of this Kantian rejection of McDowell should have come fromGraham Bird, for his was the distinction of having actually published anessay with the title ‘‘Kant and Naturalism’’ whose ambition—with referenceto Kant (at least)—was to make ‘‘the term [naturalism] less fashionable.’’ 41Bird’s essay, ‘‘Kant and Naturalism,’’ is really an extended commentaryon Skorupski (1993), whose main narrative line characterized modernphilosophy as a protracted debate between naturalism and its opponents. 42Skorupski traced the origins of this long debate to the contest of Kant withHume, and this is what provoked Bird. The latter was not comfortable withthe manner in which Skorupski construes Kant’s ‘‘anti-naturalism.’’ For onething, Bird is skeptical that Kant’s use of ‘‘naturalism’’ can be taken assubstantive enough to warrant any claim about its meaningfulness for hisviews of Hume, empiricism and skepticism. Indeed, in one of Kant’s uses of‘‘naturalism,’’ he ‘‘allies himself with Hume as an anti-naturalist against thecommon-sense philosophers.’’ 43 For Bird, the essential issue is to disputethe ‘‘traditional’’ two-world construal of Kant’s transcendental idealism onthe basis of a two-view approach—more methodological than metaphysical,or at least more epistemological than ontological. P. F. Strawson appears tobe Bird’s exemplar of the false, metaphysical reading, which others havetermed the ‘‘myth of the noumenal.’’ 44 Bird, along with Henry Allison, hasbeen prominent in developing the revisionist view. 45 As Bird puts it: ‘‘It isnot that there really are two distinct realms, a natural, empirical realm and anon-natural, transcendent realm of things-in-themselves; rather there is justone realm, empirical reality, and a conceptual apparatus which tempts us totranscend it.’’ 46 It is on this basis that he takes offense at McDowell’sinvocation of Kant.McDowell clearly draws on Strawson for his sense of Kant, Bird notes,but ‘‘Strawson’s Kant is not Kant, and so McDowell’s Kant is not Kanteither.’’ 47 While McDowell believes that a ‘‘wish to safeguard moral andreligious beliefs had a part to play’’ 48 in Kant’s cognitive theory oftranscendental idealism (‘‘to deny knowledge in order to make room forfaith,’’ as Kant famously put it [Kant, Bxxx]), Bird insists that theepistemological and the moral contexts of Kant’s invocations of the‘‘supersensible’’ be kept distinct. More concretely: ‘‘It is uncontroversial that

538 John H. ZammitoKant allows a conceptual reference to noumena quite generally. Such thingsare for us conceptually or logically, but not really, possible.’’ This is where itis important, Bird argues, to recognize the difference between ‘‘transcendental’’and ‘‘transcendent,’’ but ‘‘McDowell not only draws no distinctionbetween the transcendental and the transcendent, but also conflatesthem…’’ 49 The transcendental for Bird is safely immanent and formal.McDowell’s failure to acknowledge this leads to a fatal misconstrual ofKant. Bird invokes ‘‘Carnap’s distinction between the material and theformal modes of speech’’ to explain Kant. That is, ‘‘Kant’s vocabulary …indicates … a claim about the formal conditions presupposed by someaspects of experience, and not a material reference to some supersensibleitem which chronologically precedes it.’’ Thus, Kant’s claims should be readnot as ‘‘empirical, causal, or psychological, but modal and epistemic.’’ 50Michael Friedman makes a similar critique, contending that McDowell‘‘presents a seriously misleading conception of the understanding’’ in Kant.He elaborates:For Kant, our sensible experience is necessarily governed by andframed within a ‘space of reasons’ consisting, essentially, of logical andmathematical relations; and there can be no question, therefore, of anepistemological gap between such rational relations on the one sideand our sensible experience on the other. Nor can there …be anontological gap between nature as the object of modern mathematicalscience and the ‘space of reasons’ arising from the necessaryinteraction of pure understanding and a priori sensibility—there canbe no threat of anything like rampant platonism from Kant’s ownpoint of view. 51Like Bird (and Allison), Friedman offers an innocuous notion of thenoumenal in Kant’s (cognitive) philosophy: ‘‘the idea of a thing in itselfarises by abstracting the concepts of pure understanding from theirnecessary application to sensibility. The idea of a noumenon or thing initself is the idea of an object thought through pure understanding alone,independently of sensibility.’’ Friedman makes much of the distinction ofthe faculty of understanding from the faculty of reason in Kant, arguingthat ‘‘understanding is… precisely the faculty responsible for the intelligibilityof the realm of law .. constituted by the logical and mathematicalrelations resulting from the necessary application of pure understanding topure sensibility, and as such it makes nature—considered precisely as theobject of modern mathematical science—first possible.’’ In a note he adds:‘‘This is the heart of Kant’s reply to Humean naturalism.’’ 52Friedman traces this crucial notion of pure conceptual constitutionthrough the ‘‘logical school’’ of the late nineteenth century from Marburg

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 539Neo-Kantianism to the Viennese logical positivists he has been at such painsto redeem for current philosophy. 53What Kant calls ‘transcendental logic’ is just as distinct from empiricalhuman psychology as is the pure thought of the reine Logik tradition.For Kant, however, the entire point of the schematism of theunderstanding is that pure thought can have content only byfunctioning as the a priori presupposition of empirical thinking(including, in particular, empirical psychological thinking). Kant’s‘space of reasons’ is thus necessarily spatiotemporal. 54Kant postulated a priori intuition as the necessary complement to logic inorder to warrant the possibility of experience. The point, common to Kantand to his more recent successors, is that ‘‘the logical structure constitutingthe space of reasons does not subsist in an autonomous ontological realmbut rather in the meaning relations of language.’’ 55For Friedman, ‘‘McDowell’s problematic of an opposition betweenreason and nature really first arises in the context of contemporary post-Quinean naturalism.’’ Friedman takes Quine as an unequivocally strongnaturalist, i.e., a physical reductionist. He sees Donald Davidson as tryingto salvage a ‘‘space of reasons’’ from Quine’s view, and therefore he feelscalled upon to defend Davidson from McDowell’s strictures. ‘‘Davidson, invirtue of the residual Quinean naturalism and physicalism expressed in hisanomalous monism, has a robust conception of the independence of thereality to which we are (causally) related in sense experience.’’ Accordingly,‘‘McDowell’s own position is actually more idealistic than Davidson’s.’’ 56 Inhis presidential address, Friedman carries this line of argument from thecriticism of McDowell to the criticism of Quinean naturalism. He takes asQuine’s crucial claim that ‘‘there is no Archimedean point from whichphilosophy could hope to justify natural science from some better groundedand more certain perspective.’’ 57 He insists this is an inappropriate criticismof Carnap, for ‘‘neither in the Aufbau nor in his later works did Carnap sethimself the goal of grounding, justifying, or ‘validating’ science from somesupposedly higher and more certain philosophical vantage point.’’ On theother hand, Quine’s argument against the a priori ‘‘challenges both Carnap’sexplanation of the special a priori status of logic and mathematics … andCarnap’s explanation of the special, non-empirical status of philosophy,’’and this ‘‘provides the strongest support for contemporary philosophicalnaturalism.’’ Friedman sees this attack on the a priori as linked to Quine’sdoctrine of the indeterminacy of translation and he finds the reductionistphysicalism tacit in that view suspect. Instead, Friedman reverts to Kantand the later ‘‘relativization of the Kantian a priori’’ by the logicalpositivists, who thus anticipated Quine’s other claim of semantic holism:‘‘conditions of possibility or necessary presuppositions of empirical natural

540 John H. Zammitoscience should not be viewed as rigidly fixed for all time, as forever immuneto revision.’’ Recent mathematical physics demonstrates the persistence, notthe redundancy of the ‘‘constitutive a priori,’’ and failure to see this,Friedman writes, is the ‘‘most peculiar and, I am tempted to say, mostperverse, legacy of contemporary philosophical naturalism.’’ 58Allison joins Bird and Friedman in taking McDowell to task formisunderstanding Kant. While he agrees with McDowell against ‘‘baldnaturalism’’ that ‘‘movement within the space of reasons (judgment andinference) is governed by normative principles accepted by the subject ratherthan by the mere reception of sensory data,’’ and hence the ‘‘essentiallynormative Kantian conception can[not] itself be naturalized,’’ Allison, likethe others, maintains ‘‘the real problem with McDowell’s Kant critique isthe interpretation of transcendental idealism,’’ which, he alleges, is a‘‘complete failure to appreciate the ‘critical’ nature of Kant’s idealism.’’ 59 Toclarify transcendental idealism, Allison suggests it should be contrasted notwith empiricism but with transcendental realism. According to Allison, the‘‘‘critical,’ demythologized conception of the noumenon … is just that of alimiting concept,’’ i.e., ‘‘drawing a transcendental (not an ontological)distinction between things as they appear (subject to the conditions ofhuman cognition) and as they are in themselves (thought independently ofthese conditions).’’ To ‘‘ontologize the transcendental distinction’’ thus‘‘elevat[es] a contrast between two ways of considering things into onebetween two modes of being (real and apparent).’’ Transcendental idealismis ‘‘a normative and conceptual, not an ontological space [of reasons].’’ 60Two different pressures on transcendental idealism can be discerned in thedebate over McDowell’s reception of Kant. First there is the question of thenormative force of reason or logic, a force Kant associated with a priorinecessity. But second there is the ontological question about this ‘‘space ofreasons’’ and its elements: what place can they have in reality? 61 ‘‘Baldnaturalism’’ appears to ‘‘extrude’’ rationality both ontologically andepistemologically from the natural world. Kant’s effort to discriminate atranscendental middle ground, safe from either extrusion, seems to be justtoo transcendent for ‘‘bald’’ naturalism, and if it gets domesticated into a‘‘relaxed’’ naturalism, it seems to forsake all the normative force that madeit attractive to Kant in the first place. That is the presentist conundrum; butthere is a historical one, too. Was Kant’s notion of the autonomy andspontaneity of reason as metaphysically innocent as Bird, Friedman andAllison want to have it? Is the ‘‘two-world’’ view just a ‘‘practical’’addendum to the critical system? Have they got Kant altogether right?The hornet’s nest stirred by McDowell indicates that there are explosiveissues in the question of Kant and naturalism. What can a dose ofhistoricism add? How should we reconstruct the question of Kant andnaturalism historically? As Lothar Kreimendahl puts it, ‘‘no one any longerexpect[s] from the reconstruction of the history of the emergence or

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 541development of Kant’s critical philosophy any directing insight for itssystematic interpretation or superior understanding.’’ 62 Yet historical issueshave resurfaced concerning the moment—or perhaps the series ofmoments—at which Kant worked out the decisive lineaments of transcendentalphilosophy. 63II. Kant, Hume, naturalism and the critical turnKant starts the Preface to the A-version of the first Critique with languagewhich unmistakably highlights the intrinsic dialectic of reason: ‘‘Humanreason … is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very natureof reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all itspowers, it is also not able to answer’’ (Avii). This is the most eloquenttestimony that the ‘‘antinomy problem’’ lay at the origin of the criticalphilosophy, just as Kant claimed many years later in a letter to ChristianGarve. 64 But what Kant goes on to write in this Preface widens ourperspective, for if the antinomy problem is Kant’s unique philosophicalformulation, the crisis of metaphysics belonged to the age. ‘‘The changedfashion of the time brings [metaphysics, once the Queen of all the sciences]only scorn… her empire gradually through intestine war gave way tocomplete anarchy’’ (Aviii-ix). In his letter to Mendelssohn in 1783, Kantadopts a similar view of the fate of metaphysics in his time: ‘‘That you feelyourself dead to metaphysics does not offend me, since virtually the entirelearned world seems to be dead to her.’’ 65To characterize this new despair and quietism Kant adopted a newpejorative term, ‘‘indifferentism’’:And now, after all methods, so it is believed, have been tried andfound wanting, the prevailing mood is that of weariness and completeindifferentism—the mother, in all sciences, of chaos and night, buthappily in this case the source, or at least the prelude, of theirapproaching reform and restoration.But it is idle to feign indifference to such enquiries, the object of whichcan never be indifferent to our human nature. Indeed these pretendedindifferentists, however they may try to disguise themselves bysubstituting a popular tone for the language of the Schools, inevitablyfall back, in so far as they think at all, into those very metaphysicalassertions which they profess so greatly to despise. (Ax)Still, Kant claims that this phenomenon of indifferentism ‘‘calls forattention and reflection’’ because ‘‘it is obviously the effect not of levitybut of the matured judgment of the age, which refuses to be any longer putoff with illusory knowledge’’ (Axi). In a note to this passage, Kant makes

542 John H. Zammitoexplicit his affirmation of his times as an age of enlightenment: ‘‘Our age is,in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything mustsubmit’’ (Axi, n). Kant’s thrust in the note is that skepticism should not besuppressed by edict, but answered by reason. ‘‘It is a call to reason toundertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of selfknowledge…the critique of pure reason’’ (Axi–xii).It would appear a seamless transition to pick up Kant’s thread of thoughtwhile jumping across the entire expanse of the first Critique to Ch. I, Section2 of the ‘‘Transcendental Doctrine of Method’’—the ‘‘Discipline of PureReason in Respect of Its Polemical Employment.’’ The chapter opens withanother ringing endorsement of enlightenment critique: ‘‘Nothing is soimportant through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exemptedfrom this searching examination… Reason depends on this freedom for itsvery existence’’ (A736/B766). The particular context of the ‘‘polemical use’’of reason is the situation in which reason is interested not so much inmaking a definitive case for a belief but rather in insulating vital beliefs fromdefinitive refutation: it is a defensive strategy, acceptable, Kant notes, kat’anthropon even if never secure kat’ aletheian (A737/B767). Kant dismissesthe hope that someday a dogmatic-rational metaphysics might succeed inthe proof of God or immortality. Such proofs are impossible, as are proofsof their contraries (A741-2/B769-70). Kant, indeed, welcomes any studywhich endeavors to refute categorically a dogma vital to human interest.‘‘Already, before having opened it, I am perfectly certain … that, as reasonis incompetent to arrive at affirmative assertions in this field, it is equallyunable, indeed even less able, to establish negative conclusions in regard tothese questions’’ (A753/B781). And that means, for Kant, that ‘‘we arealways in a position to accept these propositions—propositions which are sovery closely bound up with the speculative interests of our reason in itsempirical employment, and which, moreover, are the sole means ofreconciling the speculative with the practical interest’’ (A742/B770). Thatis, ‘‘although we have to surrender the language of knowledge, we still havesufficient ground to employ, in the presence of the most exacting reason, thequite legitimate language of a firm faith’’ (A745/B773).It is in this dramatic context of ‘‘rational faith’’ that Kant turns to DavidHume and the problem of skepticism. While he characterizes Hume as‘‘dispassionate’’ and ‘‘peculiarly fitted for balanced judgment,’’ as ‘‘welldisposed and in his moral character quite blameless,’’ he also charges himwith ‘‘far-fetched subtleties … elaborately thought out,’’ which threatenedto ‘‘undermine … the conviction which is so comforting and beneficial formankind’’ (A745/B773). 66 Kant concedes that Hume might defend himselfwith the claim that he was simply in the service of critical reason in itsruthless inquisition of dogmas, since ‘‘it is the duty of philosophy tocounteract their deceptive influence, no matter what prized and cherished

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 543dreams may have to be disowned’’ (Axiii). But—and this is the decisivepoint—Kant is not prepared to linger in aporia:But to allow ourselves simply to acquiesce in these doubts, andthereupon to set out to commend the conviction and admission of ourignorance not merely as a remedy against the complacency of thedogmatists, but likewise as the right method of putting an end to theconflict of reason with itself, is a futile procedure, and can never sufficeto overcome the restlessness of reason. At best it is merely a means ofawakening it from its sweet dogmatic dreams, and of inducing it to enterupon a more careful examination of its own position. (A757/B785)While skepticism can be a ‘‘resting-place for human reason, where it canreflect upon its dogmatic wanderings,’’ it is no ‘‘dwelling-place forpermanent settlement’’ (A757/B785). Kant invokes the image of the skepticas a nomad. This is, without the term, the pith of Kant’s denunciation of‘‘indifferentism’’ from the A-Preface (Aix).Kant respects the skeptical method: ‘‘In metaphysics, where our reasoningconcerning the vocation of man goes beyond the bounds of the world andexperience, where we have nothing to guide us, the skeptical method isappropriate’’ (AA:29:1). 67 But Kant insists that the skeptical method bedistinguished from a skeptical philosophy. 68 Skeptical method is a goodthing ‘‘provided only that one does not have the constant resolve to doubteverything forever, and to leave everything undecided… The withholding ofapproval .. with the intentional inclination never to decide anything is reallynothing but a lazy doubt, a lazy addiction to doubt [faule Zweifelsucht],’’and ‘‘no more miserable condition for man can be thought … than thecondition that leaves us undecided .. particularly … when it affects ourinterests.’’ 69 Kant insists that the vital human interest in metaphysicalconcepts militates against a skeptical (‘‘indifferentist’’) aporia. ‘‘If somethingis very weighty for us and of very great importance, so that a greatpart, indeed, even the greatest part of our peace of mind and of our externalwell-being and happiness depend upon it, then in this case the mind is justnot free enough to consider the matter indifferently and impartially from allsides.’’ 70 Where does that leave Hume?In a lecture we can date fairly confidently to the period shortly after Kantpublished his Inaugural Dissertation, he presented his students with anextended characterization of David Hume:In most recent time, David Hume is especially known as a scepticuswho had an overwhelming, indeed, a somewhat extravagant inclinationto doubt. His writings, which appeared before the learned worldunder the title, ‘‘Philosophical Inquiries,’’ and were also called‘‘Miscellaneous Writings,’’ contained political articles, essays on

544 John H. Zammitoliterature, moral and also metaphysical articles[;] but they all tendedtoward to [sic] skepticism. In these writings of Hume is to be found agentle, calm, unprejudiced examination. In them he considers, namely,first of all one side of a thing; he searches for all possible grounds forit, and expounds them in the best oratorical style. Then he takes up theother side, presents it for examination, as it were, completely withoutpartisanship, expounds again all the opposing grounds with just thesame eloquence, but at the end and in conclusion he appears in his trueform as a real skeptic[;] he complains about the uncertainty of all ourcognition whatsoever, shows how little these can be trusted, and finallyhe doubts instead of inferring and settling which of the two cognitionsis true and which false. He would, however, certainly be one of the bestauthors, and one of those most worthy of being read, if only he did nothave the preponderant inclination to doubt everything, but insteadwanted to seek to attain a true certainty by means of the examinationand investigation of cognitions. 71Thus, already here Kant stresses the extravagance of Hume’s skepticism andinsists upon the prospect of attaining certainty through an analysis ofcognitive process. Certainly ten years later, in the first Critique, Kant tookHume to task for excessive skepticism. The A-Preface and the ‘‘Discipline ofPure Reason in Respect of Its Polemical Employment’’ of the Critique ofPure Reason constitute the locus classicus for Kant’s repudiation of Humeand skepticism.Kant recognized Hume as ‘‘perhaps the most ingenious of all the sceptics,and beyond all question … without rival in respect of the influence whichthe sceptical procedure can exercise in awakening reason to a thorough selfexamination’’(A764/B792). 72 Where Hume went wrong, according to Kant,was ‘‘in inferring from the contingency of our determination in accordancewith the law the contingency of the law itself’’ (A766/B794). ‘‘The celebratedDavid Hume,’’ Kant writes, ‘‘was one of those geographers of humanreason who have imagined that they have sufficiently disposed of all suchquestions by setting them outside the horizon of human reason—a horizonwhich yet he was not able to determine’’ (A760/B788). Thus he ‘‘regarded allthe supposed a priori principles … as … nothing but a custom-bred habitarising from experience and its laws, and … consequently merely empirical,that is, rules that are in themselves contingent, and to which we ascribe asuppositious necessity and universality’’ (A765/B793). 73Here Kant launched his grand narrative of the history of philosophy, withits climactic moment, the overcoming of skepticism.The first step in matters of pure reason, marking its infancy, isdogmatic. The second step is sceptical; and indicates that experiencehas rendered our judgment wiser and more circumspect. But a third

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 545step, such as can be taken only by fully matured judgment, based onassured principles of proved universality, is now necessary, namely, tosubject to examination, not the facts of reason, but reason itself, in thewhole extent of its powers, and as regards its aptitude for pure a priorimodes of knowledge. This is not the censorship but the criticism ofreason, whereby not its present bounds but its determinate [andnecessary] limits … are demonstrated from principles. (A761/B789)Kant credited Hume merely with censorship, not critique of reason. That wasonly a second, negative moment in the evolution of philosophical understanding.By ascending to a timeless universality, criticism is the restorationor redemption of the naive interests of dogmatic reason on epistemologicallyunassailable grounds. 74At least Kant credited Hume with scientific method. Far more scathing isKant’s denunciation of what he called ‘‘naturalism.’’The naturalist of pure reason adopts as his principle that throughcommon reason, without science, that is, through what he calls soundreason, he is able, in regard to those most sublime questions which formthe problem of metaphysics, to achieve more than is possible throughspeculation… This is mere misology, reduced to principles; and what ismost absurd of all, the neglect of all artificial means is eulogised as aspecial method for extending our knowledge. (A835/B863)Kant’s target here was popular philosophy, especially as it proclaimed thesuperiority of common sense over rigorous philosophy. His contempt wasblatant. Lewis Beck holds that Kant never had any patience for‘‘naturalism’’ in this sense. 75 His disdain can be traced across the wholespan of Kant’s works, from his Universal Natural History to Religion withinthe Limits of Reason Alone and The Conflict of the Faculties. 76 In all thesetexts, Kant associates naturalism with two impulses: first, the Epicureaneffort to take nature to be ontologically self-sufficient (he mentions Epicurusexplicitly); and, second, the view that common sense can achieve all that isrequired concerning metaphysics without recourse to abstruse philosophicalreasoning. Hume was not a naturalist in the second sense, because,ironically, he used ‘‘abstruse philosophical reasoning’’ to deny its utility; theutter naturalists did not even bother. ‘‘People talk much now about thehealthy understanding (gesunde Verstand)[;] they praise it too highly.’’ 77 ‘‘Ithas become the fashion … to praise the healthy understanding to thedetriment of the honor of the sciences.’’ 78 ‘‘Healthy reason’’ may ‘‘suffice forbelles lettres [schönen Wissenschaften],’’ but Kant claims that sciencerequires rational learnedness. 79 ‘‘Healthy reason’’ is unselfconscious. Itcharacterizes how in fact human thinking proceeds, rather than how it oughtto proceed. Learnedness introduces a concern with ‘‘objective rules.’’

546 John H. Zammito‘‘Healthy reason and learnedness are distinct not merely in degree but alsoin species.’’ 80 Learned understanding recognizes normative proceduralconstraints. The problem is to establish how these implicit and explicitprocedures of understanding function. That requires an examination ofhuman practices of knowledge, and this is the domain of logic. ‘‘Logica[generically] will thus have no other grounds or sources than the nature ofhuman understanding,’’ Kant elaborates, ‘‘and so in sciences of theunderstanding I have to study man first and foremost.’’ 81 Generic ‘‘logic’’takes up both subjective and objective (implicit and explicit) rules. Kantcontrasts empirical psychology, which examines the subjective rules thatgovern ‘‘healthy reason’’ with logic [proper], which considers ‘‘the objectivelaws of the understanding and of reason.’’ 82 ‘‘The understanding cognizeseverything a priori, healthy reason a posteriori.’’ 83‘‘We have … pure concepts of reason which are given a priori… Where dowe get them from? Understanding, in attending to its own procedure on theoccasion of experiences, has acquired them for itself [hat … sie sicherworben]’’ (AA:24:452). 84 Kant is confident that this attention of theunderstanding suffices when ‘‘I have to see whether a concept emerges in mysoul out of experience or out of pure reason’’ (AA:24:403). He admits that‘‘a science which delineates with certainty the limits of our knowledge ishard,’’ and here he finds the value of skeptical method, since it forces us ‘‘tothe investigation of our own reason’’ (AA:24:376, 438). Clearly, Kantintimates that a pure, a priori consideration of these normative objectivelaws is accessible, yet he elaborates, ‘‘we have to look at the nature ofhuman understanding, so that one can set up rules appropriate to it. Itwould be foolish to set up logic for rational beings in general … and tothink, in doing so, that it could be useful to us too’’ (AA:24:438). This is abewildering stance, for it seems closer to Humeian empiricism—toanthropology—than to transcendental method. It is not entirely clear how‘‘universal basic truths of human cognition’’ which are ‘‘the principia of allsciences’’ can be discovered other than through experience, and how, if theyare learned, they can have the necessity which Kant wishes to ascribe tothem. Kant clearly believes it is possible to regress to necessary prior logicalstructures in a manner that is not contingent learning but certain knowledge,even if we start with the context of experience. Originary authority may bediscovered contingently in its governance of experience, without, however,being constituted by experience. That is the heart of the ‘‘transcendentalmethod’’ of argument, over which so much ink has been spilled. 85Graham Bird was right to see Kant on Hume’s side against ‘‘commonsense’’ naturalism. But the real issue for us is Epicurean naturalism and itsepistemological concomitant of skeptical empiricism, Hume’s ‘‘science ofman.’’ I would argue that Hume was indeed an advocate of a ‘‘naturalhistory’’ of judgment on Lockean lines. 86 Hume was unequivocally anaturalist in that sense. For Hume, relations of ideas could well be a priori,

ut remained strictly formal (or analytic), while judgments concerningmatters of fact were inveterately a posteriori (Hume 1748). Judgments ofmatters of fact, while actual (or synthetic) in reference, were always onlyprobable in validity. Kant in the mid to late 1760s was in Hume’s campalready. 87 He offered a throng of Reflexionen in that period which took justthis stance. Thus Reflexion 3738 claims: ‘‘all analytic judgments are rationaland vice versa; all synthetic judgments are empirical and conversely.’’ (Kant,AA:17:278) This conception Kant seemed clearly to be deriving from Locke.Kant makes the same claim in Reflexion 3744 (Kant AA:17:280). Hedistinguishes between analytic and synthetic in just this manner: ‘‘Rational[judgments] are analytic, empirical [judgments] are synthetic’’ (Kant,AA:17:282). The consequence was precisely that Kant could not yet evenconceive of synthetic judgments a priori, and therefore the transcendentalquestion, how are synthetic judgments a priori possible? could not arise forhim. Could the ‘‘critical’’ Kant have tolerated such a position? Kant’sawakening from his ‘‘dogmatic slumbers’’ came as he realized that he couldno longer keep company with such a view. To have been awakened was tohave to break with Hume. Hume did not awaken Kant to criticize but todefend rational metaphysics: just a ‘‘transcendental’’ rather than a‘‘transcendent’’ version—at least as Kant saw it. That would appear to beconventional wisdom, for our whole history of philosophy is grounded onKant ‘‘answering’’ Hume.It goes without saying that we take seriously Kant’s claim that Humeawakened him from his dogmatic slumber, but it is by no means certainwhen and how this took place, especially that it was in a single moment andthat this moment came in 1769. Only if we can situate Hume and naturalismmore accurately in the eighteenth-century context can we understand howthe Kant of the ‘‘critical turn’’ chose to respond. Generally, Germanphilosophy of the 1770s was dominated by the reception of the anti-Humeian ‘‘common sense’’ school—Reid, Beattie and Oswald. 88 For thosewho had made the Scottish Enlightenment a major source for GermanAufklärung, the internecine strife between Hume and the common-senseschool was grievous. 89 Johann Feder and Christoph Meiners, thephilosophers at Germany’s flagship university at Göttingen, were particularlydivided in their loyalties. Negativity toward Hume appears to haveintensified among German commentators after 1770, especially late in thatdecade with the reception of Hume’s posthumous Dialogues ConcerningNatural Religion (1779). Hume’s freethinking carried dangerous connotationsfor Germans, while the common-sense school seemed to fit morecomfortably the general tenor of German popular philosophy. 90 But turningaway from Hume to common sense was not without its costs in the generaldiminution of philosophical rigor; popular philosophy—and Johann Feder,in particular—would never live that down after Kant took them to task in1783. 91 Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 547

548 John H. ZammitoBut not all the German opponents of Hume in the 1770s ended up in thearms of common-sense. One remarkably hostile reading of Hume from 1770deserves particular attention, namely Johann Heinrich Lambert’s review ofResewitz’s German translation of Hume’s Four Philosophers. 92 Lambertcondemned Hume as an extreme and destructive skeptic. 93 Indeed, in whatappears to have been a first draft for the published review, Lambert waseven more scathing: ‘‘Hume belongs among the so-called philosophers whohave read a bit and digested it ill, who have a certain measure of wit, butwho want to smuggle in more than they have, who find their greatness insophistries, and who fall back into a childishness which cannot discriminatebetween right and left.’’ 94 Given Kant’s high esteem for Lambert—whom heflattered in 1765 as ‘‘the greatest genius in Germany,’’ and to whom hehoped to dedicate his first Critique—together with the high profile of thejournal in which Lambert published the revised version of this review—Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, with which we can be certain Kantwas familiar—the harsh negativity of this judgment might have contributedto a less affirmative view of Hume in Kant himself. The dating makes thisparticularly interesting.There is another bit of historical contextualization that has begun tofeature very centrally in the developmental-philosophical account of theKant-Hume relation and the ‘‘critical turn.’’ In 1771, in the Königsbergergelehrte Zeitung he edited, J. G. Hamann published in two segments a texthe entitled ‘‘Night Thoughts of a Skeptic,’’ whose title was modeled onEdward Young’s book but whose content was a translation of theConclusion of Book I of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, where Humedeveloped his most drastically subjectivist account of causality. A number ofscholars believe that Kant knew this text and knew that it was from Hume.Indeed, they conjecture that Hamann wrote his translation with Kant as histarget. 95 They conjecture that this radicalized Hume played no small role in‘‘awakening’’ Kant from his dogmatic slumbers.What seems to have emerged in Kant is a conviction that ‘‘a consistentlydeveloped empiricism could lead to skepticism not only in metaphysics,which is as far as he thought Hume pushed it, but also in our natural andmathematical knowledge.’’ 96 As Lüthe puts it, in Hume ‘‘[t]here is nothinglike a proof concerning our own rational notions of ourselves and of theworld outside. We have experience, but experience only suffices to give usfactuality, not necessity.’’ 97 While Hume, perhaps, and Locke certainlywould allow that there appear to be procedural proprieties for reflection, andthat orderly thinking is compromised severely by their neglect or suspension,they did not believe we could ever attain to the warrant that would stipulatetheir a priori necessity. Patricia Kitcher has argued that ‘‘the essentialdifference between Hume and Kant is precisely that the latter is willing to gobeyond the Empiricists’ picture of mental life and consider what types offaculties for cognition are necessary for cognition and how their existence

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 549might be established.’’ 98 Kant believed it both possible and necessary toinvestigate a priori the ‘‘grounds of knowledge,’’ even if the objects ofknowledge could only be known a posteriori.Whence came this confidence in reason’s self-scrutiny? One answer is the‘‘great light’’ of 1769. What was the ‘‘great light?’’ Kant suggests in theReflexion that culminates in the famous line about the great light in 1769that it was considerations about the antinomy of pure reason that ushered inhis breakthrough. 99 Norbert Hinske has formulated the developmentalhistory of Kant’s antinomy problem in terms of three phases. 100 The firstphase Hinske associates with Kant’s growing awareness of contradictionsin particular philosophical claims. Historically, the wrangle betweenNewtonians and Leibnizians over the first half of the 18 th century offeredparadigmatic instances. 101 Sometime, certainly by the Inaugural Dissertationaccording to Hinske, Kant advanced to a second stage, in which he found asystematic explanation for this discord, what Kant called ‘‘subreption,’’namely the conflict between the human faculties of cognition, sensibility andunderstanding. According to Hinske, this was not the ultimate form of theproblem, however. That was only achieved at the third stage, when Kantrealized that the source of the conflict lay entirely within reason itself, intheinternal conflict of its own principles. Hinske believes that this came only inthe period after 1772. For Hinske only this compelled Kant at last to enterthe full-fledged transcendental phase of his philosophizing. What is latent inHinske’s account is that Kant could entertain, in the so-called second phase,the short-lived illusion that simply isolating the two faculties of sensibilityand understanding might resolve the antinomy problem. Just by establishingthe separate character of understanding from sensibility, Kant could hopethat an isolated and purified reason, freed from the vitium subreptionis,might proceed with utter apperceptive lucidity. That was the source of atremendous new optimism in Kant about the prospects for metaphysicsafter 1769.Thus it might well have appeared to Kant, as he wrote in his letter toLambert in 1770, that he had finally achieved a definitive solution to theproblem of metaphysics. 102 In this connection, Lewis Beck has suggested aninteresting thought experiment, namely that we imagine what Kant wouldhave composed as his Inaugural Dissertation had the chair in Logic andMetaphysics at Königsberg been conferred upon him in 1768, just after hepublished his essay on the regions in space, instead of 1770. 103 For Beck thedecisive point of this thought experiment is to reveal Kant’s newfound faithby 1770 in the possibility of a ‘‘theoretical, speculative metaphysics,’’ ofwhich little trace could be found in the 1768 text. If that is the consequenceof the ‘‘great light,’’ Beck goes on, ‘‘the essential discovery [of 1769] was thatof the difference between the senses and the faculty of thought as adifference between two independent sources of knowledge’’ and this ‘‘radicaldifferentiation’’ owed more to the Leibniz of the Nouveaux essais and to

550 John H. ZammitoPlato than to either the antinomy problem or to David Hume. Beck pointsespecially to the new terminology of the Inaugural Dissertation whose originappears ‘‘genuinely Platonic and genuinely Leibnizian.’’ 104 What the readingof Leibniz’s Nouveaux essais, and then the rereading of Locke’s EssayConcerning Human Understanding, garnered for Kant in the late 1760s—thesimultaneous spontaneity and self-transparency of reason, the essentialelements of the idea of apperception—struck Kant as a decisive newfoundation for metaphysics. It triggered an enormous optimism about aproject he had for some time considered hopeless. Reflexion 3716(AA:17:255-9) sets out from a distinction between probability and truth,and between subjective and objective warrant. ‘‘Truth has objectivecharacteristics [Merkmale], but the certainty that in any given case thisobjectivity has been attained we can only have subjectively, that is, by theconsistency of knowledge with itself.’’ Kant holds in the Reflexion thatmetaphysics ‘‘is not a philosophy about objects, for these can only be giventhrough the senses, but rather about the subject, namely its laws of reason.’’It is possible for metaphysics to treat the subject ‘‘dogmatically,’’ i.e, withrational certainty, but the object only problematically. 105 While Kantmaintains that pure reason can reach a priori certainty in its judgmentsabout its own process, he denies access to ‘‘real essences’’ of any entity in theworld. Thus he claims that ‘‘to determine the limits of reason has a positiveas well as a negative component; in the first case, to demonstrate the scopeof rational knowledge, and [in the second] to demonstrate the constraints’’(AA:17:259).Kant’s thought in the Inaugural Dissertation revolves around the sense tobe made of the ‘‘real use’’ of the understanding in reflection, namely, inconnection with the origin of its own principles. If reason has completeaccess to this originary order, transcendental arguments are sound. If not,however—if access to the origin of these principles is inferential, or‘‘suppositious’’ as Kant likes to call it—then Hume’s position is not so easily‘‘answered.’’ 106 In 1766, Kant was close to the empiricism of Locke andHume on the problem of apperception. By 1770, he appeared utterlyconfident in going beyond them. What intervened? With Lewis Beck I haveto believe the answer is the revelation of Leibniz’s Nouveaux essais. Leibnizwas of course famous for the decisive rebuttal to crude empiricism—‘‘nihilest in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu. Nisi ipse intellectus.’’ 107 Kantexplained: ‘‘All experiences have the form of reason, and without this theywill not be experiences … [because] experience is nothing but reflectedsensation, or sensation that is reflected in a judgment.’’ Accordingly,crucially, ‘‘with experience we must be active through reason.’’ 108 Now,Kant clearly rejected intellectual intuition as mysticism. Plato was such amystic, in Kant’s view, and ‘‘among the moderns, Leibniz was a follower ofPlato.’’ 109 Kant recognized that Leibniz did not believe we had intellectualintuitions, but rather innate ideas. Yet that was still too mystical or

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 551dogmatic for Kant. By contrast, while Locke was conventionally viewed as afollower of Aristotle in maintaining that all our concepts are acquired fromthe senses, Kant pointed out that this did not do Locke justice. ‘‘Conceptsare not innate in us, but rather the capacity to reflect. Aristotle believed thatour cognitions are created out of the senses and arise from them. That wasnot what Locke taught, but rather that they arise when occasioned by thesenses.’’ 110 This is an enormously important passage, for it suggests thatKant took Locke to be closer to his transcendental vantage than evenLeibniz. Kant believed that Leibniz went too far in the direction ofsubstantive innate ideas, whereas Locke remained more cautiouslyprocessual in his conception of what was independently given in reason. Itis this processual structure of empirical judgment that is the ineluctableevidence of the active intervention of reason (or ‘‘reflection’’ as Locketermed it).In his letter to Garve of August 7, 1783, Kant explained the new optimismabout reason’s immanent powers of critique in terms that reflect the ‘‘greatlight’’ which reading Leibniz and Locke at the close of the 1760s hadoccasioned for him:It is not at all metaphysics that the Critique is doing but a whole newscience, never before attempted, namely the critique of an a priorijudging reason. Other men have touched on this faculty, for instance,Locke and Leibnitz, but always with an admixture of other faculties ofcognition. To no one has it even occurred that this faculty is the objectof a formal and necessary, yes, an extremely broad, science … and atthe same time (something marvelous) deducing out of its own natureall the objects within its scope, enumerating them, and proving theircompleteness by means of their coherence in a single, completecognitive faculty. 111Empowered by this new science, Kant could be scornful indeed of naturalistsand their professed ‘‘indifference’’ to the questions of metaphysics.III. ConclusionIf we simply consider Kant’s letter to Garve just cited we can, I think, rendersuccinctly the essential issue of Kant and naturalism for us today. Kantclaims that what his transcendental philosophy entails is not metaphysicsbut criticism. In the modern terminology of his followers, it is not ontologybut epistemology. It seeks to address questions of validity, not existence. Buthis ‘‘formal and necessary … science’’ of ‘‘transcendental logic,’’ completelyand coherently ‘‘deducing out of its own nature all the objects within itsscope,’’ must, from a naturalist vantage, entail a ‘‘daring adventure ofreason,’’ to misappropriate one of Kant’s most famous phrases, for which

552 John H. Zammitophilosophy today no longer seems to have the appropriate warrant, muchless the enormous enthusiasm of the historical Kant. 112 All of the efforts ofmodern Kantianism notwithstanding, there is more than a whiff of thetranscendent in Kant’s transcendentalism.Notes1. There has been a recent rallying to the idea of the a priori. See Hanson, P. & Hunter, B.,(Eds.) (1992) Return of the a priori (Canadian Journal of Philosophy. SupplementaryVolume 18) and Boghossian, P. & Peacocke, C. (Eds.) (2000) New Essays on the a priori(Oxford: Clarendon). For additional work in this vein see Hanna, R. (2001) Kant andthe Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon) and (2006) Kant, Science,and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon). Perhaps the most energetic endeavor alongthese lines is Friedman (2001) Dynamics of Reason (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress).2. See Coffa, J. A. (1991) The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the ViennaStation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).3. ‘‘Seventy years after Husserl’s ‘Philosophy as Rigorous Science’ and Russell’s ‘Logic asthe Essence of Philosophy,’ we are back with the same putative dangers which faced theauthors of these manifestoes: if philosophy becomes too naturalistic, hard-nosedpositive disciplines will nudge it aside; if it becomes too historicist, then intellectualhistory, literary criticism, and similar soft spots in ‘the humanities’ will swallow it up.’’Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress), p. 168.4. See Zammito, J. (2004a) A Nice Derangement of Epistemes: Post-Positivism in the Studyof Science from Quine to Latour (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press).5. A crucial context for this discussion of Kant in connection with contemporary naturalismhas been the debate surrounding McDowell, J. (1996) Mind and World (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press), which will be examined below. A second notablearena of debate over Kant and naturalism has arisen in Ghent, Belgium. Reacting againstthe ascendancy of naturalism in current philosophy of biology, Gertrudis Van de Vijverand her school have launched an effort to restore a transcendental approach to currentbiological thought, specifically invoking Kant. Their interlocutor is the prominentnaturalist Werner Callebaut, who brings together the thoughts of many prominentphilosophers of science on the question of naturalism; see Callebaut, W. (1993) Takingthe Naturalist Turn, or How Real Philosophy of Science is Done (Chicago/London:University of Chicago Press). Van de Vijver adopted a different tack: Van de Vijver, G.(2004) ‘‘Auto-organisation, identité, autonomie: figures kantiennes’’, Revue internationalede philosophie, 228, pp. 45–117; Van de Vijver, G., Van Speybroeck, L., &Vandevyvere, W. (2003) ‘‘Reflecting on complexity of biological systems: Kant andbeyond?’’ Acta Biotheoretica 51, pp. 101–140; Van de Vijver, G., Van Speybroeck, L., DeWaele, D., Kolen, F. & De Preester, H. (2005) ‘‘Philosophy of biology: Outline of atranscendental project’’, Acta Biotheoretica 53, pp. 57–75; Kolen, F. & Van de Vijver, G.(2007) ‘‘Philosophy of biology: Naturalistic or transcendendal?’’ Acta Biotheoretica, 55,pp. 35–46; see also Van Speybroeck, L. (2007) ‘‘Philosophy of biology: About thefossilization of disciplines and other embryonic thoughts’’, Acta Biotheoretica, 55,pp. 47–71. These essays provoked rejoinders from Callebaut: (2005) ‘‘Again, what thephilosophy of biology is not’’, Acta Biotheoretica, 53, pp. 93–122; (2007)‘‘Transcendental niche construction’’, Acta Biotheoretica, 55, pp. 73–90. The controversythen occasioned an Octavian Discussion session at the Exeter meetings of theInternational Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, July

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 5532007, where, in addition, I presented a paper on Kant and the challenge of naturalism,focusing on his controversy with Herder.6. Kant did use the term ‘‘naturalism,’’ as we shall note, but the issue of naturalism inKant (as we see it) proves far more extensive.7. In at least this measure, I follow the line inaugurated by Quine, (1969) ‘‘Epistemologynaturalized’’, in: Quine, W. V. O., Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, pp. 69–90(NY: Columbia University Press). As noted above, the a priori is at the core of thecurrent counter-attack on naturalism.8. Graciela de Pierris has made a strong distinction between Kant’s ‘‘constitutive a priori’’and Descartes’s ‘‘foundationalism.’’ de Pierris, G. (1992) ‘‘The constititutive a priori’’,in: Hanson & Hunter (Eds.), pp. 179–214. While there are some very importantdifferences, it remains that even this constitutive a priori may entail aspects that, fromour vantage, seem more problematically transcendent than straightforwardly transcendental– if the notion ‘‘straightforward’’ can in any sense be applied to transcendentalarguments in the current context.9. I have published extensively on this second theme: Zammito, J. (1998) ‘‘‘Method’ vs‘manner’?—Kant’s critique of Herder’s Ideen in light of the epoch of science, 1790–1820’’, Herder Yearbook, pp. 1–25, (2001) ‘‘Epigenesis: Concept and metaphor in J. G.Herder’s Ideen’’, in: R. Otto & J. Zammito (Ed.), Vom Selbstdenken: Aufklärung undAufklärungskritik in Johann Gottfried Herders ‘Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte derMenschheit, pp. 131–45 (Heidelberg: Synchron Wissenschaftsverlag), (2002) Kant,Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago & London: University of ChicagoPress), (2003) ‘‘‘This inscrutable principle of an original organization’: Epigenesis and‘looseness of fit’ in Kant’s philosophy of science’’, Studies in History and Philosophy ofScience, 34, pp. 73–109, (2004b) ‘‘Naturalizm XVIII Wieku. Spinozyzm w Filozofiachnauki Diderota i Herdera’’ [Polish; ‘‘Naturalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Use ofSpinozism in the Philosophies of Science of Diderot and Herder’’], in: M. Heinz, M.Potępa & Z. Zwoliński (Eds.), Rozum iŚwiat: Herder i filozofia XVIII, XIX i XX wieku,pp. 117–46 (Warsaw: Genessis), (2006) ‘‘Teleology then and now: The question ofKant’s relevance for contemporary controversies over function in biology’’’ Studies inHistory and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 37, pp. 748–70, (2007)‘‘Kant’s persistent ambivalence toward epigenesis, 1764–1790’’, in: P. Hunemann(Ed.), Understanding Purpose: Collected Essays on Kant and Philosophy of Biology,pp. 51–74 (University of Rochester Press/North American Kant Society Studies inPhilosophy).10. See Stroud, B. (1996) ‘‘The charm of naturalism’’, Proceedings and Addresses of theAmerican Philosophical Association, 70, pp. 43–55, Friedman, M. (1997) ‘‘Philosophicalnaturalism’’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 71,pp. 7–21, Allison, H. (1997) ‘‘We can act only under the idea of freedom’’, Proceedingsand Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 71, pp. 39–50.11. Stroud (1996), pp. 43–4.12. See Sellars, R. W. (1922) Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago/London: Open Court),p. vii.13. Rosenberg, A. (1996) ‘‘A field guide to recent species of naturalism’’, British Journal ofthe Philosophy of Science, 47, pp. 1–29. A conspectus that I find vastly more compellingis Kitcher, P. (1992) ‘‘The naturalists return’’, Philosophical Review, 101, pp. 53–114.14. Friedman (1997), p. 7.15. Allison (1997), p. 39.16. See Wagner S., and Warner, R. (Eds.) (1993) Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (NotreDame: University of Notre Dame Press), Craig, W. L. & Moreland, J. P. (Eds.) (2000)Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (London/NY: Routledge); de Caro, M. & Macarthur,D. (Eds.) (2004) Naturalism in Question (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

554 John H. Zammito17. This argot takes up Rosenberg’s view that Naturalism is infused with ‘‘Darwinism,’’ aprovocative but ultimately ambiguous connection with ‘‘evolutionary epistemology.’’See for the latter Hahlweg, K. & Hooker, C. A. (Eds.) (1989) Issues in EvolutionaryEpistemology (Albany: SUNY Press).18. Kornblith, H. (1995) ‘‘Naturalizing epistemology and its critics’’, Philosophical Topics,23, p. 239; see Kornblith, H. (Ed.) (1994) Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge: MITPress), Korner, S. (1967) ‘‘The impossibility of transcendental deductions’’, TheMonist, 51, pp. 317–331.19. One way to put this is that naturalism entails the displacement of traditionalepistemology by the history and philosophy of science. See my (2004a) for an accountof modern science studies that supports just this interpretation.20. See Strawson, P. F. (1985) Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (NY: ColumbiaUniversity Press).21. See Stroud, B. (1984) The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Clarendon).22. See Biagioli, M. (Ed.) (1999) The Science Studies Reader (NY: Routledge), Golinski, J.(1998) Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism in the History of Science (NY:Cambridge University Press), Galison, P. & Stump, D. (Eds.) (1996) The Disunity ofScience: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press), andCallebaut (1993).23. Hesse, M. (1980) Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science(Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press), p. 7.24. For strong evidence of the latter claim, see Nickles, T. (1980) ‘‘Scientific discovery andthe future of philosophy of science’’, in: T. Nickles (Ed.), Scientific Discovery, Logic,and Rationality, pp. 1–59 (Dordrecht: Reidel 5 Boston Studies in the Philosophy ofScience, vol. 56), Shapere, D. (1984) Reason and the Search for Knowledge (Dordrecht:Reidel 5 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 78), Wartofsky, M. (1979)‘‘The relation between philosophy of science and history of science’’, in: M. Wartofsky& R. Cohen (Eds.), Models: Representation and Scientific Understanding, pp. 119–39(Dordrecht: Reidel 5 Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 40), Giere, R.(1985) ‘‘Philosophy of science naturalized’’, Philosophy of Science, 52, pp. 331–356. Ihave summarized some of these arguments in (2004a), pp. 114–122.25. Giere (1985), p. 336.26. Brown, H. (1988) ‘‘Normative and naturalized epistemology’’, Inquiry, 31, p. 55.27. In the terms of Karl-Otto Apel: ‘‘Any attempt at ultimate grounding leads to atrilemma: either there must come about an infinite regress, or a logical circle, or else thegrounding-procedure has to be broken off by axiomatizing or, better, dogmatizingcertain premises.’’ (1979) ‘‘Types of rationality today: The continuum of reasonbetween science and ethics’’, in: F. Geraets (Ed.), La Rationalité Aujourd’hui (Ottawa:University of Ottawa Press), p. 310.28. Kornblith (1995), p. 237.29. Rosenberg (1996), pp. 1–2, points to Nagel’s role. Also, Danto, A. (1967)‘‘Naturalism’’, Encyclopedia of Philosophy (NY: Macmillan, Vol 5/6), pp. 448–50points to Nagel as the consolidator of the new naturalism. It is noteworthy that Danto,writing when he did, could not register the revolutionary upsurge that would beassociated with Quine’s ‘‘Epistemology Naturalized.’’30. The literature on Quine’s naturalized epistemology is already substantial. See Stroud,B. (1981) ‘‘The significance of epistemology naturalized’’, Midwest Studies inPhilosophy, 6, pp. 455–471, Haack, S. (1993) ‘‘The two faces of Quine’s naturalism’’,Synthese, 94, pp. 335–356, Fogelin, R. (1997) ‘‘Quine’s limited naturalism’’, Journal ofPhilosophy, 94, pp. 543–563, and Johnsen, B. (2005) ‘‘How to read ‘EpistemologyNaturalized’’’, Journal of Philosophy, 102, pp. 78–93. I have tried to offer a rescue ofnaturalism from some of its founder’s excesses in my (2004a), pp. 47–51.

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 55531. Kornblith (1995), p. 238.32. Kitcher (1992), pp. 72, 63.33. Ibid., pp. 72–75.34. Kornblith (1995), pp. 240–245.35. See Maffie, J. (1990) ‘‘Recent work on naturalized epistemology’’, AmericanPhilosophical Quarterly, 27, pp. 281–293.36. Kornblith (1995), p. 242.37. Rescher, N. (1984) ‘‘Extraterrestrial science’’, Philosophia Naturalis, 21, p. 413.38. See Zammito (2004a).39. Kant, I. [1781/1787] (1929) Critique of Pure Reason, trans., N. K. Smith (London:Macmillan). References to the Critique of Pure Reason are given by pagination in thefirst (A) and second (B) editions, as is standard.40. See McDowell (1996), (1998) ‘‘Having the world in view: Sellars, Kant, andintentionality’’, The Journal of Philosophy, 95, pp. 431–491, (2004) ‘‘Naturalism inthe philosophy of mind,’’ in: M. de Caro & D. Macarthur (Eds.), Naturalism inQuestion, pp. 91–105 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).41. Bird, G. (1995) ‘‘Kant and naturalism,’’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy,3,p. 408.42. Skorupski, J. (1993) English-language Philosophy 1750–1945 (Oxford/NY: OxfordUniversity Press).43. Bird (1995), p. 402.44. See Strawson, P. F. (1966) The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen). Strawson iscriticized by all the Kantians who challenge McDowell. Strawson’s is not the onlyformulation of the ‘‘traditional’’ or ‘‘two-world’’ view, and there are prominent Kantscholars – even in the U.S. – who ascribe it some cogency, if only exegetical. See thecareful discussion in Quarfood, M. (2004) ‘‘The thing in itself: Methodologicalperspective or metaphysical entity?’’ in: M. Quarfood, Transcendental Idealism and theOrganism: Essays on Kant, pp. 16–65 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International).45. See Bird, G. (1962) Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (NY: Humanities), Allison, H. (1983)Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press).46. Bird (1995), p. 406.47. Bird, G. (1996) ‘‘McDowell’s Kant: Mind and World’’, Philosophy, 71, p. 219.48. Bird (1996), p. 223.49. Bird (1996), p. 228.50. Bird (1996), pp. 229–232.51. Friedman, M. (1996) ‘‘Exorcising the philosophical tradition: Comments on JohnMcDowell’s Mind and World’’, The Philosophical Review, 105, pp. 436–39.52. Friedman (1996), pp. 441–447.53. See Friedman, M. (1999) Reconsidering Logical Positivism (NY/Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press).54. Friedman (1996), p. 454n.55. Friedman (1996), p. 454; see Friedman, M. (2000) ‘‘Transcendental philosophy and apriori knowledge: A neo-Kantian perspective’’, in: P. Boghossian & C. Peacocke (Eds.),pp. 367–383, (2001), (2002) ‘‘Kant, Kuhn, and the rationality of science’’, Philosophy ofScience, 69, pp. 171–190, (2003) ‘‘Transcendental philosophy and mathematicalphysics’’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 34, pp. 29–43; see alsoRichardson, A. (2002) ‘‘Narrating the history of reason itself: Friedman, Kuhn, and aconstitutive a priori for the 21 st century’’, Perspectives on Science, 10, pp. 253–274,DiSalle, R. (2002) ‘‘Reconsidering Kant: Friedman, logical positivism and the exactsciences’’, Philosophy of Science, 69, pp. 191–211.56. Friedman (1996), pp. 456–464.57. Friedman (1997), p. 8.

556 John H. Zammito58. Ibid., pp. 9–14.59. Allison (1997), p. 39.60. Ibid., pp. 45–47.61. For a study that asks similar questions—of McDowell and all of contemporaryphilosophy—see Rouse, J. (2002) How Scientific Practices Matter (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press).62. Kreimendahl, L. (1990) Kant—Der Durchbruch von 1769 (Cologne: Dinter), p. 15.63. See Kriemendahl (1990); Gawlick, G., & Kreimendahl, L. (1987) Hume in der deutschenAufklärung: Umrisse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte (Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog), Carl, W. (1988) Review of Gawlick & Kreimendahl, Hume in der deutschenAufklärung, Philosophische Rundschau, 35, pp. 207–14, Brandt, R., & Klemme, H.(1988) David Hume in Deutschland: Literatur zur Hume-Rezeption in MarburgerBibliotheken (Marburg: Universitätsbibliothek Marburg), Brandt, R. (1992) Review ofKreimendahl, Kant – Der Durchbruch von 1769, Kant-Studien, 83, pp. 100–11,Falkenstein, L. (1995) ‘‘The great light of 1769—a Humeian awakening? Commentson Lothar Kreimendahl’s account of Hume’s influence on Kant,’’ Archiv für Geschichteder Philosophie, 77, pp. 63–79, Hinske, N. (1995) ‘‘Prolegomena zu einerEntwicklungsgeschichte des Kantschen Denkens. Erwiderung auf LotharKreimendahl’’, in: R. Theis & C. Weber (Eds.), Von Christian Wolff bis LouisLavelle: Geschichte der Philosophie und Metaphysik. Festschrift für Jean Ecole zum 75.Geburstag, pp. 102–121 (Hildesheim/Zurich/NY: Georg Olms).64. Kant to Garve, Sept. 21,1798 in: Kant, I. (1999) Correspondence, trans., A. Zweig(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 551–2.65. Kant to Mendelssohn, August 16, 1783, in: Kant, I. (1999), p. 202.66. The editor conjectures that this criticism may have been specifically in connection withHume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.67. Kant, Philosophische Enzyklopädie in: Kant, I. (1902ff) Gesammelte SchriftenHerausgegeben von der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: deGruyter). References to Gesammelte Schriften are abbreviated as AA and cited byvolume and page.68. See Kant, I. (1992) Lectures on Logic, (Tr.) J. M. Young (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press), pp. 125–7.69. Ibid., pp. 126–7, 160.70. Ibid., p. 125.71. Ibid., p. 172.72. Note the anticipation, here, of the language of the Prolegomena on Hume awakeningKant from dogmatic slumber.73. In the 1787 version Kant made a more thorough statement of his rejection of Hume:David Hume recognised that … it was necessary that these concepts should havean a priori origin. But since he could not explain how it can be possible that theunderstanding must think concepts, which are not in themselves connected in theunderstanding, as being necessarily connected in the object, and since it neveroccurred to him that the understanding might itself, perhaps, through theseconcepts, be the author of the experience in which its objects are found, he wasconstrained to derive them from experience, namely, from a subjective necessity(that is, from custom), which arises from repeated association in experience, andwhich comes mistakenly to be regarded as objective… It is impossible, he declared,with these concepts and the principles to which they give rise, to pass beyond thelimits of experience. Now this empirical derivation … cannot be reconciled with thescientific a priori knowledge which we do actually possess, namely, pure

Kant and Naturalism Reconsidered 557mathematics and general science of nature; and this fact therefore suffices todisprove such derivation (B127–8).Of course, we need not simply accept Kant’s verdict. Lewis White Beck felt driven toacknowledge that ‘‘Hume’s implicit account of the causal principle is much more likeKant’s own than Kant had any reason to suspect.’’ Beck, L. W. (1978) Essays on Kantand Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 120. And Falkenstein has offered anextensive development of this view (1998) ‘‘Hume’s answer to Kant’’, Nous, 32,pp. 331–360. See also two recent essays which assess the complexity of the questionwithout simply presuming Kant’s position: Langsam, H. (1994) ‘‘Kant, Hume, and ourordinary concept of causation’’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54,pp. 625–647, and Nuyen, A. T. (1990) ‘‘Sense, reason and causality in Kant andHume’’, Kant-Studien, 81, pp. 57–68.74. Thus, Kant comes to the rescue of his queen with the same gallantry that Burke evokedin his longing to have rescued Marie Antoinette in Burke, E. [1790] (2001) Reflectionson the Revolution in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press).75. See Beck (1978), pp. 3–19.76. See Bird (1995), p. 401n.77. Kant (1992), p. 6. Kant indifferently used Verstand and Vernunft in connection withGesundheit. The translators generally use ‘‘healthy reason’’ so I will comply, though Iprefer healthy understanding, or, better still, ‘‘common sense,’’ which captures theessential colloquial connotation.78. Ibid., p. 6.79. Kant (1992), p. 12. Indeed, ‘‘there really and properly is no science of the beautiful[schöne Wissenschaft] at all; rather what we know of the beautiful is nothing but acritica.’’ Ibid.80. Ibid., p. 6.81. Ibid., p. 12.82. Ibid., p. 13.83. Ibid., p. 8.84. From Logic Philippi.85. For some classical contributions to the understanding of Kant’s transcendentalargumentation, see Korner, S. (1967), Stroud, B. (1969) ‘‘Transcendental arguments’’,in: T. Penelhum & J. J. MacIntosh (Eds.), The First Critique: Reflections on Kant’sCritique of Pure Reason, pp. 54–69 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth), Henrich, D. (1969)‘‘The proof structure of Kant’s transcendental deduction’’, Review of Metaphysics, 22,pp. 640–59, Hintikka, J. (1972) ‘‘Transcendental arguments: Genuine and spurious’’,Nous, 6, pp. 274–81, Schaper, E. (1972) ‘‘Arguing transcendentally’’, Kant-Studien, 63,pp. 101–16, Ameriks, K. (1978) ‘‘Kant’s transcendental deduction as a regressiveargument’’, Kant-Studien, 69, pp. 272–87. Up through the present, every few months,some new effort to make sense of transcendental arguments appears in the journalliterature.86. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Buickerood, J. (1985) ‘‘Thenatural history of the understanding: Locke and the rise of facultative logic in theeighteenth century’’, History and Philosophy of Logic, 6, pp. 157–190.87. See Zammito (2002), pp. 179–220.88. See Kuehn, M. (1983) ‘‘The early reception of Reid, Oswald and Beattie in Germany’’,Journal of the History of Philosophy, 21, pp. 479–485, (1987) Scottish Common Sense inGermany (Kingston, Ontario: McGill/Queens University Press).89. Beck, indeed, sees this as a good way to describe Kant’s critical problem: ‘‘How couldhe oppose Hume without falling in with Reid, Beattie, and Oswald… How could hegive up a supernatural metaphysics without making a metaphysics of naturalism?’’

558 John H. ZammitoBeck (1978), p. 6. One way out was to refuse to see the difference. That was whatFriedrich Jacobi did. ‘‘Jacobi moves imperceptibly between Hume and Reid withoutsignalling any difference between the two…’’ di Giovanni, G. (1998) ‘‘Hume, Jacobi,and common sense: An episode in the reception of Hume in Germany at the time ofKant’’, Kant-Studien, 89, p. 50.90. See Gawlick & Kreimendahl (1987), pp. 120–138.91. See Kant, Appendix to Prolegomena (AA:4:372–383).92. The text entitled Four Philosophers was actually a continental innovation in thepackaging of Hume’s writings and approach. Originally published in French in 1758 byMérian, it was then translated into German by Resewitz and published 1768. SeeGawlick & Kreimendahl (1987), p. 50.93. Lambert, Review of Hume, Vier Philosophen, inAllgemeine deutsche Bibliothek 12(1770) Vol. 2, St. 297–298; discussed in Gawlick/Kreimendahl, 1987, 50–51.94. Lambert, draft for review of Hume, Vier Philosophen, cited in Gawlick & Kreimendahl(1987), pp. 50–51n.95. See Kuehn, M. (2001) Kant: A Biography (Cambridge/NY: Cambridge UniversityPress), pp. 198–201.96. Beck (1978), p. 5.97. Lüthe, R. (1984) ‘‘Misunderstanding Hume: Remarks on German ways of interpretinghis philosophy’’, in: V. Hope (Ed.) Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment,(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p. 110.98. Kitcher, P. (1991) ‘‘Changing the name of the game: Kant’s cognitivism versus Hume’spsychologism’’, Philosophical Topics, 19, p. 202.99. See Kant, Reflexion 5037 (AA:18:69).100. See Hinske, N. (1965) ‘‘Kants Begriff der Antinomie und die Etappen seinerAusarbeitung’’, Kant-Studien, 56, pp. 485–496.101. See Al-Azm, S. (1972) The Origins of Kant’s Arguments in the Antinomies (Oxford:Oxford University Press).102. Kant to Lambert, Sept. 2, 1770, in Kant (1999), p. 108.103. See Beck (1978), p. 101.104. Ibid., p. 103.105. See also Kant (1992), pp. 76–7; Kant, AA:24:456ff.106. See Falkenstein (1998).107. Leibniz, G, [1765] (1996) New Essays Concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press); see Tonelli, G. (1974) ‘‘Leibniz on innate ideas and theearly reactions to the publication of the Nouveaux Essais (1765)’’, Journal of the Historyof Philosophy, 12, pp. 437–454.108. Kant (1992), p. 188.109. Ibid., p. 16.110. Ibid.111. Kant to Garve, August 7, 1783 in Kant (1999), p. 198.112. The phrase ‘‘daring adventure of reason’’ occurs, of course, in Kant, 1790, 305n, inreference to a historical-evolutionary theory of nature.