Kant Yearbook now at the Kant-Forschungsstelle Trier!
With the new issue, Kristina Engelhard takes over as editor-in-chief of the Kant Yearbook. The Kant Yearbook was founded in 2009 by Dietmar Heidemann and has since become one of the highest esteemed international journals in Kant research. Leading international Kant scholars are members of the editorial board. The goal of the Kant Yearbook is to intensify innovative Kant research on an international level. For this reason, the Kant Yearbook prefers to publish articles in English, but German-language contributions will also be considered. Each issue is devoted to a specific topic. It is published by De Gruyter and has achieved best results in the leading rankings compared to other journals devoted to Kant's philosophy (https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/kantyb/html?lang=en#ranking).
Website of the Kant Yearbook at De Gruyter: https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/kantyb/html?lang=en#editorial
Herzlichen Glückwunsch! Dr. Lorenzo Sala wird für seine Dissertation "Kant's Theory of Consciousness and its Role in the Critique of pure Reason" mit dem Premio Barone ausgezeichnet.
Der "Premio Barone", der 1997 zum Gedenken an den italienischen Erkenntnistheoretiker und Historiker der Logik, Professor Francesco Barone, gegründet wurde, ist ein Preis für Dissertationen in der Philosophie. Er wird vom Rotary Club Versilia gestiftet, in dem Professor Barone ein berühmtes Mitglied war, und von einer Kommission verschiedener Philosophieprofessoren verliehen.
Abstract
The Transcendental Deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, the Paralogisms of pure Reason and Kant’s theory of consciousness are all famous for being extremely complicated topics, whose interpretation requires a lot of in-depth exegetical work. Thus, it might seem an overtly ambitious goal to give a satisfying interpretation of all of them within the limits of a single work of a reasonable size. My thesis takes origin from the opposite intuition: considering all of these topics at the same time necessary limits the set of possible interpretations to those that work for all of them. Thus, in my thesis, I give a conjoint interpretation of all these topics.
The second consideration that shaped my thesis is about the context in which Kant wrote his Critique. In fact, despite the decline in popularity of Wolffianism, Wolff’s work still shaped the terminological and conceptual framework of the philosophy of the time, especially for what concerns consciousness. However, the scholarship on the topic had until now focused mainly on Wolff’s German writings. This, however, constitutes an important lacuna: the theories presented in Wolff’s German writings are in fact a much simplified version of their Latin counterparts, and are not nearly as informative for understanding Kant’s work.
Thus, my thesis is divided into two parts. In the first one, I provide an outline of Wolff’s understanding of cognition as it emerges from his Latin writings, which I then employ for elaborating an overall reconstruction of his theory of consciousness. Building on these results, in the second part I first analyse Kant’s concept of a critique of pure reason and first individuate the systematic, meta-philosophical role that the notion of consciousness plays in it. I then provide an analysis of Kant’s paralogisms that, at the same time, serves to reconstruct his theory of consciousness. As a last step, I finally provide an account of the second edition’s Transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding.
Call for Papers - Synthese Topical Collection on “Essences, Dispositions, and Laws in Kant”
Guest Editors
Lorenzo Spagnesi (Trier University) and Kristina Engelhard (Trier University)
Deadline
30th November, 2023
Topical Collection Description
Essences, dispositions, and laws play a central role in Kant’s pre-Critical and Critical philosophy, especially in, but not limited to, his theoretical philosophy and philosophy of science. For several years there has been a reappraisal of these notions and their interconnections (or lack thereof) in Kant scholarship, which might be motivated by recent extensive debates in metaphysics and philosophy of science on the same issues. Yet, several questions have not been fully answered so far, e.g.: What are essences for Kant? Should they be distinguished from ‘natures’ or ‘grounds’? What kind of investigation of nature do they afford? What role do dispositions play? Can we provide unified foundations for essences and dispositions, or are dispositions primitive? What grounds laws of nature or their modality? And how can they be object of cognition? More generally, what are, if any, the relations between essences, dispositions, and laws in Kant’s philosophy? The aim of this topical collection is to shed light on these and other related questions, as well as to explore their implications for contemporary debates in essentialism, dispositionalism, laws of nature and the metaphysics of modality. As such, the topical collection brings together aspects of history of philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.
To be considered in the journal, each submission should include a discussion of the relevance of the examination of Kant's views on essences, dispositions, and laws to contemporary debates. The discussion can occur in a specific section or be a general theme of the manuscript. In this way, the contribution will go beyond a historical understanding of Kant, although this understanding can be (and typically will be) at the centre of the manuscript.
The topical collection follows up on a workshop and summer school on the same topic that took place at Trier University in August 2022, in the context of the Trier Kant Research Centre and the DFG research group ‘Inductive Metaphysics’.
Topics that may be addressed include (but are not limited to):
Essences and natural kinds in Kant;
Forces, faculties, and powers in Kant;
Laws and the metaphysics of modality in Kant;
Kant and contemporary philosophy of science;
Kant and analytic essentialism;
Kant and scientific realism;
Kant and dispositionalism;
Pre-Critical Kant and natural science and/or metaphysics;
Kant and predecessors on essences, dispositions, and laws;
Kantian approaches to essences, dispositions, and laws.
For further information, please contact the guest editors: spagnesi@uni-trier.de, engelhard@uni-trier.de.
Submissions can be made at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/synt/default.aspx. Please select “Essences, Dispositions, and Laws in Kant” as type of manuscript. Papers in a topical collection are not assigned to a special issue of the journal but published in the first available issue of Synthese. The papers are then collected and prominently displayed together on Synthese's website. Papers in a topical collection undergo the same review process as any other submission to Synthese. Guidelines for submitting the manuscript can be found here: https://www.springer.com/journal/11229/submission-guidelines.
Lorenzo Spagnesi (Trier University) and Kristina Engelhard (Trier University)
