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The Human A Priori is a collection of essays by A.W. Moore, one of them previously unpublished and the rest all revised. These essays are all concerned, more or less directly, with something ineliminably anthropocentric in our systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making. Part I deals with the nature, scope, and limits of a priori sense-making in general. Parts II, III, and IV deal with what are often thought to be the three great exemplars of the systematic pursuit of such sense-making: philosophy in the case of Part II, ethics in the case of Part III, and mathematics in the case of Part IV. Much of the attention throughout is devoted to the work of other philosophers: Kant and Wittgenstein feature prominently, and five of the essays take the form of reviews or critical notices of recent work in philosophy. But the interest in never purely exegetical. One of the lessons that emerges from the essays, either in opposition to the views of these other philosophers or by invocation of their views, is that we humans achieve nothing of real significance in philosophy, ethics, or mathematics except from a human point of view, and hence that all three of these pursuits can be said to betoken what may reasonably be called 'the human a priori'.
Philosophers, anthropologists and biologists have long puzzled over the question of human nature. It is also a question that Kant thought about deeply and returned to in many of his writings. In this lucid and wide-ranging introduction to Kant’s philosophy of human nature - which is essential for understanding his thought as a whole - Patrick R. Frierson assesses Kant’s theories and examines his critics. He begins by explaining how Kant articulates three ways of addressing the question ‘what is the human being?’: the transcendental, the empirical, and the pragmatic. He then considers some of the great theorists of human nature who wrestle with Kant’s views, such as Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud; contemporary thinkers such as E.O.Wilson and Daniel Dennett, who have sought biological explanations of human nature; Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz, who emphasize the diversity of human beings in different times and places; and existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger. He argues that whilst these approaches challenge and enrich Kant’s views in significant ways, all suffer from serious weaknesses that Kant’s anthropology can address. Taking a core insight of Kant’s - that human beings are fundamentally free but finite - he argues that it is the existentialists, particularly Sartre, who are the most direct heirs of his transcendental anthropology. The final part of the book is an extremely helpful overview of the work of contemporary philosophers, particularly Christine Korsgaard and Jürgen Habermas. Patrick R. Frierson explains how these philosophers engage with questions of naturalism, historicism, and existentialism while developing Kantian conceptions of the human being. Including chapter summaries and annotated further reading, What is the Human Being? is an outstanding introduction to some fundamental aspects of Kant’s thought and a judicious assessment of leading theories of human nature. It is essential reading for all students of Kant and the philosophy of human nature, as well as those in related disciplines such as anthropology, politics and sociology.
This book deals with questions about the nature of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge. Until the twentieth century, it was more or less taken for granted that there was such a thing as a priori knowledge, that is, knowledge whose source is in reason and reflection rather than sensory experience. With a few notable exceptions, philosophers believed that mathematics, logic and philosophy were all a priori. Although the seeds of doubt were planted earlier on, by the early twentieth century, philosophers were widely skeptical of the idea that there was any nontrivial existence of a priori knowledge. By the mid to late twentieth century, it became fashionable to doubt the existence of any kind of a priori knowledge at all. Since many think that philosophy is an a priori discipline if it is any kind of discipline at all, the questions about a priori knowledge are fundamental to our understanding of philosophy itself.
This open access book – as the title suggests – explores some of the historical roots and epistemological ramifications of perspectivism. Perspectivism has recently emerged in philosophy of science as an interesting new position in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. But there is a lot more to perspectivism than discussions in philosophy of science so far have suggested. Perspectivism is a much broader view that emphasizes how our knowledge (in particular our scientific knowledge of nature) is situated; it is always from a human vantage point (as opposed to some Nagelian "view from nowhere"). This edited collection brings together a diverse team of established and early career scholars across a variety of fields (from the history of philosophy to epistemology and philosophy of science). The resulting nine essays trace some of the seminal ideas of perspectivism back to Kant, Nietzsche, the American Pragmatists, and Putnam, while the second part of the book tackles issues concerning the relation between perspectivism, relativism, and standpoint theories, and the implications of perspectivism for epistemological debates about veritism, epistemic normativity and the foundations of human knowledge.
What kind of knowledge can we get just by thinking? Two of the world's leading philosophers develop radically different positions, in alternating chapters, on the status and nature of a priori knowledge. The reader is able to follow up-close how a philosophical debate evolves.
A comprehensive defence of the rationalist view that insight independent of experience is a genuine basis for knowledge.
Philosophers, anthropologists and biologists have long puzzled over the question of human nature. In this lucid and wide-ranging introduction to Kant's philosophy of human nature - which is essential for understanding his thought as a whole - Patrick Frierson assesses Kant's theories and examines his critics.
In Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, Robert Hanna works out a unified contemporary Kantian theory of rational human cognition and knowledge. Along the way, he provides accounts of (i) intentionality and its contents, including non-conceptual content and conceptual content, (ii) sense perception and perceptual knowledge, including perceptual self-knowledge, (iii) the analytic-synthetic distinction, (iv) the nature of logic, and (v) a priori truth and knowledge in mathematics, logic, and philosophy. This book is specifically intended to reach out to two very different audiences: contemporary analytic philosophers of mind and knowledge on the one hand, and contemporary Kantian philosophers or Kant-scholars on the other. At the same time, it is also riding the crest of a wave of exciting and even revolutionary emerging new trends and new work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, with a special concentration on the philosophy of perception. What is revolutionary in this new wave are its strong emphases on action, on cognitive phenomenology, on disjunctivist direct realism, on embodiment, and on sense perception as a primitive and proto-rational capacity for cognizing the world. Cognition, Content, and the A Priori makes a fundamental contribution to this philosophical revolution by giving it a specifically contemporary Kantian twist, and by pushing these new lines of investigation radically further.