REMINDER: This week’s SHAPE seminar will be presented by Melissa Merritt (UNSW).

Title: "Kant on the Requirement to Reflect"

Abstract:
My talk is about Kant’s claim — found both in the Critique of Pure Reason as 
well as in his lectures on logic — that “all judgments require reflection”.  
There are two ways to read this claim.  On one reading, Kant is referring to a 
constitutive requirement of rationality: the reflection referred to is the 
basic awareness of oneself as the source of a point of view on how things are 
that is constitutively required in order to be able to judge that something is 
the case at all.  On another reading, the requirement is normative: reflection 
is required in order to judge well about things.  Both of these ideas are 
central to Kant’s conception of reflection; and I argue, first, for the 
importance of distinguishing clearly between them.  But the context of the 
particular claim in question clearly indicates that he has the normative 
requirement in mind.  This gives rise to a problem: the normative requirement 
appears to be overly demanding, leading one recent commentator to dismiss the 
remark as a slip of the pen.  I suggest that Kant developed his view about the 
requirement to reflect in later work — in the Critique of Judgment and the 
Anthropology — so that the requirement properly lodges not piecemeal, for each 
and every act of judgment, but globally, as a concern one ought to take for 
one’s own epistemic character.


Time: Fri June 6, 10.30am

Place: Muniment Room, S401 (under the central clock tower, level 1, Main Quad, 
USyd)

David

Dr. David Macarthur | Senior Lecturer & UG Coordinator
Philosophy Department, SOPHI | FASS
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
NSW, 2006 | Australia
Ph: +61 2 9351 3193
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/philos/staff/profiles/dmacarthur.shtml



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