Publicness is an essential feature of Kant's idea of republic, because it substantiates his political thesis that only representative democracies can avoid war. If this is the case, the question of copyright cannot be viewed as a marginal interest of Kant, because it affects the public use of reason. An accurate reading of Von der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks can show two major points:...

PHILOSOPHY VII 1999 1. Opening WHAT IS THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL STATUS OF OUR KNOWledge of the truths of arithmetic? Are they analytic, the products of pure reason, as Leibniz held? Or are they high-level empirical truths that we know only a posteriori, as some empiricists, particularly Mill, have held? Or was Kant right to say that, although our knowledge that ‘5+7=12’ depends essentially upon intu...

In this paper I put forth three criticisms against McDowell account of the idea that moral requirements are categorical imperatives. I argue that McDowell’s account fails as a defense of Kant’s doctrine for at least three reasons. First, McDowell claims that agents can appeal to experience in order to formulate and recognize categorical imperatives. However, Kant strongly disagrees with this cl...

In a recent paper, Robert Hanna argues that Kant’s incongruent counterparts example can be mobilized to show that some mental representations, which represent complex states of affairs as complex, do so entirely non-conceptually. I will argue that Hanna is right to see that Kant uses incongruent counterparts to show that there must be a non-conceptual component to cognition, but goes too far in...

The paper deals with an attempt to present an “abductive-transcendental” argument in favour of a particular version of structural realism (SR), dubbed Intermediate SR. In the first part of the paper the general structure of transcendental arguments is scrutinized with a close view on Kant’s original version and the prospect of their abductive variation. Then the role of symmetries in modern phy...