Publications

Journal Articles

“Looking for Laws in all the Wrong Spaces: Kant on Laws, the Understanding, and Space” (Forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy)

Abstract:

Prolegomena §38 is intended to elucidate the claim that the understanding legislates a priori laws to nature (“the Legislation Thesis”). Kant cites various laws of geometry as examples and discusses a derivation of the inverse-square law from such laws. I address four key interpretive questions about this cryptic text that have not yet received satisfying answers: (1) How exactly are Kant’s examples of laws supposed to elucidate the Legislation Thesis? (2) What is Kant’s view of the epistemic status of the inverse-square law and, relatedly, of the legitimacy of the geometric derivation of that law? (3) Whose account of laws, the understanding, and space is Kant critiquing in the passage? (4) What Kant’s positive account of the relationship between laws, the understanding, and space is Kant offering in the passage? My answer to (4) depends crucially on my answers to (1)-(3). As I interpret Kant, he holds that a wide-range of a priori laws – including geometric laws, the inverse-square law, and the universal laws discussed in the Analytic of Principles – are “grounded” (a technical term defined in the paper) in categorial syntheses rather than the intrinsic nature of the space given to us in pure intuition.

“The Relationship between Space and Mutual Interaction” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2017)

Abstract:

Kant claims that we cannot cognize the mutual interaction of substances without their being in space; he also claims that we cannot cognize a ‘spatial community’ among substances without their being in mutual interaction. I situate these theses in their historical context and consider Kant’s reasons for accepting them. I argue that they rest on commitments regarding the metaphysical grounding of, first, the possibility of mutual interaction among substances-as-appearances and, second, the actuality of specific distance-relations among such substances. By illuminating these commitments, I shed light on Kant’s metaphysics of space and its relation to Newton and Leibniz’s views.

“Kant’s Stance on the Relationalist-Substantivalist Debate and its Justification” (Forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Philosophy)

Abstract:

Kant famously claims that space is merely a feature of the mind – something subjective – rather than a mind-independent feature of reality-in-itself (e.g. CPR A26/B42). However, it would be a mistake to think that Kant’s commitment to the subjectivity of space would lead him to view as entirely otiose the debate between relationalists and substantivalists that raged in the 17th and 18th century (henceforth, the R-S debate). To the extent that the question of Kant’s position on the R-S debate has been considered, the general consensus seems to be that Kant is a kind of relationalist. However, discussions have tended to concentrate on Kant’s views on motion. There has been a relative neglect of the question of where Kant falls on other issues regarding the metaphysical relationship between space, bodies, and spatial relations. And there has been practically no discussion of Kant’s justification for the particular theses he adopts on the R-S debate, their justificatory relations to one another, and their relationship to the subjectivity of space thesis. In this paper, I take up these matters.

“Conceptual Analysis and the Essence of Space: Kant’s Metaphysical Exposition Revisited” (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 2015)

Abstract:

I offer here an account of the methodology, historical context, and content of Kant’s so-called “Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space” (MECS). Drawing on Critical and pre-Critical texts, I first argue that the arguments making up the MECS rest on a kind of conceptual analysis, one that yields (analytic) knowledge of the essence of space. Next, I situate Kant’s MECS in what I take to be its proper historical context: the debate between the Wolffians and Crusius about the correct analysis of the concept of space. Finally, I draw on the results of previous sections to provide a reconstruction of Kant’s so-called “first apriority argument.” On my reconstruction, the key premise of the argument is a claim to the effect that space grounds the possibility of the co-existence of whatever things occupy it.

“Kant on the Unity of Space and the Synthetic Unity of Apperception” (Kant-Studien 2014)

Abstract:

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant famously characterizes space as a unity, understood as an essentially singular whole. He further develops his account of the unity of space in the B-Deduction, where he relates the unity of space to the original synthetic unity of apperception, and draws an infamous distinction between form of intuition and formal intuition. Kant’s cryptic remarks in this part of the Critique have given rise to two widespread and diametrically opposed readings, which I call the Synthesis and Brute Given Readings. I argue for an entirely new reading, which I call the Part-Whole Reading, in part by considering the development of Kant’s views on the unity of space from his earliest works up through crucial reflections written during the silent decade.

“Kantian Space, Supersubstantivalism, and the Spirit of Spinoza” (Kant-Yearbook 2014)

Abstract:

In the first edition of Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Mendelssohn, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi claims that Kant’s account of space is “wholly in the spirit of Spinoza”. In the first part of the paper, I argue that Jacobi is correct: Spinoza and Kant have surprisingly similar views regarding the unity of space and the metaphysics of spatial properties and laws. Perhaps even more surprisingly, they both are committed to a form of parallelism. In the second part of the paper, I draw on the results of the first part to explain Kant’s oft-repeated claim that if space were transcendentally real, Spinozism would follow, along with Kant’s reasons for thinking transcendental idealism avoids this nefarious result. In the final part of the paper, I sketch a Spinozistic interpretation of Kant’s account of the relation between the empirical world of bodies and (what one might call) the transcendental world consisting of the transcendental subject’s representations of the empirical world and its parts.

“Answering Aenesidemus: Schulze’s Attack on Reinholdian Representationalism and its Importance for Fichte” (Journal of the History of Philosophy 2011)

Abstract:

According to a standard story about the genesis of Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre, the early Fichte was largely sympathetic to Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s attack on the validity of Reinhold’s principle of consciousness and the definition of representation that he derives from it. I argue that the standard story is unacceptable, insofar as it distorts Schulze’s true objections to Reinholdian Representationalism and the real nature of their influence on the early Fichte. I offer a new account of the nature of Schulze’s critique of Reinholdian Representationalism and its role in the genesis of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.

“Leibniz on Compossibility” (Philosophy Compass 2009)

Abstract:

Leibniz’s well-known thesis that the actual world is just one among many possible worlds relies on the claim that some possibles are incompossible, meaning that they cannot belong to the same world. Notwithstanding its central role in Leibniz’s philosophy, commentators have disagreed about how to understand the compossibility relation. We examine several influential interpretations and demonstrate their shortcomings. We then sketch a new reading, the cosmological interpretation, and argue that it accommodates two key conditions that any successful interpretation must satisfy.

Abstracts for chapters in edited volumes

“Kant’s Necessitation Account of Laws and the Nature of Natures” in Kant and the Laws of Nature, edited by Michela Massimi and Angela Breitenbach (Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Abstract:

I build on recent scholarship to argue that Kant defends a “bottom-up” Necessitation Account of laws of nature, at a distance from traditional readings of both constitutive a priori principles and regulative principles of systematicity. The bonus of the Necessitation Account is that the necessity and universality of laws can be regarded as supervening on the natures of things (instead of being injected by our cognitive faculties). This reading chimes with contemporary debates in philosophy of science about laws of nature and their nomic necessity.

“The Fate of the World (and Compossibility) after Leibniz: The Development of Cosmology in German Philosophy from Leibniz to Kant,” in Leibniz: Compossibility and Possible Worlds, edited by Yual Chiek and Gregory Brown (Springer, 2016).

Abstract:

This chapter explores the reception of Leibniz’s views on possible worlds and compossibility in the cosmologies of Wolff, Baumgarten, Crusius, and the pre-Critical Kant, with an eye towards determining continuities and discontinuities in their treatments of these notions. As I argue, Leibniz and these post-Leibnizians argue that compossibility should be understood in terms of the characteristic relations (namely, spatio-temporal and causal) that the members of a world stand in – that, they understanding compossibility along the lines of (what has been dubbed) the cosmological interpretation. They also agree that compossibility is ultimately grounded in properties of God. They disagree, however, about (1) the nature of space and time and their role in determining what things are compossible, (2) the number of possible and actual worlds, and (3) the legitimacy of using cosmological considerations to argue for a theodicy along Leibnizian lines. On these points, Kant radicalizes trends set in place by Crusius, leading to a rather drastic departure from Leibniz’s own account of possible worlds and compossibility.