We are glad to give notice that Katharina Kraus (University of Notre Dame) will give the talk Kant’s Ideas of Reason: A Contextualist Interpretation at the Leuven Seminar in Classical German Philosophy (22 April 2021, 5:00-6:00 pm CET, Zoom). Respondent will be Jannis Pissis (University of Crete).

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Abstract:

In this paper, I develop a novel, contextualist interpretation of Kant’s ideas of reason and contrast it with what I call noumenalist and fictionalist interpretations. Drawing on contemporary analytic theories about the context-dependency of semantic content, I argue that for Kant the content of experience and cognition is only sufficiently determined in adequate contexts, and that ideas of reason are needed to map and demarcate these contexts. The regulative use of ideas is understood to produce not descriptions of an existing or merely imagined metaphysical reality, but expressions of contexts of cognition in two respects: (i) subjective contexts of intelligibility, within which a human subject can first conceive of certain experiences as truth-apt, inferentially derivable cognition of objects (of some kind), and (ii) objective contexts of evaluation, within which cognition can be assessed in light of the represented object and as valid for all human subjects on the basis of coherence criteria.

Please register through the website in order to receive the Zoom link. Email: classicalgermanphilosophy@kuleuven.be