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All books
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- Ivanhoe (323)
- By Scott Walter
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- The Double and The Gambler (12)
- (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
- By Fyodor M. Dostoevsky
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- All or Nothing (1)
- Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism
- By Paul W. Franks
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- Kant (2)
- Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)
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- An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)
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- Anthropology, History, and Education (1)
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- Agency and Autonomy in Kant's Moral Theory (1)
- Selected Essays
- By Andrews Reath
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- A Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (2)
- (Phoenix Books)
- By Lewis White Beck
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- Constructions of Reason (2)
- Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy
- By Onora O'Neill
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- Philosophische Bibliothek, Bd.519, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. (7)
- By Dieter Schönecker, Bernd Kraft, Immanuel Kant
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- Kant and Skepticism (2)
- (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy)
- By Michael N. Forster
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Finished on Aug 22, 2008
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- The Uncanny (10)
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- By Hugh Haughton, Sigmund Freud
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- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (374)
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- By Robert Louis Stevenson
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- Knowledge, Reason, and Taste (3)
- Kant's Response to Hume
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- A Novel
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Kant and Skepticism
2 people find this helpful
It is a well known and accepted fact that Kant's philosophy is, on some level, a response to skepticism. Kant scholars have for a century now debated over the nature of this response. Is Kant set out to "refute" the skeptic? Is his critical philosophy a "diagnosis" of skepticism? Or is it, on the co ... (continue)
It is a well known and accepted fact that Kant's philosophy is, on some level, a response to skepticism. Kant scholars have for a century now debated over the nature of this response. Is Kant set out to "refute" the skeptic? Is his critical philosophy a "diagnosis" of skepticism? Or is it, on the contrary, an "accommodation" of skepticism?
At the beginning of _Kant and Skepticism_, Michael N. Forster draws attention to another issue Kant scholars have largely ignored. Who is the skeptic Kant is responding to? What kind of skepticism concerns him? There are, Forster maintains, a total of three: (1) "veil of perception" skepticism, (2) Humean skepticism, and (3) Pyrrhonian skepticism. Armed with this three-fold distinction, Forster sets out to accomplish two main tasks in his book.
The first task (Part One) is exegetical. He wants to show that, contrary to what many might expect, Kant did not take doubts about the mind-world relation, or "veil of perception" skepticism, seriously, and his engagement with it in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ was, if anything, an afterthought. More controversially, Forster argues that the main skeptical threat Kant responded to was ancient, not modern. He was more concerned with the dialectical attacks on reason created through multiple "counter arguments," the trademark of "Pyrrhonian" skepticism. He was not, as many believe, concerned primarily with Hume's doubts about necessary a priori concepts or metaphysical principles.
Forster's second task (Part Two) is critical, but it flows from the first. He asks whether Kant's philosophy responds successfully to each of the strands of skepticism identified above. And he argues that while Kant dealt adequately with the first two, "veil of perception" and Humean skepticism, he did not get to the root of Pyrrhonian skepticism. For in his critical system, Kant relied too heavily on logical principles (in the tradition handed down from Aristotle) that even the Pyrronian skeptic would call into question. He made assumptions that could get past a Descartes or a Hume, but not a Pyhrro.
The scholarship of Forster's book is top rate. His knowledge of a wide array of Kantian texts, and his grasp of their conceptual and historical interconnections, is both impressive and valuable for other readers of Kant. Of particular highlight is his close reading of Kant's esoteric piece from the pre-critical period, _Dreams of a Spirit Seer_ (1766). I recommend Forster's book to those interested in Kant's theoretical philosophy on the basis of its scholarship alone.
Forster's critical response to Kant is less impressive, for two reasons. It take up far less of the book, and so each successive chapter is fairly quick and often glances over important details. Chapter 10 "A Metaphysics of Morals?" touches on an exciting topic, but I found it ultimately disappointing. For a book devoted entirely to Kant's relationship with skepticism, I was saddened to see only one chapter touch on *moral* skepticism. And even in this chapter, Forster resorts to standard 'cognitivist' readings of Kant instead of developing a novel reading of his own. The final chapter, "The Pyrrhonist's Revenge" is really the center piece of his argument, but again, I found it to be too brief to make a convincing case. I still need to hear more from Forster to accept that Kant's critical system is vulnerable to Pyrronian attacks - and perhaps more significantly, I still need to hear more to accept that Kant's critical system is even built as an anti-skeptical system.
My final impression after Part Two was that Forster has presented us with an exciting and novel *work in progress*. He has quite a way to go before making it *required reading* for Kant students and scholars alike.
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