Tuesday 14th May, 5-6.30pm — Faculty Board Room
Ido Geiger (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) will present a paper on 'Kant
on the Empirical Order of Nature and the Discursivity of Human Understanding’
(details below). The paper is part of a book project Ido is currently finishing
on the Critique of Judgment.
All are welcome to attend!
Abstract:
Kant emphatically announces his deduction of the principle of the conceptual
purposiveness of nature in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgment. But
the deduction itself is unsatisfactory. First, it assumes empirical knowledge
must take the form of a comprehensive hierarchical taxonomy of empirical
concepts – but does not explain why. Second, Kant creates high expectations by
employing the term ‘deduction’ and promising to seek the grounds of the
principle in the “sources of cognition a priori” (KU 5:182). But he appears
simply to declare that finding a hierarchical system of empirical laws is a
need of the understanding and that although we have no a priori insight into
its existence “such a unity must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed”
and that specifically “the power of judgment must thus assume it as an a priori
principle for its own use” (KU 5:183).
The paper argues that completing the deduction is the ultimate end of
the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It culminates in a discussion of the
discursive peculiarity of our understanding, which explains both why the system
of empirical experience and knowledge takes the shape attributed to it and how
the assumption of the conceptual purposiveness of nature is grounded in the
discursivity of our understanding. Succinctly, only the complete but
unattainable determination of the sensibly given by a complete system of
concepts can ground the claims to objectivity made in determinative judgments.
The assumption of the comprehensive conceptual purposiveness of nature thus
underwrites any subsumption of a particular under an empirical concept in a
determinative judgment laying claim to being objectively true.
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