Kant And The Double Government Methodology

This is a book about dreaming and knowing, and about thinking that one can ascertain the difference. It is a book about the Bernards of the world who would have us believe that there is a humanly uncreated world existing en Boi that freely dis closes its forever fixed ontology, even though they too must accept that -many of the worlds we make as we try to under stand ourselves are counterfeit. It is a book about the real estate of the human mind. The book is about Leibniz and Kant, and about methods of science. It is also about what is now called pseudo-science. It tries to show how Kant struggled to mark the limits of the humanly knowable, and how thi s strug gle involved him in trying to answer questions of importance then and now. Some are philosophers' questions: the epistemo logical status of mathematics, the role of space and time in knowing, the nature of the conceptual constraints on our ef forts to hypothesize the possible. Some are questions of per ennial human interest: Can spirits exist? How is the soul re lated to the body? How can we legitimately talk about God, if at all? Finally, Kant teaches that these are all questions bearing on our entitlements in claiming to know. Leibniz fashioned a way of talking about nature and super nature that I call the Double Government Methodology.

Robert E. Butts (1928-1997) was a philosopher and historian of science whose central concerns were the distinction between the rational and the irrational. He viewed scientific rationality as our major defence against the various conditions that encourage witch hunts and similar outbursts of irrationality, with all their attendant pain and terror. Butts saw himself as a pragmatic realist, combining what he took to be the best aspects of logical empiricism with a historically informed pragmatism, deeply appreciative of the methods of science, trying to describe a kind of rationality essential in the struggle to preserve human values. This volume gathers previously unpublished essays and lectures with some previously published, thematically related essays. It includes essays and lectures on philosophical aspects of the European witch hunt, on scientific rationality and methodology, and on the relationships between science and philosophy exhibited in the writings of such historically significant figures as Leibniz, D'Alembert, Hume, Kant, Carnap and Kuhn.

For the philosopher and psychologist this book offers the first thoroughly cross-disciplinary interpretation of Jung's psychology. Using the conceptual framework of traditional Western philosophy, Nagy studies the internal structure of Jung's theory. His epistemology, his ontology (archetypes), and his teleological views (individuation and theory of self) are analyzed in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophical and scientific problems. Jung's psychology is a response to the challenge of Freud and to the rise of the empirical sciences.

From the mid-1960s, after the important works by J. Hintikka, S. Körner, W. Sellars and P.F. Strawson, there has been a marked revival of Kantian epistemological thought. Against this background, featuring fruitful exchange between historical research and theoretical prospects, the main point of the book is the discussion of Kantian theory of scientific knowledge from the perspective of present-day analytical philosophy and philosophy of empirical and mathematical sciences. The main topics are the problem of a priori knowledge in logic, mathematics and physics, the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, the constitution of physical objectivity and the questions of realism and truth, the Kantian conception of time, causal laws and induction, the relations between Kantian epistemological thought, relativity theory, quantum theory and some recent developments of philosophy of science. The book is addressed to research workers, specialists and scholars in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of science and history of philosophy.

This book is the first detailed study of Kant's method of 'transcendental reflection' and its use in the Critique of Pure Reason to identify our basic human cognitive capacities, and to justify Kant's transcendental proofs of the necessary a priori conditions for the possibility of self-conscious human experience. Kenneth Westphal, in a closely argued internal critique of Kant's analysis, shows that if we take Kant's project seriously in its own terms, the result is not transcendental idealism but (unqualified) realism regarding physical objects. Westphal attends to neglected topics - Kant's analyses of the transcendental affinity of the sensory manifold, the 'lifelessness of matter', fallibilism, the semantics of cognitive reference, four externalist aspects of Kant's views, and the importance of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations for the Critique of Pure Reason - that illuminate Kant's enterprise in new and valuable ways. His book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant's theoretical philosophy.