Salomon Maimon offers a series of critiques of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in his Letters from Philaletes to Aenesidemus, in order to establish his skepticism. The most prevalent of theses is the critique of Kant’s idea of the “thing-in-itself.” For Kant, a thing in itself is outside the sphere of possible experience, yet is also the source of cognition. Maimon agreed with Kant that the thing in itself is beyond the sphere of possible experience, but holds that this does not mean that the thing in itself cannot be an object of cognition in principle. (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/maimon)
Maimon looks at the relationship between logic and transcendental philosophy in the first part of his sixth letter, and claims that Kant inverts the two. While the logical forms are all that can be truly known, they “have no meaning at all when abstracted from their transcendental meaning.” (185, emphasis in original) One cannot give the meaning of logical affirmation and negation apart from the corresponding transcendental concepts of reality and negation. Maimon then goes on to argue that logical reality and negation presuppose the transcendental and absolute categories and “otherwise they would not have meaning at all.” (186) Logic must, therefore, have transcendental philosophy as its premise, rather than the other way around, as Kant has it.
Part of Maimon’s objection rises from his contention that the logical forms have not yet been subjected to proper scrutiny and have always just been assumed to be valid and complete, since they were proposed by Aristotle. “[The Critique of Reason] assumes [the logical forms]…even though without a previous critique they cannot be either correctly determined or complete in number, and cannot have either a meaning or a ground.” (186) So, to use the logical forms as a basis for transcendental philosophy would be to base that philosophy on an unproven foundation.
Even with his problems with the logical forms, Maimon still has problems accepting things in themselves as objective, as we see in the previous post. For Maimon, we cannot know anything objectively because we can only know our representations, not the things in themselves. If, as Maimon seems to believe, we cannot truly know things in themselves, but can only have perfect knowledge of pure thought, i.e. logic and math, then we seem to be on a slippery slope towards solipsism. For, if we cannot know anything objectively, but can only be sure of representations and pure thought, then how can we truly know that anything actually exists outside of our mind? This is, obviously, a position that one would not want to hold, but I think is one that could be drawn from Maimon’s skepticism.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I need brushing up on the term "logical forms." Does that include any affirmation or negation (saying 'this is so' and 'this isn't so') or is it more specific? E.g., does the law of non-contradiction need a transcendental basis, or is under the realm of pure thought? (which raises the question, is pure thought excluded from the transcendental requirement, i.e., is it separate from the logical forms)
James, in this context I think non-contradiction is a logical form. Maimon seems to agree with Kant that logic contains the "necessary rules of thinking" (CPR 194). If by pure thought you mean judgments without objects, I think they would be considered subject to logical forms that control what sort of judgments can be made. Hence the Analytic contains the legitimate forms of "transcendental logic", the rules that control thoughts associated with intuitions.
Maimon is resituating the relation between logic and transcendental judgment, as Brendan said. But the question is what this means. Michael is right, the principle of non-contradiction is a logical form. But Maimon goes so far as to say that logic needs its own critique, and this is what Kant has not offered.
In this respect, it is quizzical that Kant has not justified the use of logic at all. I think that Maimon's answer to this is the principle of determinability--this is the principle of the critique of logic. And the principle of determinability distinguishes between formal, arbitrary and real forms. Only real forms are true, and they correspond to what Kant calls transcendental logic, in part.
The difference is that Maimon thinks that real judgment includes mathematical judgments that are completely determined but have no real object corresponding to their construction.
Post a Comment