Kant and the Early Moderns

Daniel Garber, Béatrice Longuenesse

Princeton University Press, Jul 21, 2008 - Philosophy - 280 pages

For the past 200 years, Kant has acted as a lens--sometimes a distorting lens--between historians of philosophy and early modern intellectual history. Kant's writings about Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have been so influential that it has often been difficult to see these predecessors on any terms but Kant's own. In Kant and the Early Moderns, Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse bring together some of the world's leading historians of philosophy to consider Kant in relation to these earlier thinkers.


These original essays are grouped in pairs. A first essay discusses Kant's direct engagement with the philosophical thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, or Hume, while a second essay focuses more on the original ideas of these earlier philosophers, with reflections on Kant's reading from the point of view of a more direct interest in the earlier thinker in question. What emerges is a rich and complex picture of the debates that shaped the "transcendental turn" from early modern epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind to Kant's critical philosophy.


The contributors, in addition to the editors, are Jean-Marie Beyssade, Lisa Downing, Dina Emundts, Don Garrett, Paul Guyer, Anja Jauernig, Wayne Waxman, and Kenneth P. Winkler.

Contents

• Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse: 1
• 1 Kants I Think versus Descartes I Am a Thing That Thinks: 9
• 2 Descartes I Am a Thing That Thinks versus Kants I Think: 32
• Contra the Leibnizians but Pro Leibniz: 41
• 4 What Leibniz Really Said?: 64
• Kants Alternative to Lockes Physiology: 79
• 6 The Sensible Object and the Uncertain Philosophical Cause: 100
• 7 Kants Critique of Berkeleys Concept of Objectivity: 117
• 8 Berkeley and Kant: 142
• 9 Kants Humean Solution to Humes Problem: 172
• 10 Should Hume Have Been a Transcendental Idealist?: 193
• Notes: 209
• Bibliography: 241
• List of Contributors: 249
• Index: 251

About the author

Daniel Garber is professor of philosophy at Princeton University and the author of Descartes Embodied and Descartes' Metaphysical Physics. Béatrice Longuenesse is professor of philosophy at New York University. Her books include Kant on the Human Standpoint and Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Kant and the Early Moderns
• Editors: Daniel Garber, Béatrice Longuenesse
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2008
• ISBN: 1400828961, 9781400828968
• Length: 280 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / Ethics & Moral Philosophy; Philosophy / History & Surveys / General