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Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and Necessity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2013

John Callanan
John Callanan
Affiliation:
King's College London
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E-mail address:
john.callanan@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

Kant criticizes the so-called ‘preformation’ hypothesis – a nativist account of the origin of the categories – at the end of the B-Deduction on the ground that it entails scepticism. I examine the historical context of Kant's criticism, and identify the targets as both Crusius and Leibniz. There are two claims argued for in this paper: first, that attending to the context of the opposition to certain forms of nativism affords a way of understanding Kant's commitment to the so-called ‘discursivity thesis’, by contrasting the possession conditions for the categories with those for innate ideas; secondly, it provides an insight with regard to Kant's understanding of the dialectic with scepticism. Kant's claim is that a certain explanatory lacuna that attaches to Humean empiricism can be seen to apply equally to any nativist theory. The lacuna concerns the explanation of the modal purport of a priori necessity, i.e. how it is that our consciousness can even distinguish contents that are represented as necessary features of objects.

Keywords

Crusius Leibniz nativism preformation scepticism
Type
Articles
Information
Kantian Review , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © Kantian Review 2013

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