Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-nwzlb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T16:57:58.055Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Logicism and Formal Necessity: Reflections on Kant’s Modal Metaphysics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2018

James Van Cleve*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California

Abstract

Logicism is Stang’s name for the Leibnizian doctrine that all necessary truths are derivable from identities and definitions. Stang shows that the early Kant opposed this doctrine because he thought the proposition God exists was a counterexample to it; I raise some non-theological counterexamples as well. Formal necessity is the necessity that attaches to a proposition when its truth is grounded in our categories and forms of intuition. Stang treats it as one of several sui generis kinds of necessity in Kant, all of them falling short of logical or metaphysical necessity. I raise several questions for Stang’s account, including the following: Can our having the forms we do really explain the necessity of geometry? Is our possession of those forms self-grounding in an objectionable way? How can our forms ground general truths without grounding particular instances of them?

Type
Author Meets Critics
Copyright
© Kantian Review 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bennett, Karen (2011) ‘By our Bootstraps’. Philosophical Perspectives, 25, 2741.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel (1965 [1781 and 1787]) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Russell, Bertrand (1999 [1912]) The Problems of Philosophy. New York: Dover.Google Scholar
Stang, Nicholas F. (2016) Kant’s Modal Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar