Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego
Research project:
Autonomy and the Legislation of Laws in the Prolegomena
Abstract:
In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant never used the word “autonomy” or, for that matter, any of its cognates. Further, its subject matter (theoretical cognition) and primary goal (ascertaining whether metaphysics can be a science) differ significantly, at least at first glance, from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, which concerns morality and establishing its supreme principle. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that the development of Kant’s moral philosophy runs on a track that is separate from that of his theoretical philosophy and thus that the Prolegomena is irrelevant to understanding the emergence of the notion of autonomy in the Groundwork. For Kant was writing the Prolegomena in 1782 and 1783, just as he was thinking about how to compose the metaphysics of morals that finds preliminary expression in the Groundwork. More importantly, the Prolegomena builds into its basic argument the view that reason legislates, or prescribes, laws to nature, a view that parallels the Groundwork’s claim that autonomy involves reason legislating the moral law. As a result, it is worth considering the possibility that Kant developed his doctrine of practical autonomy in the Groundwork on the basis of the parallels he discovered with the account of reason’s legislation of laws to nature while composing the Prolegomena.
To determine whether this developmental thesis is tenable, one must investigate Kant’s account of the legislation of the laws of nature in the Prolegomena and compare it to the account of autonomy that he works out in the Groundwork. But even more importantly, one must investigate the notions of normativity that are involved in both the legislation of the laws of nature, on the one hand, and practical autonomy, on the other hand. Prima facie, these theoretical and practical contexts seem very different, so it is not a trivial matter to describe the different notions that go into each notion so as to be able to determine whether there is some relatively abstract core notion that they share. I hope to make progress on this project while in Frankfurt. Marcus Willaschek, who is working on the emergence of autonomy by looking at the Naturrecht Feyerabend manuscript (written at the same time as the Prolegomena), is an ideal discussion partner for this project.
Events:
July 3, 2014
Paper Presentation
Autonomy and the Legistlation of Laws in Kant’s “Prologomena”
Location: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Bad Homburg
July 26 – 27, 2014
Workshop
The Unity of Nature. Kant’s “Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic”
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Biografische Angaben
Eric Watkins is one of the leading Kant scholars of our time and an excellent expert on modern philosophy. His research focuses on science, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, with a particular interest in the metaphysical implications and presuppositions of modern conceptions of science. In his book Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (2005), which has quickly become a standard work, he has shown in a particularly impressive way how fruitful such an approach is. His current research project is concerned with the normative dimension of Kant's concept of nature, which he examines using the Kantian metaphor of self-legislation. Another project is dedicated to the reception of the Kantian concept of the unconditional in the philosophy of German Idealism and Romanticism. -
Publikationen
Books: Watkins, Eric, Kant and the Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) xii + 291 p. Watkins, Eric, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) xiv + 451 p. Watkins, Eric, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Background Source Materials (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Watkins, Eric, (ed.) The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature: Historical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) xvi + 240 pages Select Articles: “Kant’s Theory of Physical Influx,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 77 (1995): 285-324. “Kant’s Third Analogy of Experience,” Kant-Studien 88 (1997): 406-441. “Autonomy in and after Kant,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (2004): 727-740. “Kant’s Model of Causality: Causal Powers, Laws, and Kant’s Reply to Hume,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004): 449-488. “On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and the pre-Critical Kant,” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 3 (2006): 261-314. “Kant and the Myth of the Given,” Inquiry 51 (2008): 512-531. “Kant on the Hiddenness of God,” Kantian Review 14, 1 (2009): 81-122. “The System of Principles,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. P. Guyer, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 151-167.