Modern Logic and the Synthetic A Priori

1949 ◽  
Vol 46 (8) ◽  
pp. 243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irving M. Copi
2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-40
Author(s):  
Valentin N. Karpovich

The concept of analyticity plays an important role in establishing truths. Both in the traditional logic of terms and modern logic of predicates, similar approaches are used to reconstruct the idea of reliable substantiation. Kant used the categories of synthetic a priori, Frege relied on the features of terms (individual constants and functions) to formulate the conditions for the application of definitions. As a result, primary statements as the beginning for substantiation presuppose the existence and uniqueness of a defined subject (definite descriptions), similar to the localization of objects in space and time by Kant’s synthetic apriori judgments.


Author(s):  
Ralph C.S. Walker

Kant is committed to the reality of a subject self, outside time but active in forming experience. Timeless activity is problematic, but that can be dealt with. But he holds that the subject of experience is not an object of experience, so nothing can be known about it; this raises a problem about the status of his own theory. But he ought to allow that we can know of its existence and activity, as preconditions of experience: the Critique allows that synthetic a priori truths can be known in this way. However, its identity conditions remain unknowable. Kant’s unity of apperception shares much with Locke’s continuity of consciousness, but does not determine the identity of a thing. Personal identity is bodily identity. Only Kant’s moral philosophy justifies recognizing other selves; it could warrant ascribing a similar status to animals.


Author(s):  
William Demopoulos ◽  
Peter Clark

This article is organized around logicism's answers to the following questions: What is the basis for our knowledge of the infinity of the numbers? How is arithmetic applicable to reality? Why is reasoning by induction justified? Although there are, as is seen in this article, important differences, the common thread that runs through all three of the authors discussed in this article their opposition to the Kantian thesis that reflection on reasoning with mere concepts (i.e., without attention to intuitions formed a priori) can never succeed in providing satisfactory answers to these three questions. This description of the core of the view differs from more usual formulations which represent the opposition to Kant as an opposition to the contention that mathematics in general, and arithmetic in particular, are synthetic a priori rather than analytic.


Author(s):  
Robert Audi

Abstract Kant influentially distinguished analytic from synthetic a priori propositions, and he took certain propositions in the latter category to be of immense philosophical importance. His distinction between the analytic and the synthetic has been accepted by many and attacked by others; but despite its importance, a number of discussions of it since at least W. V. Quine’s have paid insufficient attention to some of the passages in which Kant draws the distinction. This paper seeks to clarify what appear to be three distinct conceptions of the analytic (and implicitly of the synthetic) that are presented in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and in some other Kantian texts. The conceptions are important in themselves, and their differences are significant even if they are extensionally equivalent. The paper is also aimed at showing how the proposed understanding of these conceptions—and especially the one that has received insufficient attention from philosophers—may bear on how we should conceive the synthetic a priori, in and beyond Kant’s own writings.


2021 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mikhail

Abstract Phillips et al. make a strong case that knowledge representations should play a larger role in cognitive science. Their arguments are reinforced by comparable efforts to place moral knowledge, rather than moral beliefs, at the heart of a naturalistic moral psychology. Conscience, Kant's synthetic a priori, and knowledge attributions in the law all point in a similar direction.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document