Kant and the Meaning of Religion

1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin, 1990), 49; see also 61.

2 Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 8.

3 George Santayana, The Life of Reason, vol. 3, Reason in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 236.

4 Summaries of the recent literature will be found in Chris L. Firestone and Nathan Jacobs, In Defense of Kant’s Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 3, and in Stephen Palmquist, “Kant’s Ethics of Grace: Perspectival Solutions to the Moral Difficulties with Divine Assistance,” The Journal of Religion 90/4 (2010): 530–53. See also Firestone and Palmquist (eds.) Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006).

5 M. Jamie Ferreira, “Hope, virtue, and the postulate of God: a reappraisal of Kant’s pure practical rational belief,” Religious Studies (2013): 1–24.

6 Van A. Harvey, “The Pathos of Liberal Theology,” The Journal of Religion 56/4 (October 1976): 383. See Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., Kant and the Problem of God (New York: Blackwell, 1999). In the conclusion we will come to the question whether at the end of his life Kant abandons his own Critical philosophy of religion. See Eckhart Forster, Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Peter Byrne, Kant on God (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007); Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), esp. Part III.

8 Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 46.

10 Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 99.

11 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

12 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1985). For critical discussion and a guide to the recent literature, see Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (New York: AAR/Oxford, 2010), esp. Introduction. I take up Dole’s reading in chapter four.

13 Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 33–34, after John Haugeland, “Heidegger on Being a Person,” Nous 16 (1982), 18: “This is a central thesis of Being and Time, which I venture to sum up in a memorable slogan: All constitution is institution.”

14 Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 58, quoting McDowell, Mind and World, 98.

15 Lewis White Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 30. For the parallel passage in Kant, see Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in trans., Mary J. Gregor, Practical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77; Ak. 4: 425.

1 So argues Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience. In Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order, Andrew Dole argues persuasively that Schleiermacher at the same time advances a sophisticated naturalistic approach to the study of religion. I take up these issues in chapter four.

2 Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

3 Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 41.

4 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xvi; see also Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

5 Robert Brandom, “Platforms, Patchworks, and Parking Garages: Wilson’s Account of Conceptual Fine-Structure in Wandering Significance,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82/1 (January 2011): 185.

8 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: from Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi.

9 Willi Braun, “Religion,” in (eds. Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon), Guide to the Study of Religion (New York: Cassell, 2000), 8.

10 Hilary Putnam, “The Craving for Objectivity,” New Literary History 15/2 (Winter 1984: 229; next quotation, 230. In the religious studies arena, see Kevin Shilbrack’s discussion of reification in, “Religions: Are There Any?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78/4 (December 2010): 1127.

11 References to the Critique of Pure Reason follow the usual A (1781) and B (1787) format, and will appear in the text (trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998]). Citation to other of Kant’s works will include both the English translation and a reference to the “Akademie” edition: Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Königlich Preussischen (Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer, now W. de Gruyter, 1902-).

12 See also Kant, Lectures on Logic (trans. and ed. J. Michael Young) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 564–65; Ak. 9: 58–59.

13 See Kant, Lectures on Logic, 564ff. For discussion of Kant’s humanizing program, see Carl Posy, “Immediacy and the Birth of Reference in Kant,” in Gila Sher and Richard Tiesen (eds.), Between Logic and Intuition: Essays in Honor of Charles Parsons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 155–85.

14 For discussion, see Stephen Engstrom, “Understanding and Sensibility,”Inquiry 49/1 (February 2006): 9–10.

15 Willem R. De Jong, “Kant’s Analytic Judgments and the Traditional Theory of Concepts,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33/4 (1995): 613–41.

16 Manley Thompson, “Unity, Plurality, and Totality as Kantian Categories,” The Monist 72/2 (April 1989): 186, n.11.

17 Wendy Doniger, “Hinduism by Any Other Name,” The Wilson Quarterly 15/3 (Summer 1976): 41.

18 For discussion, see De Jong, “Kant’s Analytic Judgments and the Traditional Theory of Concepts,” 624ff.

19 For discussion, see Thompson, “Unity, Plurality, and Totality as Kantian Categories,” 186, n.11.

20 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 46ff.

21 Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 7; Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54. In several places Brandom has portrayed Kant’s construal of concepts as rules as marking an important advance in Enlightenment epistemology; see Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7ff, and Tales of the Mighty Dead, in which he notes that, for Kant, “judgment appears for him as the minimal unit of experience” (21). My thanks to Warren Frisina for helping me see the importance of the move from representation to action.

22 Kant, Lectures on Logic, 595; Ak. 9: 97; original emphasis. For discussion see Thompson, “Singular Terms and Intuitions in Kant’s Epistemology,” in Carl Posy (ed.), Kant’s Philosophy of Mathematics: Modern Essays (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2010), 92.

24 Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 131.

25 In the Critique Kant’s interest extends only to the distinctions between analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori, but in the Jäsche Logic, we find him making several further distinctions between sub-concepts. Thus, if two sub-concepts do not require each other they are “coordinate,” while if one sub-concept follows uniquely from another sub-concept it is “subordinate” (Lectures on Logic, 564–65; Ak. 9: 58–59). Under the latter presumably fall the concepts forming a given chain of genus and species. For example, the predicates “mortal” and “rational animal” are both derivable from “man”; since “is over 6’ tall” is not so derivable, it is a coordinate concept (assuming of course that “The man is over 6’ tall” is true). This is apparently where a Kantian theory of concepts could accommodate what since Sellars is known as “material” inference (Wilfrid Sellars, “Inference and Meaning,” Mind NS 62/247 [July 1953]: 313–38). Of the inference from “Lightning is seen now” to “Thunder will be heard now,” Brandom comments: “It is the contents of the concepts lightning and thunder, as well as the temporal concepts, that make the second appropriate. Endorsing these inferences is part of grasping or mastering those concepts, quite apart from any specifically logical competence” (Articulating Reasons, 52; see also 30). Kant can agree that English speakers who want to use “temporal event,” in smooth conversation will generally have to behave as though “is caused” is part of its content. The key point for Kant is that “is caused” is not strictly derivable from “temporal event” and, so, in that sense, is not part of its contents. Of course not all coordinate concepts will be counted as part of grasping or mastering the relevant concept. We will return to this issue in chapter six.

28 Kevin Schilbrack, “Religions: Are There Any?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78/4: 1126–27 (original emphasis).

31 Elsewhere Brandom comments that Kant’s achievement is to make the issue “the normative grip concepts have on us, not our grip on them” (Tales of the Mighty Dead, 30). Put in these terms the question is whether, in the case of the a priori concepts that interest Kant, the grip is so tight as to leave no room for normativity. I take up this question in chapter five.

32 Putnam later came to criticize his modified essentialism as “incoherent,” though not for Kantian reasons (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [New York: RKP, 1978], 125).

33 Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion, 90; Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 121ff.

1 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason [1788], in trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, Practical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 244; Ak. 5: 129. This formula is repeated in Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 343; Ak. 5: 481; Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) in trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni, Religion and Rational Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 177; Ak. 6: 154; Metaphysics of Morals (1797), in Practical Philosophy, 599; Ak. 6: 487; The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), in Religion and Rational Theology, 262; Ak. 7: 36.

3 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007); Richard Bernstein, “The Secular–Religious Divide: Kant’s Legacy,” Social Research 76/4 (Winter 2009), 1039. For Taylor, Kant’s subordination of God to duty has contributed to a characteristic form of malaise, a “flattening of human motivation”—“the sense that the modern notion of order involves an eclipse of the human potential for moral ascent” (311–12). Bernstein finds more to like in Kant’s attempt to clear space for both believer and non-believer.

4 Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 148–67; Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics, 20 n.15. Of course no one sympathetic to Kant’s ethics could be tempted by the thought that morality is a form of enslavement. On the contrary, Kant’s fundamental claim is that freedom and the moral law are “reciprocal” concepts (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [1785], in Practical Philosophy, 97; Ak. 4:450). In taking myself to be subject to the moral law I am thereby committed to taking myself as free, and in taking myself to be free I am thereby committed to taking myself as subject to the moral law. Taylor makes this point in A Secular Age (311).

5 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 42; Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 2.

6 This discussion draws on Lewis White Beck, “Kant’s Theory of Definition,” The Philosophical Review, 65/2 (April 1956): 182.

7 Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), III.3.§6.

8 “If the judgment is analytic, whether negative or affirmative, its truth can always adequately be known in accordance with the principle of contradiction” (A151/B190).

10 Arthur Melnick, Kant’s Analogies of Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 168.

11 See Hilary Putnam, Representation and Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), Ch. 1.

12 Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10, 72.

13 C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1946), 161ff. I have benefitted from Melnick’s discussion of Lewis’s objection. See Kant’s Analogies of Experience, 165ff.

14 Carl Posy counts the objectivity of reference in the face of incomplete concepts as an important plank in Kant’s “humanizing program.” It is, he says, “a deep Leibnizean blasphemy.” See “Immediacy and the Birth of Reference in Kant,” in (eds. Sher and Tieszen), Between Logic and Intuition, 162. In chapter six we will return to Kant’s humanizing program in the context of the theory of meaning.

15 See Reflexionen 2994 and 2995 (Ak. 16: 231–32), and 3003 (Ak. 16: 610). The first two are included in (ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Curtis Bowman, Guyer, Frederick Rausher), Notes and Fragments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57. For discussion, see Beck, “Kant’s Theory of Definition,” 181.

16 Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason; all quotations in this paragraph from p. 177; Ak. 6: 154. Citations to the Religion will henceforth appear in the text.

17 The first three items on each list are paraphrased from the paragraphs following the definition at p. 177; the discussion of grace occurs at p. 193 (Ak. 6:174).

18 Paul Horwich mentions astrology in a related context in “Williamson’s Philosophy of Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82/2 (March 2011): 525.

19 This is the answer to the objection that says common usage is too variable to bear the weight of the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgment. Thus, C. D. Broad: “I think there are considerable difficulties involved in the notion of an analytic judgment. In the first place, to talk of the concept S begs questions. . . . May not different men have different concepts of the same term at the same time, and may not the same man have different concepts of the same term at different times? And may not some of these concepts of S contain the notion of P, and others of them not contain the notion of P?” (Kant: An Introduction ed. C. Lewy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978], 4). But it is not a matter of getting French philosophes and Prussian Rosicrucians to agree on the content of “religion.” It is a matter of finding an aspect of the world whose properties can be inquired into.

20 For a clear statement of this point, see The Critique of Practical Reason, 195; Ak. 5:68.

21 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, 52; Ak. 4:397.

22 Michalson writes that “the concept of the ethical commonwealth in fact displaces Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul,” Kant and the Problem of God, 100–101; see also Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History, esp. Part III; Byrne, Kant on God, Conclusion; and Eckart Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Ch. 5.

23 Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 42. Asad is quoting from, ed. H. Reiss, Kant: Political Writings c(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 114.

24 Kant, Practical Philosophy, 336; Ak. 8.368. Kant retains the sense and much of the wording of this passage three years later in The Conflict of the Faculties (Religion and Rational Theology, 262; Ak. 7:36).

25 Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54–55; original italics.

26 “You, see, paradoxical as it may seem, it is impossible for us to know individuals or to find any way of precisely determining the individuality of any thing except by keeping it unchanged [à moins que de la garder elle même]. For any set of circumstances could recur, with tiny differences which we would not take in” (Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, III.3.§6).

27 The Life of Reason, vol. 3, Reason in Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 5.

30 Philip L. Quinn, “Religious Diversity: Familiar Problems, Novel Opportunities,” in ed. William J. Wainwright, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 406.

32 See Simon Robertson, “A Nietzschean Critique of Obligation-Centred Moral Theory,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19/4 (2011): 563–591.

35 Ibid., 337, 338; see also 176, 271. A second example from Wilson: “Most of us are inclined to presume that we have a pretty good sense of what the property of being ice involves. . . . [However,] in theory it should be possible to supercool liquid water until it vitrifies into a non-crystalline substance of very high viscosity structurally resembling normal glassware.” Is it ice? According to Wilson, it is doubtful that “our everyday notion of ice requires—as opposed to accepts—this distinction” (pp. 55–56, original emphasis).

36 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, ed. and Intro., Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 305.

39 Ibid., 77; 208. See Godlove, “Teaching the Critics: One Route through The Elementary Forms,” in ed. Godlove, Teaching Durkheim (New York: Oxford/AAR, 2005), 119.

40 But note that the forces responsible for successful dragging—a complex and often uncooperative world and the always-insecure boundaries of our concepts—are just off-stage. For the uncooperative world, see Hans Penner’s recovery of the Buddha as a “superhuman agent,” Discovering the Buddha: Legends of the Buddha and their Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). As for the insecure boundaries: to the extent that we allow Durkheim to drag “god” to “community,” then we make room for sympathy with those who press the distinction between taking refuge in the Buddha and in the Sangha.

41 Of course it is open to us to find Kant’s definition of religion of some use in the arena of religious ethics. Thus, Susan Meld Shell notes that, in Kant’s own day, Saul Ascher apparently intended his Leviathan, oder ueber Religion in Ruecksicht des Judenthums (Berlin, 1792) “as an application of Kantian principles. Leviathan makes Judaism, rather than Christianity, the true basis for a genuinely universal moral religion.” Shell argues that Ascher established “a tradition of which Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism was a late fruit.” See Shell, “Kant and the Jewish Question,” Hebraic Political Studies 2/1 (Winter 2007): 132, 132 n.91. For a comparison of Kant and Cohen along this axis, see Robert Erlewine, Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). In a comparative context one thinks of Ronald Green, Religion and Moral Reason: A New Method for Comparative Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Religious Reason: The Rational and Moral Basis of Religious Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

43 Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 7. Another example: Tweed was “looking for a theory of religion that made sense of the religious life of transnational migrants and addressed three themes—movement, relation, and position” (Crossing and Dwelling, 5, original emphasis). I take it we are not tempted to ask whether his three or Lincoln’s four sub-concepts yield the “correct extension” of the concept.

45 William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Ch. 2, 30; Smith, Imagining Religion, 18. Ivan Strenski, “Religion, Power, and Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66/2 (summer, 1998): 358. Raymond Geuss, “On the Usefulness and Uselessness of Religious Illusions,” in (eds. Margarete Kohlenbach and Geuss) The Early Frankfurt School and Religion (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 29–42; 33.

46 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, (New York: Dover Publications), second essay §13. Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics, 7. For Kant only certain mathematical objects can be cognized without the application of general concepts. The reason is not that they are a-historical but that we construct them for ourselves. I discuss Kant’s constructivism in mathematics in “Poincaré, Kant, and the Scope of Mathematical Intuition,” The Review of Metaphysics 62/4 (2009):779–801, and “Hanna, Kantian Non-Conceptualism, and Benacerraf’s Dilemma,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19/3 (July 2011): 447–64.

47 Talal Asad, “The Idea of An Anthropology of Islam,” occasional papers, (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1986), 5.

1 Hans Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (trans.) Barbara Harshaw (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).

2 Mark C. Taylor, “Introduction” (ed. Taylor) Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15; Eric Sharpe, Understanding Religion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 46.

3 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

4 Arvind Mandair, “The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion September 74/3 (2006): 646–73. In more recent work, Mandair situates this narrative about the invention of Sikhism in a larger Hegelian context: “What Hegel bequeathed to the European scholars engaged with the study of non-European cultures was the ability to make the transition from particular to universal and yet give the impression that no transition had actually occurred” (Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation [New York: Columbia University Press, 2009], 157).

5 Markus Dressler, “Religio-Secular Metamorphoses: The Re-Making of Turkish Alevism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76/2 (June 2008): 282, original emphasis.

6 For criticism of Masuzawa as in effect inventing the invention of world religions, see, for example, Anne E. Monius, “Fighting Words on ‘World Religions’,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 34/1 (Winter 2006) http://www.hds.harvard.edu/news/bulletin_mag/articles/34-1_monius.html; Alan Segal, “Review of The Invention of World Religions,” Journal of Religion, 87/1 (January 2007): 146–48.

7 For example, Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Hindus and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

8 Daniel Dubuisson, “Response to Russell T. McCutcheon,” 173–74, in eds. Steven Engler and Dean Miller, “Review Symposium: Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion,” Religion 36 (2006): 119–78. Dubuisson is citing Kant, Critique de la raison pure. trans. A. Tremesaygues and B. Pacaud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), 468. The Cambridge translation reads: “In such a way the idea is only a heuristic and not an ostensive concept; and it shows not how an object is constituted but how, under the guidance of that concept, we ought to seek after the constitution and connection of objects of experience in general” (A671/B699, original emphasis).

9 Philip Kitcher, “Projecting the Order of Nature,” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Patricia Kitcher (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 222.

10 Martin Bondeli, “Zu Kants Behauptung der Unentbehrlichkeit der Vernunftideen,” Kant-Studien 87/2 (1996): 166–83; Béatrice Longuenesse, “The Transcendental Ideal and the Unity of the Critical System,” in (ed.) Hoke Robinson, Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress, vol. 1, part 3 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995), 521–37.

11 Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 436; Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Why Must there be a Transcendental Deduction in Kant’s Critique of Judgment?,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three “Critiques” and the “Opus Postumum,” ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 169ff.; Longuenesse, Ibid.; Angelica Nuzzo, Kant and the Unity of Reason (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 67 (177–78).

12 Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 57ff.

13 Paul Abela, Kant’s Empirical Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 5; Mario Caimi, “Über eine wenig beachtete Deduktion der regulativen Ideen,” Kant-Studien 86/3 (1995): 308–20; Reinhard Brandt, “The Deductions in the Critique of Judgment: Comments on Hampshire and Horstmann,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, 180–81; Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Reason and the Practice of Science,” in (ed.) Paul Guyer, The Cambridge Companion to Kant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 228–48.

14 Michael Friedman, “Regulative and Constitutive,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 30/S1 (Spring 1992): 73–102, and, “Philosophical Naturalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71/2 (November 1997): 5–21.

15 Until recently, English-speaking commentators have tended to favor this limitation, as, for example: A. C. Ewing, “The Message of Kant,” Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6/21 (January 1931): 43–55; Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Dialectic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 276. Robert Pippen makes the necessity of assuming systematicity “conditional” on “the desire for a more integrated and unified system of knowledge than can be provided by the understanding alone,” Kant’s Theory of Form (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 210; Jay F. Rosenberg finds in the Dialectic “at best a subsidiary organizing function,” Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Oxford, 2005), 297.

16 At A87/B119–20 Kant says he has shown the objective validity of the concepts of space and time by way of a transcendental deduction, but he goes on to make clear that, in this context, a transcendental deduction does not have the burden—as, in the case of the categories, it does—of showing the objectivity of what might be taken to be merely subjective rules of thought.

17 In a Kantian context talk of input as contrasted to output may seem out of place, since my reflection on my own experience requires conformity to the rules of experience as much as my reflection on anything else. Thus, as Barry Stroud puts it, “in my own case I have nothing but ‘output’ to work with” (“The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, VI, eds. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., Howard K. Wettstein [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981], 464). Strictly, then, talk of input for Kant is just talk of the immediacy of the relation between thought and its object. We will return, in chapter four, to the question of how to construe this sense of immediacy. It will be important in sorting out the issues between Kant and Schleiermacher.

18 Dubuisson, “Response to Ann Taves,” in eds. Engler and Miller, “Review symposium: Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion,” 170.

22 Kant repeats this thought-experiment involving the failure of material resemblance in the first and second Introductions to the Critique of the Power of Judgment, but without the spatial theory of concepts to, as I am arguing, back it up (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16–17 and 72, respectively; Ak. 20: 213 and 5: 185–86. This means that on the line I am taking here, the third Critique does not represent, as is sometimes argued, an advance over the first on these issues—on the contrary. I return to this point at the end of this chapter.

23 Horstmann makes this point, “Die Idee der systematischen Einheit: Der Anhang zur transzendentalen Dialektik in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” in (ed.) Horstmann, Bausteine kritischer Philosophie (Frankfurt: Philo, 1997), 128.

24 Abela, Kant’s Empirical Realism, 287; for another version of this claim, see Brandt, “The Deductions in the Critique of Judgment,” 180–81.

25 Beatrice Longuenesse reads the regulative thrust of the Appendix to the Dialectic as an early attempt to make the transition from the theoretical to the practical use of reason (“The Transcendental Ideal and Unity of the Critical System,” 535). I have been arguing that the advance made in the Appendix lies in its contributing material conditions (namely, the principles of homogeneity, specificity, and continuity) to what can only then advance from a formal to a sufficient criterion of empirical truth.

26 And again, A787/B815: “In the case of transcendental propositions . . . we always start from one concept only, and assert the synthetic condition of the possibility of the object in accordance with this concept.” In the case of systematic unity the point is precisely that we cannot make this assertion; for all we know, objects may continue to strike us through the forms of space and time but fail of material resemblance. Mario Caimi sees Kant arguing in the Appendix from the unavoidability of the assumption of systematicity to its justification: “Die Berechtigung der Annahme liegt in ihrer Notwendigkeit. In dieser Rechtfertigung besteht die transzendentale Deduktion der Ideen” (“Über eine wenig beachtete Deduktion der regulativen Ideen,” Kant-Studien 86/3: 315). I can find no such argument. Indeed, Kant’s distinction between constitutive and regulative depends on keeping them separate.

27 Wartenberg, “Reason and the Practice of Science,” 232–33. His claim that the principle of systematic unity is a piece of transcendental knowledge is all the more puzzling since he at the same time recognizes that it cannot be proved a priori (237). He recognizes too that a central challenge to his reading is Kant’s explicit denial that a transcendental deduction of systematic unity is possible (in the passage with which we began, A663–64/B691–92). But it is again puzzling why he does not address this passage, but rather one in which Kant is referring to the three transcendental ideas: self, world and God. For further discussion of Kant’s inconstant use of “transcendental,” see Horstmann, “Why Must There be a Transcendental Deduction?,” 168ff.

28 Kitcher, “Projecting the Order of Nature,” 236. Kitcher says the regulative principles “complete” the Second Analogy, but it is not clear from this paper whether he thinks they do so in such a way as to undermine Kant’s distinction between constitutive and regulative. The Second Analogy argues on a priori grounds from the necessary advance of time, from earlier to later, to the necessary connection between events in time. But the discovery of particular causal laws seems to require experienced regularities. Kitcher’s point is that the sifting through of these regularities will rely crucially on the heuristic use of the regulative principles: “Certain claims come to be regarded as lawlike because they play a particular role in the systematization of belief.” While the nod to experience may limit the scope of Kant’s “reply” to Hume, it does not seem to me to threaten the basic result of the Second Analogy. For discussion, see Melnick, “The Second Analogy,” in (ed.) Graham Bird, A Companion to Kant (New York: Blackwell, 2006), 169–192.

31 McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, 133–34; Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Ch. 1.

33 Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10.

34 Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 20–21.

1 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 25.

3 See B. A. Gerrish’s review of George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1984), The Journal of Religion 68/1 (1988): 87–92; more recently, Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order, and Theodore Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition, Again (Or, ‘We Remain Bound to the Earth’),” in (eds.) Brent Sockness and Wilhelm Gräb, Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 40–50.

4 Wayne Proudfoot, “Immediacy and Intentionality in the Feeling of Absolute Dependence,” in Sockness and Gräb, Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology, 28.

5 For a guide to the broader literature, see York H. Gunther (ed.), Essays on Non-conceptual Content (Boston: MIT, 2008), 8ff. For the Kantian literature, see (ed. and Introduction Dietmar Heidemann), Kant and Non-conceptual Content, a special issue of International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19/3 (July 2011). In these paragraphs I am following Melnick, “Kant’s Theory of Space as a Form of Intuition,” in Richard Kennington (ed.), The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 39–56.

6 These arguments are contained in the so-called “Metaphysical Exposition” of the concept of space in the Critique of Pure Reason (A22-25/B37–40). I discuss the arguments of the Metaphysical Exposition in greater detail in “Poincaré, Kant, and the Scope of Mathematical Intuition,” Review of Metaphysics 62/4 (June 2009): 779–806. As is well known, Kant runs together the question whether space is an a priori form of intuition with the question whether there are a priori constraints on its applied geometry. In particular, he wrongly thinks he can give a priori arguments to show that the geometry of space must be Euclidean. In this article, I join others in pointing out that the arguments of the Metaphysical Expositions can be split off from what Kant wrongly takes to be their Euclidean consequences.

8 Robert Hanna, “Beyond the Myth of the Myth: A Kantian Theory of Non-Conceptual Content,” Kant and Non-conceptual Content, 389, original emphasis. Cf., Heidemann’s Introduction for a survey of the broader landscape.

9 Manley Thompson, “Singular Terms and Intuitions in Kant’s Epistemology,” 87. This paragraph follows my discussion in “Hanna, Kantian-Nonconceptualism, and Benaceraff’s Dilemma,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19/3 (July 2011), 259–60.

11 See Thompson, “Things in Themselves,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 57/1 (September 1983): 47 n.19.

12 Quotations from the first edition of On Religion follow the Richard Crouter translation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1996); Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGA), edited Günter Meckenstock et al., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980-; Band 2 Schriften aus der Berliner Zeit 1796–1799, ed. Meckenstock (1984). References appear in the text as (OR, Crouter), followed by the KGA pagination in brackets.

13 Theodore Vial, “Anschauung and Intuition Again,” 47; Proudfoot, “Immediacy and Intentionality in the Feeling of Absolute Dependence,” 29.

14 Several sentences later we come to the famous line, “To accept everything individual as a part of the whole and everything limited as a representation of the infinite is religion” [und so alles Einzelne als einen Theil des Ganzen, alles Beschränkte als eine Darstellung des Unendlichen hinnehmen, das ist Religion] (OR, Crouter, 25 [214]). Peter Grove, commenting on Schleiermacher’s use of Darstellung in this passage, recommends replacing Crouter’s “representation” with “presentation”—but this does not affect the present point, which is that Schleiermacher gives Darstellung a causal context and, thereby, a usage foreign to Kant. See Grove, “Symbolism in Schleiermacher’s Theory of Religion,” in (eds.) Sockness and Gräb, Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology, 111.

15 Manfred Frank, “Metaphysical foundations: a look at Schleiermacher’s Dialectic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 28.

18 McDowell, Mind and World, 24ff. As we have seen, a Kantian Darstellung is not supposed to provide justification for particular claims about particular objects in the world. It is only supposed to legitimize our continued contact with objects of experience as inquiry proceeds. In Hanna’s terms, we are poised, but not more than poised, for success.

19 Van A. Harvey, “On the New Edition of Schleiermacher’s Address on Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 39 (December 1971): 449.

20 Richard Crouter, “Introduction,” in Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 65.

22 W. V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 83.

23 Quotations from the 1831 edition of the Speeches follow the John Oman translation (New York: Harper, 1958); Band 12 Über die Religion (2.-)4. Auflage. Monologen (2.-) 4. Auflage, ed. Meckenstock (1995). References appear in the text as (OR, Oman), followed by the KGA pagination in brackets.

25 E.g., “Intuition is and always remains something individual, set apart, the immediate perception, nothing more. To bind it and to incorporate it into a whole is once more the business not of sense but of abstract thought. The same is true of religion; it stops with the immediate experiences of the existence and action of the universe, with the individual intuitions and feelings; each of these is a self-contained work without connection with others or dependence upon them” (OR, Crouter, 105 [215]). Vial argues that Schleiermacher’s use of “intuition” is not “pre-linguistic” (“Anschauung and Intuition,” 46)—but passages such as this one are hard to square with that claim. The problem is that natural language seems to require general terms. We do not need to subscribe to Kant’s spatial theory of concepts to recognize that command over the English word “apple” brings with it the knowledge that the word is in principle applicable to more than one object; “connection with others” is then required of linguistic representations. Such passages as this seem to be denying this function to intuition. In that narrow respect Schleiermacher follows Kant’s usage.

27 Proudfoot, “Immediacy and Intentionality in the Feeling of Absolute Dependence,” 37.

31 It is of course open to Schleiermacher to abandon the first-person point of view for a thoroughgoing naturalism. And, in fact, Dole ably documents what he calls the “social dimension of Schleiermacher’s thought on religion” (Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order, 115). Dole points out that, later in the Speeches and also in subsequent work, Schleiermacher “offers an account of religious socialization that locates the origin of inward religion . . . in outward religion” (113, original emphasis). Dole apparently sees, as I do not, a way to harmonize the irreducibly first-person form of the Second Speech with third-person (social) form of the Fourth and Fifth. In any case, with the loss of the first-person point of view goes any compelling connection between Kant and Schleiermacher on the subject of non-conceptual content as well as the force of Proudfoot’s original criticisms in Religious Experience.

36 Writing of McDowell’s suggestion with this criticism in mind, Michael Friedman asks, “Are we not here very close indeed to the traditional idealist doctrine that the world to which our thought relates is a creature of our own conceptualization?” See, “Exorcizing the Philosophical Tradition,” in (ed.) Nicholas H. Smith, Reading McDowell: On Mind and World (New York: Routledge, 2002), 46. In his response to Friedman, McDowell remarks that, “I do not need to say anything about Kant’s idea that our sensibility has its own a priori form” (272). I am arguing in this chapter that, in fact, decisive emphasis should go on Kant’s claim that sensibility has its own a priori form.

39 Quotations from The Christian Faith follow the H. R. Macintosh and James S. Stewart translation of the second edition (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1976); Band 13/1+2 Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt ed., Rolf Schäfer (2003). References appear in the text, followed by the KGA pagination in brackets.

40 Robert Adams, “Faith and Religious Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 38, original emphasis.

41 Normunds Titans, Overcoming History of Philosophy: The Contribution of Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lewiston: Edwin Mellin Press, 2006), 136.

42 Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 32, and “Immediacy and Intentionality in the Feeling of Absolute Dependence,” 31.

46 Arthur Melnick, “The Consistency of Kant’s Theory of Space and Time,” in his Themes in Kant’s Metaphysics and Ethics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 11.

47 A609/B637. For discussion, see Dawn DeVries and Gerrish, “Providence and Grace: Schleiermacher on Justification and Election,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, 193. Dole comments that “Because the divine causality is simple and eternal, it does not operate at discrete locations within the natural order, but rather operates upon that order as a whole.” Kant’s point is that the last clause takes us away from the only context in which we can attach any sense to “operates.” See Dole, “Schleiermacher and Religious Naturalism,” in (eds.) Sockness and Gräb, Schleiermacher, the Study of Religion, and the Future of Theology, 18.

48 In contemporary terms, Schleiermacher appears to be articulating a “property dualism” in theology along the lines of Davidson’s in the philosophy of mind. Divine causality (mental events) is (are) irreducible to natural causality (physical events), but neither are the two different things. Jaegwon Kim, among others, brings the charge of epiphenomenalism against Davidson.

1 Ernst Troeltsch, “Empiricism and Platonism in the Philosophy of Religion: To the Memory of William James,” The Harvard Theological Review 5/4 (October 1912): 406, 418; John McDowell, Mind and World, 98; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), x; Massimo Rosati, Ritual and the Sacred: A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 21ff.

3 Adam B. Seligman, Modernity’s Wager (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 36–37.

6 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 354. Béatrice Longueness cites a range of the “disembodied” criticism in “Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of One’s Own Body: Variations on a Kantian Theme,” Philosophical Topics 34/1–2 (Spring and Fall 2006), 306 n.2.

7 Richard Rorty, “Some inconsistencies in James’s Varieties,” in (ed.) Wayne Proudfoot, William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing the Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 93.

9 Manley Thompson, “Quine’s Theory of Knowledge,” in (eds.) Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 549. For an informed discussion of James’s use of introspection, see Gerald E. Myers, “Pragmatism and Introspective Psychology,” in (ed.) Ruth Anna Putnam, The Cambridge Companion to William James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11–24. Myers notes that, in The Principles of Psychology, James had expressly denied infallibility and privileged access.

10 James, Varieties, 34 (original italics). Later, in the same spirit, James writes that “religious experience spontaneously engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds and metaphysical theologies” (342).

11 Proudfoot, “Pragmatism and ‘an Unseen Order’ in Varieties,” in William James and a Science of Religions, 41. Proudfoot cites David A. Hollinger, “‘Damned for God’s Glory’: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture,” same volume, 9–30. It is not clear to me how to criticize the definition itself. James advertises it as “arbitrary,” is open with us about its content, and does not stray too far from common usage—which, after all, was then and is now far from homogeneous. For discussion, see Richard King, “Asian Religions and Mysticism: The Legacy of William James in the Study of Religions,” in (ed.) Jeremy Carrette, William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Routledge, 2005), 112.

12 Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 24, original italics.

13 Thus, Ruth Anna Putnam, “Varieties of Experience and Pluralities of Perspective,” in William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience, 153: “James does not deny the phenomenon of collective religious life, but he sees it as a secondary phenomenon. He underestimates, perhaps, the role that religious institutions, lives lived in religious communities, play in preparing the ground from which religious experience springs.”

14 I say James gives this impression because, if we focus on what he does in Varieties rather than on what he says, it becomes harder to detect even this much Cartesian commitment. Against James’s official line, Rorty would rather say that James’s items of introspection “are all generated by the attempts of human individuals and communities to solve their problems, to lead happier lives” (“Some Inconsistencies in James’s Varieties,” 93). But in chapter after chapter James comes close to this. He conducts his inquiry by asking about the “fruits for life” of this or that “religious temper.” I thank Brian Mahan for making this clear to me.

17 Galen Strawson, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52.

18 Descartes, “Reply to the Second Set of Objections,” in (trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross) The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 38.

21 James, Varieties, 360. Longueness takes a different route to a position close to the one I am advocating: “For Kant, consciousness of oneself as the subject of thought is not and cannot be consciousness of oneself as an object, or at least not an object individuated as an existing thing,” “Self-Consciousness and Consciousness of One’s Own Body,” 284.

22 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (ed. Charles W. Morris) (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1932), 174.

23 James, Varieties, 399–400 (original italics). The basic formula survives the entire last decade of James’s life, reappearing in A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 [1909]), 139.

24 Wayne Proudfoot, “Pragmatism and an ‘Unseen Order’ in Varieties,” in Proudfoot, William James and a Science of Religions, 44.

25 Rorty, “Some Inconsistencies,” 87–88, quoting John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 85.

26 Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 33. All italics from Reason in Philosophy are original.

32 Clinton Tolley argues against normative interpretations of the logical laws on the grounds that the prospect of failure is strictly incoherent. See “Kant on the Nature of Logical Laws,” Philosophical Topics 34/1–2 (Spring and Fall 2006): 371–407. I have benefitted from his discussion.

33 I am leaving untouched many issues in Brandom’s treatment of Kant in Reason and Philosophy. He does of course see that Kant gives the unity of apperception presuppositional status in his account of empirical cognition. He writes that,

It is because of this dimension of conceptual contentfulness that the synthetic unity of apperception deserves to count as a transcendental unity of apperception. For in Kant’s usage, transcendental logic differs from general logic in addressing the content, and not just the form, of judgments, in the sense of their representation of, or reference . . . to, objects. (41)

Here Brandom is apparently using “transcendental” in a different sense than does Kant in the first Critique. Transcendental logic does reach out to objects; in chapter four, that fact was crucial in charting Schleiermacher’s refusal to follow Kant in distinguishing between an exhibited and an inferred necessity. But, as we saw in discussing the regulative principles (chapter three, section II), and in our discussion here of the unity of apperception, Kant reserves “transcendental” for a priori knowledge that makes possible further a priori knowledge. Brandom seems to be using it to connote only a presupposition of empirical cognition. Put into the context of the first Critique, the kind of epistemic advice Brandom associates with constructing a unity of apperception (Integrate!, Weed out!, Justify!, etc.), looks like a regulative maxim. Ironically, again, as we have seen, this is just the context in which Kant denies transcendental status.

34 Taylor, A Secular Age, 489. Taylor is quoting Sir George Trevelyan, as cited in Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 21.

35 Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Introduction, section II; Godlove, Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief: The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 2.

36 “If society is to live . . . there is a minimum of logical conformity which it cannot do without. Thus, in order to prevent dissidence, society weighs on its members with all its authority. Does a mind ostensibly transgress these norms of all thought? Society no longer considers it a human mind in the full sense of the word, and treats it accordingly” (Elementary Forms, 16; translation emended).

37 Krister Stendahl, Paul among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (London: Fortress Press, 1976), 16–17; Rosati, Ritual and the Sacred, 8.

38 Again, consider Seligman’s work on the early Puritan community. He writes persuasively, as have others, of “a new stress on inward piety and the indwelling of grace, as opposed to its more institutionalized realization and in a more direct relation to the ultimate sources of cultural meaning and order,” Innerworldly Individualism: Charismatic Community and Its Institutionalization (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 33. I have been emphasizing that, for Kant, all of these changes take place (if they take place) on the empirical side of the house. Placing them there depends on no point of theology or social theory. Let us imagine a conception of piety inseparable from institutional realization; it too must make room for a subject capable of claiming that institutional context as its own. Elsewhere Seligman writes of the self that it “can be lost or collapsed in another direction as well. It can collapse not only into the transcendent, but also into the immanent. It can collapse into the social” (“Ritual, the Self, and Society,” Social Research 76/4 [winter 2009]: 1074). No doubt. But even idle chatter must be claimed as such.

39 Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 345.

1 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Is it Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?,” Modern Theology 14/1 ( January 1998): 2.

2 Michael Williams, “Pragmatism, Minimalism, Expressivism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 18/3 (2010): 318.

5 What in the Jäsche Logic Kant calls “coordinate” concepts. For discussion, see chapter one, note 25.

6 Brandom, Making it Explicit; Huw Price, “Naturalism without Representationalism”, in Mario Caro and David Macarthur, Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and David Macarthur and Huw Price, “Pragmatism and the Global Challenge,” in Cheryl Misak, New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See especially the title essays, “Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth” and “Representation, Social Practice and Truth.” All as cited in Williams, “Pragmatism, Minimalism, Expressivism,” 330.

7 At least by one standard Kant outdoes such pragmatists as Peirce (truth as what is fated to be believed at the end of inquiry) or James (what solves problems) by refusing to elide the distinction between truth and justification.

8 Posy, “Immediacy and the Birth of Reference in Kant,” in (eds. Sher and Tiesen), Between Logic and Intuition, 168.

9 (A239/B298) again: “For every concept we demand, first, the logical form of a concept (of thinking) in general, and then, second, the possibility of giving it an object to which it is to be related. Without this latter it has no sense, and is entirely empty of content”.

13 Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance,”157. Proudfoot discusses Rorty’s suggestion in “Religious Belief and Naturalism,” in ed. Nancy Frankenberry, Radical Interpretations in Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88.

14 Rorty, “Comments on Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78/2 ( June 2010): 423.

15 Jeffrey Stout, “Rorty on Religion and Politics,” in (eds. Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn) The Philosophy of Richard Rorty (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 536.

17 “Response by Jeffrey Stout,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78/2 ( June 2010): 435.

19 I take it Rorty has the issue of objectivity in mind in remarking that he and Stout read chapter eight of Making It Explicit very differently (“Comments on Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition,” 443). The underlying question, one arising equally for Stout, Rorty, and Brandom, is whether Brandom is trying to extract the “referential–representational” function of language out of its “inferential–expressive” dimension. Thus, McDowell: “What I urge against Brandom is that we cannot make sense of discourse-governing social norms prior to and independent of object purport. Answerability to each other in discourse is not a self-standing foundation on which we could construct a derivative account of how talk and thought are directed at reality” (“Reply to Robert B. Pippin,” in [ed. Nicholas H. Smith], Reading McDowell: On Mind and World [New York: Routledge, 2002], 275).

21 Here I am influenced by Ferreira, “Hope, virtue, and the postulate of God,” 1–24. “On [Kant’s] terms a concept gains ‘objective reality’ and an object gains ‘real possibility’ by its connection with the moral enterprise – one could say that the moral law is the stand-in for the sensible intuition that is lacking” (9).

22 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 240 (original emphasis); Ak. 5:125. What Peter Byrne says strikes me as right: “There is in the Critical treatment of God a passage of thought of the following form: ‘try to construe talk of God the “normal” way and its meaning evaporates in our hands; to restore the meaning re-interpret it in a radically new (and subjectivist) way.’ This is to say that he is a radical revisionist in the philosophy of God: his own account of the limits of knowledge, thought and meaning block off traditional uses of the God-concept, so he must construct a new understanding of what it means to talk of God” (Kant on God [Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007], 1). I hesitate only over “subjectivist,” which needs to be robust enough to accommodate the real and not merely the logical possibility of the existence of God. See above, note 21.

23 This, I think, is where Wolterstorff goes wrong: “As to intuitions, Kant assumes that the intuitional content of our mental life consists entirely of mental representations produced in us by reality; intuitions are inputs” (“Is it Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?,” 17).

25 In chapter one, section II, we identified a purely epistemological motivation for Kant’s holism, namely, his insistence that existence can be established only through empirical intuition.

26 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 1998), 79.

27 Michael L. Monheit, “The Ambition for an Illustrious Name: Humanism, Patronage, and Calvin’s Doctrine of the Calling,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 23/2 (Summer, 1992): 278.

29 Philip Benedict, “The Historiography of Continental Calvinism,” in (eds. Hartmut Lehmann and Gunter Ross), Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (New York: Cambridge, 1993), 315.

30 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Mentor, 1954, 13th printing), 76–77.

32 Paul Seaton, “Liberation from the Weberian Iron Cage: Pierre Manent on Max Weber,” Perspectives on Political Science 31/3 (2002): 167.

38 “Teaching the Critics: One Route through the Elementary Forms,” in (ed. Godlove) Teaching Durkheim (New York: AAR/Oxford University Press, 2005), 107–30.

39 I am sympathetic with Fodor and Lepore’s complaint that Brandom “seems to want to be on both sides of the analytic/synthetic distinction at the same time. On the one hand, he would like to agree with Quine that there’s no principled difference between empirical and conceptual truth; but, on the other hand, he wants to endorse the idea that nomological necessities are concept constitutive” (681). Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore, “Brandom Beleaguered,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74/3 (May 2007): 677–91. Following Kant, I am urging that partisans of the analytic/synthetic distinction keep to conceptual decomposition.

40 Davidson, “Thought and Talk,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 168. For the earlier thesis, see also, “Rational Animals” (1982), reprinted in Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (New York: Oxford, 2001), 95–106.

41 Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation Interpreted,” in (ed. James E. Tomberlin) Philosophical Perspectives, 8: Logic and Language (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1994), 123.

42 For the earlier formulation, see Davidson, “Radical Interpretation” (1973), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford, 1984), 136; for the later his “Introduction,” to that volume, xvii, and his “Reply to Andrew Cutrofello,” in (ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn) The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 342; (342–44). I have said that (following Kant) the principle of non-contradiction governs conceptual decomposition, whereas (following Davidson) maximizing understanding governs interpretation. But Davidson can be quoted as seeming to endorse a constitutive role for the principle of non-contradiction in interpretation: “Nothing a person could say or do would count as good enough grounds for the attribution of straightforwardly and obviously contradictory belief, just as nothing could sustain an interpretation of a sincerely and literally asserted sentence as a sentence that was true if and only if D was both bald and not bald, though the words uttered may have been ‘D is bald and not bald’. It is possible to believe each of two statements without believing the conjunction of the two” (“Deception and Division,” in his Problems of Rationality [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 200). From a Kantian point of view the question is whether Davidson intends this as an a priori truth, or as a very well-insulated empirical generalization. If, as seems likely, it is the latter, then the division between them stands.

43 I am ignoring the question of what divides Davidson and Brandom on the methodology of interpretation, mainly because I think the answer is: very little. As Brandom puts it, “deontic scorekeeping is recognizably a version of the sort of interpretive process Davidson is talking about” (Tales of the Mighty Dead, 7). This is not to minimize the importance of corollary differences. See Stout, “Radical Interpretation and Pragmatism: Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom on Truth,” in Frankenberry, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 25–52.

44 For partial understanding and the “molecularism” it implies, see E. Dresner, “Holism, language acquisition, and algebraic logic,” Linguistics and Philosophy, 25 (2002): 419–52. Dresner sees therein an answer to a central question facing any version of semantic holism: if meaning is determined by overall inferential content, then a change in any constituent inference threatens to make meaning so unstable as to make interpretation impossible.

45 Mark Q. Gardiner and Steven Engler, “Semantic holism and the insider–outsider problem,” Religious Studies 48/2 (2012): 239–55; see also “Charting the map metaphor in theories of religion,” Religion 40/1 ( January 2010): 1–13.

46 Scott Davis, Believing and Acting: The Pragmatic Turn in Comparative Religion and Ethics (New York: Oxford, 2012), esp. ch. 5.

48 Nancy Frankenberry, “Pragmatism, Truth, and the Disenchantment of Subjectivity,” in (ed. Stuart E. Rosenbaum) Pragmatism and Religion: Classical Sources and Original Essays (Bloomington, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 243–64; “Religion as a ‘Mobile Army of Metaphors’,” in Frankenberry, Radical Interpretation in Religion, 171–87. Hans Penner, “Why does semantics matter to the study of religion?,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 7/2 (1995): 221–49.

49 Warren Frisina, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Toward a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), especially chapter two. Kevin Schilbrack, “The Study of Religious Belief after Donald Davidson,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 14/3–4 (2002): 334–49.

50 J. Wesley Robbins, “Donald Davidson and Religious Belief,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 17/2 (May 1996): 141–55; Godlove, Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief.

51 Davidson, “Reality without Reference,” in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 215–26.

52 Williams has shown that we can help ourselves to Davidson’s theory of interpretation (in which the constraints of holism and charity figure prominently) without committing ourselves to his formal account of meaning (an axiomatic theory which aims to give the meaning of every sentence in an object language). In earlier work in this area I did not fully appreciate this point. See Williams, “Meaning and Deflationary Truth,” The Journal of Philosophy 96/11 (Nov. 1999): 545–64.

53 As far as I am aware, Peirce first identified the tension between the denial of the complete determinability of objects and first order quantificational logic with bivalence; see Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7–8, ed. A. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), vol. 3, p. 93. I discuss these issues at greater length in “Hanna, Kantian Non-Conceptualism, and Benacerraf ’s Dilemma,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19/3 (2011): 450ff. For further discussion, see Thompson, “Peirce’s Verificationist Realism,” Review of Metaphysics, 32/1 (September 1978): 78ff.

1 Richard Bernstein, “The Secular-Religious Divide: Kant’s Legacy.” Social Research 76/4, 2009: 1036.

6 Arthur Melnick, Space, Time and Thought in Kant (Boston: Kluwer, 1989), 273. Melnick develops what he calls the “rework hypothesis” (135ff.), a “cousin to” Kemp-Smith’s “patchwork” hypothesis, according to which the 1781 Critique includes three “topically complete” books under one cover. Each “book” provides a fundamentally improved answer to the question Melnick takes to be motivating the entire project: How can thoughts refer to objects they do not produce? Melnick places passages cited in this paragraph in Kant’s “middle” view, according to which “things as they appear must also be something in themselves apart from appearing.” According to his “early” view, appearances considered in themselves “are nothing, since they are nothing but sensible representations” (157).

8 Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” in (ed. Nancy Frankenberry) Radical Interpretation in Religion, 57. Rorty cites Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” The Monist 66 (1983): 387–409. I take up some consequences of the turn toward material religion in “Saving Belief: On the New Materialism in Religious Studies,” Radical Interpretation in Religion, 1–24.

9 Kant, Opus postumum (ed., with introduction and notes, Eckhart Förster), (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 248; Ak. 21:81. Adickes dates this text between December 1801–03; see Förster, Introduction, xxvii.

10 Eckhart Förster, Kant’s Final Synthesis, 147; Bernstein, “The Secular-Religious Divide,” 1043. For discussion, see Peter Byrne, Kant on God: Exploring the Notion of the Divine in the Critical Philosophy (Cornwall, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 126, and Keith Ward, The Development of Kant’s View of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), 160. Michalson notes that the route from ethics to God had already become more difficult in the Religion. Kant there “opens up lines of thought not developed in the thinner discussion in the Foundations, yet the accounts share in common a systematic Kantian interest in the social dimensions of morality which has the force of drawing attention away from God and toward humanity’s own historical endeavors” (Kant and the Problem of God), 96.

11 Lewis White Beck, “Can Kant’s Synthetic Judgments Be Made Analytic?,” Kant-Studien 7 (1955–56): 172.

12 Michalson argues that Kant had, in the Religion, already dispatched the postulate of immortality: “One might plausibly say that the most important theological development in the Religion is the apparent superseding of the postulate of immortality by the theory of moral progress associated with the ethical commonwealth” (Kant and the Problem of God), 121; chapter five is titled “Heaven Comes to Earth.”

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