Kantian Conceptual Geography

This is a work in Kantian conceptual geography. It explores issues in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics in particular by appealing to theses drawn from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Those issues include the nature of the subjective, objective, and empirical; potential scopes of the subjective; what can (and cannot) be said about a subject-independent reality; analyticity, syntheticity, apriority, and aposteriority; constitutive principles, acquisitive principles, and empirical claims; meaning, indeterminacy, and incommensurability; logically possible versus subjectively empirical worlds; and the nature of empirical truth. Part One introduces two theses drawn from the Critique. The first, Empirical Dualism, concerns the subjective, objective, and empirical. The second, Subjective Principlism, concerns principles that might bear on the empirical. Part Two examines work of influential analytic philosophers to reveal how conceptually expansive the territory formed by Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism is. Part Three defends that territory by defending Empirical Dualism and Subjective Principlism themselves. Part Four discloses two new lands within the territory that have so far remained uncharted. The first is a Kantian account of meaning, which is shown to be superior to other accounts of meaning in the analytic literature. The second are Kantian thoughts on truth, which illuminate the nature of empirical truth itself. Finally Part Five shows how engaging in Kantian conceptual geography enriches epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics generally.

Nathaniel Goldberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington and Lee University, in Lexington, Virginia. He researches at the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language, and has an abiding interest in Kant.