Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The semantic tradition
- 1 Kant, analysis, and pure intuition
- 2 Bolzano and the birth of semantics
- 3 Geometry, pure intuition, and the a priori
- 4 Frege's semantics and the a priori in arithmetic
- 5 Meaning and ontology
- 6 On denoting
- 7 Logic in transition
- 8 A logico-philosophical treatise
- Part II Vienna, 1925–1935
- Notes
- References
- Index
1 - Kant, analysis, and pure intuition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Editor's preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The semantic tradition
- 1 Kant, analysis, and pure intuition
- 2 Bolzano and the birth of semantics
- 3 Geometry, pure intuition, and the a priori
- 4 Frege's semantics and the a priori in arithmetic
- 5 Meaning and ontology
- 6 On denoting
- 7 Logic in transition
- 8 A logico-philosophical treatise
- Part II Vienna, 1925–1935
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
It was disastrous that Kant … held the domain of the purely logical in the narrowest sense to be adequately taken care of by the remark that it falls under the principle of contradiction. Not only did he never see how little the laws of logic are all analytic propositions in the sense laid down by his own definition, but he failed to see how little his dragging in of an evident principle for analytic propositions really helped to clear up the achievements of analytic thinking.
Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, pt. 2For better and worse, almost every philosophical development of significance since 1800 has been a response to Kant. This is especially true on the subject of a priori knowledge. The central problem of the Critique had been the a priori, and Kant had dealt with it from the complementary perspectives of judgment and experience. His “Copernican revolution” gave him a theory of experience and a non-Platonist account of the a priori. But when the Critique was well on its way, Kant discovered the notion of a synthetic a priori judgment, and he saw in this a particularly appealing way of formulating his project as that of explaining how such judgments are possible.
The constitutive dimension of Kant's theories of experience and the a priori will figure prominently in later developments. As we shall see, one of the turning points in our story will involve a Copernican turn, though the issue it concerns will be different from Kant's.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Semantic Tradition from Kant to CarnapTo the Vienna Station, pp. 7 - 21Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991