NAKS is very happy to announce that Lucy Allais
has won the NAKS book prize for 2016 for her Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and his Realism.
Lucy Allais is jointly appointed as Henry Allison
Chair of the History of Philosophy at the University of San Diego, California
and Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg (Wits). She did her undergraduate degree at Wits and post graduate
degrees in Oxford. Her work on Kant has focussed on his transcendental idealism
and issues to do with conceptualism in his epistemology, though she has also
published on Kant on giving to beggars and on Kant’s racism. She also works on
forgiveness as well as related issues to do with punishmentShe is currently
working on Kant’s account of free will and the relation between this and issues
to do with moral psychology and forgiveness. Her articles include ‘Kant,
Non-Conceptual Content and the Representation of Space,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2009, 47, no. 3, pp 383–413, “Kant’s Idealism and the Secondary Quality Analogy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy,
vol. 45, no. 3, 2007, pp 459-84, “Wiping
the slate clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs, 2008, 36(1) pp 33–68, “Retributive Justice, Restorative
Justice, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 39 (4),
2011 and “Freedom and
Forgiveness” Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, volume 2 edited by Neal
Tognazzini and David Shoemaker, 2014.
Manifest
Reality presents an
interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism. One its central aims is to
find a way of understanding Kant’s position that does justice to his being an idealist—his holding that physical
objects in space and time depend on our minds in some sense and to some
extent—at the same time as accommodating his explicit rejection of
understanding this mind-dependence as anything like Berkelean idealism which
sees physical objects as existing as constructions out of what exists merely in
the mind. Further, the book aims to do this in a way that accommodates Kant’s
holding that the things that appear to us have a way they are in themselves,
independently of us, that grounds the way they appear to us, and which we
cannot cognize. Finally, it aims to present an interpretation that illuminates
the connections between transcendental idealism and Kant’s account of
cognition, with respect to both empirical and metaphysical cognition. The book
is divided into three parts. The first part goes through the basic textual
claims Kant makes concerning transcendental idealism, as well as summarizing
and responding to the main competing interpretations in the literature. Allais
argues that the abundance of apparent textual evidence as well as philosophical
considerations that can be appealed to in support of opposing interpretative
extremes, as well as the fact that both have serious problems, seems to keep
the literature in a state of oscillation between them. Many extreme idealist
interpreters are rightly dissatisfied with deflationary readings that cannot do
justice to the parts of the text in which Kant expresses his idealism; they
frequently seem to assume that the only way to do justice to these texts is
through seeing Kant as a phenomenalist. On the other hand, many deflationary
and bare empirical realist interpreters are rightly dissatisfied with
interpretations that see Kant as a phenomenalist, and from this they conclude
that he is not an idealist. She argues
that to reach a stable interpretation we need an account of idealism that is
not phenomenalist and that does justice to Kant’s empirical realism, and we
need an account of what it means to say that things have a way they are in
themselves which does not involve a commitment to intelligibilia.
The second part of the book presents Allais’s
positive account of the nature of the mind-dependence of Kantian appearances,
as well as her account of Kant’s argument for the position. It also presents,
as a central part of her approach, her way of understanding Kant’s central
notion of intuition, the role intuition plays in cognition, and the relation
between this and Kant’s idealism. The third part of the book presents Allais’s
reading of Kant’s commitment to there being a way things are in themselves and
the relation between this and his idealism about appearances as well as his empirical
realism. She presents an account of his argument in the Transcendental
Deduction of the Categories, one part of which she sees as compatible with
realism, and as well as an account of the relation between Kant’s idealism and
his explanation of the possibility of metaphysics. She sees the Deduction as
containing an epistemological argument for the claim that applying the
categories is a condition of referential empirical concept application. Kant
then is able to convert this conditional claim about those objects we can
cognize to a claim about all objects in space and time because he has already
established that objects in space and time are limited to the conditions of our
cognizing them. Thus, on her reading of the argument, transcendental idealism
is not an explanation of cognition of synthetic a priori judgments in general. Rather, the explanation of the
possibility of synthetic a priori
cognition in geometry is a priori
intuition. The idea of a priori
intuition, and the role it plays in organising empirical intuition, leads to
transcendental idealism. This has implications for how we understand the
idealism, because it enables us to take seriously the role of the idealism in
explaining the possibility of metaphysics without taking the explanation to be
that it is because our minds ‘make’ objects in certain ways that we can know a priori claims about objects. Rather,
the synthetic a priori claims are
established as conditional claims about the conditions of empirical cognition;
they are converted into unconditional claims about spatio-temporal objects once
we grant that spatio-temporal objects do not exist independent of the
possibility of our cognizing them.
