Publications
Journal Articles
- A Buddhist Case for Ontological Idealism: Two Arguments Against Mind-Independent Existence in Xuanzang’s Cheng Weishi Lun, PhilArchive
- Susan Sontag and Our Duties Towards Photographs of Violence and Suffering, PhilArchive
- The Early Development of Kant's Practical Notion of Belief, PhilArchive
- On the Epistemic Instrumentalist Solution to the Combinatorial Problem, PhilArchive
- Kant on Propositional Content and Knowledge, PhilArchive
Book Chapters
- Hegelian Sufficientarianism and Limitarianism as an Anti-Colonial Theory of Justice (with Joshua Folkerts),
- On the Secondary Quality Analogy,
- Hegel's Justification of Private Property, Penultimate Draft
Book Reviews
- Review of Paul Morrow, Seeing Atrocities: Ethics for Visual Encounters with Intolerable Harms,
- Review of Till Hoeppner, Urteil und Anschauung: Kants metaphysische Deduktion der Kategorien,
- Review of Gabriele Gava, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics,
Dissertation
Towards a Hybrid Reading of Kant's Transcendental Idealism
In my dissertation, I propose a novel reading of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which I call the hybrid reading. Roughly put, transcendental idealism is the doctrine that the objects we can experience, which Kant calls appearances, are in some way mind-dependent, and that we cannot know how things are in themselves. Current interpretations of this doctrine fall into two main camps. According to metaphysical readings, transcendental idealism amounts to the thesis that reality has a hierarchical structure: things in themselves are what are ultimately real, while appearances are less real. Epistemic readings, by contrast, take this doctrine to merely highlight the fact that there are certain a priori conditions under which alone cognition is possible for us, and that we cannot cognize or know anything about things that do not conform to those conditions.
My hybrid reading steers a middle course between these two camps by combining elements from both. Like metaphysical readers, I believe that Kant's idealism offers a hierarchical picture of reality. More specifically, I argue in agreement with metaphysical readings that appearances and things in themselves are two distinct sets of beings, that Kant is committed to the existence of things in themselves as what grounds appearances, and that Kant takes appearances to depend on us for their existence. I agree with epistemic readers, however, that Kant takes the conditions of human cognition – space, time, and the categories – to be central to how we describe the world. As I read him, Kant believes that any human metaphysical endeavor is subject to the limit of the conditions of our cognition and cannot reach how the world really is from the “God’s Eye” point of view. This is because, for Kant, we can only think about uncognizable things in themselves by analogy with objects of possible experience, which means that we can think about nothing independently of the constraint of our forms of cognition. I further argue that, while Kant is committed to the existence of things in themselves, this commitment is not knowledge, but rather a form of belief (Glauben) justified by the interests of our reason. In short, on my reading, Kant’s transcendental idealism amounts to a radically anthropocentric metaphysics: it includes both a theory of first-order metaphysics and a meta-metaphysical account of how this metaphysics is constrained by the conditions of our cognition and the interests of our reason.
This dissertation is organized around four questions that are central to the debate between metaphysical and epistemic readers: (1) whether Kant takes appearances and things in themselves to be two distinct sets of beings; (2) whether he regards things in themselves to be ultimately real from the “God’s Eye” point of view; (3) whether he allows any knowledge of things in themselves; and (4) whether he takes our empirical objects to be mind-dependent. After surveying how metaphysical and epistemic readers answer these questions, I present my own answers to them in chapters 2 to 5 respectively. In Chapter 2, I show that Kant takes appearances and things in themselves to be two distinct sets of beings by arguing against Henry Allison’s view to the contrary. In Chapter 3, I argue against the metaphysical readers’ view that things in themselves are how the world ultimately is from the “God’s Eye” point of view. Instead, I suggest that they are merely how we think about the mind-independent world underlying appearances, and all our thinking is fundamentally constrained by the forms of our cognition. In Chapter 4, I show that Kant denies that we can have knowledge (Wissen) of the existence of things in themselves, even though he allows us to have practically justified belief, or Glaube, about this. Finally, in chapter 5, I argue that appearances are partially mind-dependent intentional objects of our experience: they depend on us for their form, but their matter is mind-independent.
In Progress
Under Review
- A paper on Kant's doctrine of Noumenal Ignorance draft available upon request
In Progress
- Kant on the Inescapability of the Human Standpoint and the Limit of Metaphysics draft available upon request
- Kant's Theory of Reasons for Belief draft available upon request
- Hegel's Implicit Solution to the Problem of Poverty
- Argument from Ignorance and Buddhist Epistemological Pragmatism
- Kant on Sense and Reference
- Kant on Sinn and Bedeutung
- Dharmottara's Theory of Propositional Content
Translation
- Xuanzang's Cheng Weishi Lun, Book I Draft Translation