Vendredi 15 mars 2024, de 12h à 14h
Titre : G.E. Moore’s (anti-)Kantian conceptions of mind and judgment
Intervenant Wim Vanrie (UGhent)
Résumé :
I investigate how Moore’s conceptions of mind and judgment from his 1899 paper “The Nature of Judgment” were shaped by his critical reception of Kant in his 1898 dissertation, from which that paper was lifted. Moore wishes to side with Kant against empiricism, by preserving what he takes to be the core insight of Kant’s Transcendentalism: that there is a domain of a priori judgments that are presupposed by empirical judgments. He seeks to do this whilst avoiding what he regarded as Kant’s psychologistic account of the truth of those a priori judgments. Rather than grounding that truth in the activity of the mind in judgment—as Kant sought to do—Moore develops a conception of the mind as a purely receptive capacity for cognizing concepts and the relations between them. To secure our knowledge of a priori principles, Moore reconceives Kant’s distinction between empirical and a priori judgments in terms of a distinction between empirical and a priori concepts, both of which are given directly to the receptive mind in cognition. In this way, Moore advances a conception of ‘Transcendentalist’ philosophy as the investigation of a timeless, world-independent, self-standing domain of a priori truths that are presupposed in our empirical knowledge, but the truth of which, and our knowledge of which, is entirely independent of that empirical knowledge—a conception that will reverberate, not only through Moore’s own oeuvre, but through the nascent analytical tradition as such.
UCLouvain Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, salle P30.