Kant's Revolutionary Theory of Modality

by Uygar Abaci

Overview

Kant's Revolutionary Theory of Modality is a comprehensive study of Immanuel Kant's views on modal notions of possibility, actuality or existence, and necessity. Abacı locates Kant's views on these notions in their broader historical context, establishes their continuity and transformation across Kant's precritical and critical texts, and determines their role in the substance as well as the development of Kant's philosophical project. He makes two overarching claims. First, Kant's precritical views on modality, which appear in the context of his attempts to revise the ontological argument and are critical of the tradition only from within its prevailing paradigm of modality, develop into a revolutionary theory of modality in his critical period, radicalizing his critique of the ontotheological and rationalist metaphysical tradition. While the traditional paradigm construes modal notions as fundamental ontological predicates, expressing different modes or ways of being of things, Kant's theory consists in redefining them as subjective and relational features of our discursivity, expressing different modes in which our conceptual representations of objects are related to our cognitive faculty. Second, this revolutionary theory of modality is not only a crucial component of Kant's critical epistemology and his radical critique of rationalist metaphysics, but it is in fact directly constitutive of the critical turn itself, as Kant originally formulates the latter in terms of a shift from an ontological to an epistemological approach to the question of possibility. Thus, tracing the development of Kant's understanding of modality comes to fruition in an alternative reading of Kant's overall philosophical development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198831556
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Uygar Abacı, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University

Uygar Abacı is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. He acquired his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He works on Kant's theoretical philosophy, Early Modern Philosophy, and Philosophy of Religion, and is the author of a number of journal articles and book chapters.

Table of Contents

IntroductionPart I: Modal Thought Prior to Kant1. Ontotheology and Modality I: The Classical Version of the Ontological Argument2. Ontotheology and Modality II: The Modal Version of the Ontological ArgumentPart II: Kantian Modality: Precritical and Revisionist3. Kant and Ontotheology4. Kant's 'Only Possible Argument', Possibility and NecessityPart III: Kantian Modality: Critical and Revolutionary5. The Revolutionary Shift in Kantian Modality Prior to the Critique6. The Modality of Judgments7. Modal Categories and Kant's Revolution8. Kant's Radical Critique of Ontotheology9. Absolute Real Modality and Kant's Amodalism Regarding Noumena

Editorial Reviews

"This book is useful not only as a contribution to the literature on Kant but also as a fairly comprehensive account of the development of a variety of historical views on modality, and the clarity of Abaci's presentation is noteworthy. Summing Up: Recommended. Ambitious upper-division undergraduates through faculty." — L. Bernhardt, University of Southern Indiana, CHOICE

"...a helpful and illuminating historical contextualization of Kant's theory of modality." — Ralf M. Bader, Journal of the History of Philosophy

From the Publisher