Kant's anatomy of the intelligent mind (Q2866037)

Immanuel Kant's reflections on mathematics played an essential role within his overall philosophical thought. In his philosophy of mathematics, Kant developed views on mathematical judgement and on the relations between the concepts and methods of pure mathematics, on the one hand, and the natural world on the other, whose critical statements are a crucial part of his fundamental treatise ``Critique of Pure Reason''. The problem of how to interpret Kant's philosophy of mathematics has been a fertile area of philosophical research over centuries, and this debate is still going on in the current literature.NEWLINENEWLINE The book under review offers a further, new interpretation of Kant's general, fundamental doctrines concerning intelligence, space, time, nature, mathematics, and logic. Basically, the author argues against the consensus view that Kant had removed psychology from epistemology, and that his views of mathematics, logic, and nature were purely rationalist. As already announced in the publisher's description of the present book, the author argues that Kant's transcendental philosophy is a priori psychology, and that Kant's transcendental conception of nature is well compatible with modern physical theories such as quantum theory or relativity theory. Moreover, the author asserts that Kant's anatomy of the understanding is perfectly continuous with the psychologization of philosophy á la John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.NEWLINENEWLINE In this context, and as far as mathematics and logic are concerned, the most relevant parts are Chapter 6 (``Mathematics and the Unity of Sensibility''), where the role of pure intuition in geometry, algebra, arithmetic and mathematical logic is analyzed, and Chapter 10 (``A Defense of Kant's Table of Judgements''), in which Kant's psychological approach to the logic of judgement is the central topic of discussion.NEWLINENEWLINE Mathematicians and logicians might find these two chapters particularly interesting, whereas philosophers will appreciate this controversial contribution toward the interpretation of Kant's transcendental viewpoints as a whole.