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Chapter 2 - Healthy Human Understanding

from Part I - Reflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2018

Melissa Merritt
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
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Summary

This chapter takes up a lingering problem stemming from Kant’s claim that “all judgments require reflection”—in effect, that that the requirement at issue looks to be overly demanding, and out of step with what we normally have in mind when we take a belief or judgment to be justified. My aim is to show that Kant offers a more nuanced articulation of the normative requirement to reflect (reflect-n) through the three maxims of healthy human understanding presented in the third Critique and Anthropology, as well as many Nachlass materials. This interpretive work offers an alternative to supposing that reflection-n must be a deliberately undertaken activity of some kind—something one must do on the occasion of each and every judgment, over and above the judging itself. The upshot is that the requirement to reflect-n lodges at the level of character, rather than piecemeal over individual acts of judgment—an idea that is developed further in Chapter 5.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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