This essay highlights the important contributions Watkins's books have made to our understanding of theories about causation developed in eighteenth-century German philosophy and by Kant in particular. Watkins provides a convincing argument that central to Kant's theory of causation is the notion of a real ground or causal power that is non-Humean (since it doesn't reduce to regularities or counterfactual dependencies among events or states) and non-Leibnizean because it doesn't reduce to logical or conceptual relations. However, we raise questions about Watkins's more specific claims that Kant completely rejects a model on which the first relatum of a phenomenal causal relation is an event and that he maintains that real grounds are metaphysically and not just epistemically indeterminate.
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October 01 2010
Kant's Theory of Causation and Its Eighteenth-Century German Background: Eric Watkins (ed. and Trans.), Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason'': Background Source Materials and Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality
The Philosophical Review (2010) 119 (4): 565–591.
Citation
Andrew Chignell, Derk Pereboom; Kant's Theory of Causation and Its Eighteenth-Century German Background: Eric Watkins (ed. and Trans.), Kant's ''Critique of Pure Reason'': Background Source Materials and Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality. The Philosophical Review 1 October 2010; 119 (4): 565–591. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2010-014
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