CFP: REVUE ROUMAINE DE PHILOSOPHIE Special issue: The Kantian Theory of Science. Kant’s Theoretical Program and the Lawfulness of Science

Submission deadline: July 1, 2022

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Call for papers for special issue no. 2/2022 of REVUE ROUMAINE DE PHILOSOPHIE (RRP is a Romanian Academy journal of philosophy, indexed ISI Clarivate Analytics - Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents Arts & Humanities, https://mjl.clarivate.com/search-results)

Topic: The Kantian Theory of Science. Kant’s Theoretical Program and the Lawfulness of Science

The transcendental a priori character of the Kantian project for reforming metaphysics exceeds the confines of both metaphysics itself and those of his first Critique.

The already common knowledge that Kant is to be found at the very origin of the modern epistemological tradition addresses mainly his contributions in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science due to his “critical” program. The structure of the program is grounded on the transcendental theory fully developed in the second edition of his Critique (1787). Kant’s theoretical program influenced and even changed those various disciplinary perspectives that approached it. To meet our intention, we only address here the following: the analytic epistemology, the philosophy of exact sciences, the meta-theoretical approach and a new transcendental approach on Kant’s critical project as a frame theory of a wide program of foundational research in philosophy and science.

The analytic epistemology understands Kant’s program as a direct investigation of the realm and bounds of human knowledge that attempts to justify reasonable opinions face to scepticism by approaching knowledge and its accomplishments with the logical means of conceptual analysis. As P.F. Strawson argued in The Bound of Sense, the main task of Kant’s Critique should be a “conceptual analysis” aiming to clarify the significance and the presuppositions of the “knowledge by experience”.

The account on Kant’s critical program from the view of the philosophy of exact sciences is mainly focused on how Kant introduces, first in the Prolegomena, then in the second edition of the Critique, “the general problem of the pure reason”: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible? In the preamble of this question Kant sets two other epistemological questions (pertaining to the philosophy of science): How is pure mathematics possible? and How is the pure science of nature possible? This account was initially proposed by neo-Kantians, particularly by H. Cohen, but was also endorsed by some other philosophical traditions interested in their historical grounds (from Husserl’s phenomenology, that Goedel appreciated as being the legitimate successor of the Critique, to the modern scientific realism).

The meta-theoretical approach on transcendental philosophy conceives transcendental philosophy as a meta-account that sets as its proper distinctive object the a priori elements of the scientific knowledge. Therefore, transcendental philosophy becomes a meta-account whose specific task is to investigate the nature and the conditions of possibility for the first order knowledge. This approach sets a multi-level theoretical view on knowledge (where Kant’s program would be at the higher level) whose structure does not change due to scientific revolutions.

A new transcendental approach on Kant’s critical project as a frame theory of a wide program of foundational research in philosophy and science (a significant work for this perspective is Michael Rahnfeld’s Die theoretische Philosophie Kants im Licht des Strukturalismus von Sneed – Stegmüller). This account does not pertain solely to a specific rational discipline, but it determines them all (including those listed above). In this view, the Kantian program shapes its “scientific form” by the very nature of its own way of theorizing, i.e., a way of constructing theories “from top to bottom”. This kind of theories exceeds both the inductive and the hypothetic-deductive modelling processes for they are not acquired by inductive generalization from experience nor they gain their validity with respect to the deductive relation with the experience (“the empirical content”).

We are inviting you to contribute with papers that do not necessarily fit one of the accounts mentioned above, but approach current issues of Kantian exegesis and theoretical reconstruction set forth in the epistemological perspective or the philosophy and theory of science that are not solely confined to the Critique of Pure Reason. Specifically, the task here is to follow the path of a priori laws in general mostly with respect to the lawfulness of science starting even with Kant’s pre-critical writings (The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures for instance) and moving to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, the second edition of the Critique, Opus postumum.

Submision

Papers should be submitted by July 1, 2022, using the invited editors e-mail addresses: [email protected], and/or [email protected]. Notification of acceptance, conditional acceptance, or rejection: August 1, 2022. Papers must be no longer than 12.000 words, including notes and references, and be prepared for blind review, removing all self-identifying references. The formatting of the submission is up to the author; accepted papers will be asked to adhere to journal style (see the journal’s website for further information: http://www.institutuldefilosofie.ro/page.php?29)

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