T. A. Pendlebury
Research

Titles in blue are links.

Publications

The Shape of the Kantian Mind (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2022)
Kant's readers have disagreed about whether, according to his account of cognition, concepts, representations of the understanding, are involved in intuitions, representations of sensibility. But proponents of the affirmative 'conceptualist' answer and those of the negative 'non-conceptualist' answer have alike presupposed that such involvement should be construed in a particular way: i.e., as the involvement of particular concepts in particular exercises of sensibility. I argue, on the contrary, that it should not be: that though, for Kant, no concepts are applied in exercises of sensibility, nonetheless the understanding, the faculty of concepts, is teleologically internal to sensibility and, therefore, to its exercises. That is, those exercises are per se directed towards the provision to the understanding of objects to which its fundamental concepts, the categories, are applicable, though no act of categorical application is internal to them. This conception of sensibility, available only in light of a careful distinction between capacities and acts, is demanded, I argue, by Kant's conception of a priori knowledge as elaborated in his Transcendental Deduction.

The Real Problem of Pure Reason (European Journal of Philosophy, 2022)
The problem of Kant's first Critique is the problem of pure reason: how are synthetic judgments possible a priori? Many of his readers have believed that the problem depends upon a delimitation within the class of a priori truths of a class of irreducibly synthetic truths—a delimitation whose possibility is doubtful—because absent this it is not excluded that all a priori truths are analytic. I argue, on the contrary, that the problem depends on nothing more than the human knower's everyday consciousness of her own finitude: her dependence in thinking and knowing on what is given to her. The problem is a difficulty about how the concepts which figure in metaphysical judgments could represent reality given that they cannot do so in the way in which concepts figuring in empirical judgments do. Empirical judgment here functions as exemplary of thought and knowledge because it is exemplary of finite thought and knowledge. Mere analysis could not, therefore, dissolve the problem even in principle, because to say that a concept can be analyzed is not yet to explain the possibility of its real representative power. The significance of the analytic- synthetic distinction in the context of the problem of pure reason is that its formulation allows Kant to say this.

Forthcoming

The Will of All in Kant's Groundwork (Kantian Review)
Central to Kant's ethical theory is the notion of universality, whose apparently canonical expression is his 'Formula of Universal Law' ('FUL'). In the second section of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ('Groundwork II'), the FUL stands between the notion of a categorical imperative and later formulations in terms of the notions of humanity as an end in itself, the autonomy of the rational will, and the kingdom of ends. It is meant to be equivalent both to what precedes it and to what follows it. But it has seemed to Kant's readers that neither of these claims to equivalence is true, so that Groundwork II is a comprehensive argumentative failure. I develop a reading of the basic structure of Groundwork II which acquits it of this charge but which, unlike many extant vindicatory readings, does not abandon its expository development by reading later formulations into the FUL. Crucial to my reading is a distinction between three notions of universality which figure in the Groundwork. One of these is expressed by the FUL, but truly central to Kant's ethics is another, that of the will of all, whose philosophical extraction from common moral cognition is the principal task of Groundwork II.

The Rational Faculty of Desire (with Jeremy David Fix; in Bacin & Bagnoli (eds.), Reason, Agency & Ethics, OUP)

This essay is about the relationship between the notions of practical reason, the will, and choice in Kant’s practical philosophy. Although Kant explicitly identifies practical reason and the will, many interpreters argue that he cannot really mean it on the grounds that unless they are distinct, irrational and, especially, immoral action is impossible. Other readers affirm his identification but distinguish the will from choice on the same basis. We argue that proper attention to Kant’s conception of practical reason as a capacity reveals that these distinctions are neither textually grounded nor philosophically necessary. His moral psychology concerns a single capacity, practical reason, which is the will, and whose actualities in this or that individual fall under the title of choice. Practical reason is the will and choice because it is the rational faculty of desire: a rational being’s capacity to be, by means of her representations, the cause of the actuality of their objects. This, we argue, is entailed by his conception of rational action: action not just in accordance with, but in and through the representation of, principles. The possibility of irrational action is explained not by a distinction between capacities but by the finitude, and thereby the fallibility, of human reason.

Drafts

(available upon request; comments welcome)

The First Acts of Kantian Cognition
When Kant seems to define capacities like sensibility and the understanding, he mentions only some of their representations, and not even the ones with which, as the course of his philosophy reveals, he is most concerned. Many commentators have concluded, reasonably enough, that these characterizations aren't definitions after all. I explain why they are definitions and why it's important. Belonging to each Kantian capacity is a system of acts with a determinate structure, but the capacity is properly defined in terms of only one of them. I defend this claim by applying it first to the case of empirical concepts, then to that of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, and by showing how this explanatory structure is related to the first Critique's expository structure.

The Kantian's Desire
It has been claimed that Christine Korsgaard's oft-quoted image of the reflective agent 'backing up' from her desires misleadingly suggests that, in her view, agents relate to their desires as alien objects rather than as expressions of their own rational activity. I argue, on the contrary, that this image is a perspicuous expression of Korsgaard's moral psychology and captures a respect in which it's deeply different from that of Kant. For Kant, desires aren't alien to the finite will, not, however, because they're expressions of rational activity, but because, notwithstanding their origin external to reason, the nature of the finite will confers deliberative import upon them. Kant and Korsgaard differ on the question of inclinations because they endorse fundamentally different conceptions of the nature of the finite rational will.

Selected work in progress

A monograph on the constitution of the problem of pure reason and the emergence of its solution in the Critique of Pure Reason

An article on Hegel's criticism of the Kantian highest good as a mere ought

An article on Kant's notion of real possibility