MR: Professor De Boer. One of the main themes of your research
has been Kant’s philosophy. Could you please explain, firstly, what made
you interested in Kant’s philosophy and, secondly, what has made you
continue to be interested in his philosophy?
KB: I cannot trace the origin of my interest in Kant’s philosophy
very well. I have a vivid memory of a class during which professor
Peperzak, who at the time was a guest professor at the University of
Amsterdam, explained the main ideas of Hegel’s philosophy. I was moved
by the beauty of it. I do not recall a similar experience in relation to
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. However, I was impressed and
inspired by a monograph written in Dutch by one of our professors, Otto
Duintjer, on Kant, Heidegger, and transcendental philosophy. This
monograph – as well as the continental orientation of the philosophy
department at the time – clearly planted the seeds of the perspective on
Kant I developed in later years.
During my PhD I taught a BA class on the history of metaphysics that
included a few sessions on Kant. My PhD thesis – published in Dutch in
1997 and in English in 2000 under the title Thinking in the Light of
Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel – contains nine pages on the
difference between Heidegger’s and Hegel’s reading of Kant. Yet I only
started to study Kant’s works, in particular the Critique of Pure
Reason, more in- depth when I was an assistant professor at the
University of Groningen (also in the Netherlands). I published an
article on Hegel’s relation to Kant in 2004 and I simply wanted to get a
better understanding of the first Critique and Kant’s
theoretical philosophy more generally.
Teaching on Kant’s first Critique, and the many exchanges
with colleagues, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in Leuven and
elsewhere has been a great joy and source of inspiration. Part of my
motivation to work on Kant is the view that much of mainstream
Anglophone scholarship does not do justice to Kant’s enduring attempt to
reform the metaphysics handed down to him and the logic that informs the
Critique of Pure Reason. Seen from my perspective, many of the
criticisms of Kant stem from misguided assumptions that go back to at
least neo-Kantianism and are repeated from generation to generation. I
try to provide an alternative in the hope that young researchers will be
inspired by it in the same way as I was inspired by the path that
Duintjer had shown.
Maybe I should note that I do not consider myself a Kantian, in the
same way that I never considered myself a Heideggerian or Hegelian. I am
less interested in the content of their philosophies as in the forms of
philosophical rationality that are enacted in works such as the
Critique of Pure Reason or the Science of Logic. In
the case of my first book on Heidegger and Hegel, for example, I focused
on the method that informs Heidegger’s analyses of human existence but
that he does not explicitly discuss. This allowed me to show the
relation between this method and his conception of the mode of
temporarity that undergirds philosophy itself. Similarly, my book on
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason goes beyond its actual content
by reconstructing the outline of the metaphysical system Kant envisioned
by never published. More recently, I have worked on the various methods
Kant employs in the first Critique but, like Heidegger, does
not explicitly discuss.
MR: For the next question, I would like to discuss some of the
ideas in your book, Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. But before I go into
the content of the book, I would like to discuss your main influences in
the book, namely Pichler, Wundt, Heimsoeth and Heidegger (p. 9). What
distinguishes them from other readers of Kant, and what do you find
inspiring in their work?
KB: As a BA student, I was very much impressed by Heidegger’s
Being and Time, and I wrote my MA thesis on the method I took
him to employ in this work. This thesis led to my PhD project on
Heidegger and Hegel mentioned earlier on. In this context, I also
studied Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant. I was inspired in particular
by his emphasis on Kant’s engagement with Wolffian metaphysics. It is
only much later that I realized that Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ reading
was indebted to authors like Wundt and Heimsoeth, who each in their own
way challenged the premises of the dominant neo-Kantian readings of Kant
in the early 1920s. I completely agree with Heidegger’s criticism of
these readings. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason does not
primarily aim to provide the natural sciences with a foundation. Unlike
Heidegger, I hold that Kant did not even aim to provide metaphysics with
a new ground. The idea that a discipline needs to be grounded on a
secure foundation is a neo-Kantian one that can be traced back to
Descartes and, in post-Kantian philosophy, to Reinhold. Kant himself
rather aimed to develop a properly systematic and coherent metaphysical
system without resorting to an allegedly indubitable foundation. In
2019, I published an article on this subject together
with my former postdoc Stephen Howard.
MR: Throughout the book, but especially in the chapter on the
Transcendental Deduction, you prefer the first (1781) edition of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason to the second (1787) edition. There is no
denying that there are major differences between the two, but the
question remains whether these are merely methodological or substantive.
Which side do you take?
KB: I do not know the B-Deduction well enough to answer this question
in very positive terms. I also do not know if it is possible to draw a
clear line between the two options you present. It seems to me that Kant
throughout his works tried to ponder the matter at hand from various
perspectives, trusting that each of them would shed light on particular
aspects of it. This attitude allowed him to abandon some of the
assumptions that inform his early texts or present them in different
terms. In each part of the 1781 edition of the Critique Kant
elaborates on the question as to the conditions under which the human
mind can generate a priori cognitions of objects from a particular
perspective. I believe that Kant’s ‘perspectivism’ also applies to the
relation between the two versions of the transcendental deduction. Kant
tried to carry out the task of the transcendental deduction by starting
from a different point, but he did so in order to achieve the same
result, namely, to demonstrate that producing objects of cognition
requires not just the intellectual activity commonly attributed to the
understanding but also the rule-bound syntheses carried out by the
imagination. This demonstration suffices to limit a priori cognitions of
objects to the sphere of possible experience and, thus, to counter the
speculative elements of disciplines such as rational psychology and
rational theology.
Seen in this way, Kant’s decision, in the B-Deduction, to spend much
less time on the account of the various syntheses carried out by the
human mind makes good sense: he could have done so already in the
A-Deduction without undercutting the main argument. In line with
Heidegger, however, I believe that Kant’s account of the role of the
pure imagination in the constitution of objects in the A-Deduction is
crucial to the argument as a whole and harder to understand by reading
the B-Deduction. More generally, I prefer the first edition of the work
to the second since many of the changes stem from Kant’s attempt to
defend the Critique against criticisms. In my view, the result
is less coherent than the original edition.
MR: One aspect of your work on Kant’s metaphysics, and not just
in the book, is your engagement with Kant’s various notions of ‘object’
or ‘thing’. Could you elaborate on what you see as Kant’s overall
picture—including the many different words that Kant uses for what we
might in ordinary discourse just call object?
KB: It is true that I find this a very intriguing subject. I
published an article on Kant’s multi-layered conception
of the thing in itself in 2014 and included a reworked version of it in
my Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. I complemented my work on this
topic in a recent article, published in Studi
Kantiani, on Kant’s transcendental turn to the object. This article
focuses on the distinction between the term ‘object’ in the sense of a
material thing that exists independently of the mind and, on the other
hand, the term ‘object’ in the sense of a content that is produced by
the human mind and that, according to Kant, is nothing but the result of
its explicit focus on the unity of a manifold of representations. By
taking into account the specific aims Kant pursues in specific sections,
it is possible to distinguish these various meanings and see that his
analyses are much more coherent than is often alleged.
I consider Kant’s account in the A-Deduction of the various ways in
which the human mind engages in the objectification of its
representations to be infinitely more important than his few comments on
what I call ‘affecting objects,’ i.e., the material things that produce
impressions in us. From Jacobi’s attack on Kant in the Appendix to his
1787 book on David Hume onward, these comments – and the contradiction
to which they are alleged to give rise – have attracted a
disproportionate number of scholarly books and articles. This
research
has overshadowed the significance and originality of Kant’s
conception of object constitution and its impact on authors such as
Fichte and Hegel. In my view, Kant’s analysis of how the human mind
produces objects of intuition, objects of thought, and objects of
cognition, among others, illustrates very well the meaning of the term
‘transcendental idealism,’ which I take to be another element of Kant’s
philosophy that has often been misunderstood and rejected for the wrong
reasons.
MR: You are very active in Kant scholarship, not only through
your writings, but also through the online Leuven Seminar in Classical
German Philosophy, which organizes regular talks and discussions on Kant
and post- Kantian German philosophy. The seminar attracts a large
audience from all over the world and I think has helped to shape the
present landscape of Kant scholarship. Could you tell us a little more
about it? How did it start, how is it going, and what are the plans for
the future?
KB: In the early Spring of 2020, when the pandemic was spreading, we
decided to organize the yearly Leuven Kant Conference online. We had
started to use Zoom to communicate, and I loved it, but we had no
experience with organizing online conferences. I believe we were one of
the first to organize a relatively big philosophy event online. We had
prepared everything in much detail and thanks to that it went very well.
This experience, and other online events in which I participated, led me
to the idea of the Leuven Seminar in Classical German Philosophy, which we initiated in the Fall of
2020. It has always been organized by me, two or three postdocs who work
with me, and in one case a PhD student. It is very inspiring to put
together the program for each semester. We try to find a good balance
between junior and senior researchers, male and female researchers, and
researchers based in various parts of the world. For me, it is great to
be able to foster exchanges between researchers whose work shares much
common ground but who would not have been able to meet each other at
conferences or in other ways. The Leuven Seminar also allows us to draw
attention to recently published books, and the recordings of the
sessions on YouTube are watched by many viewers. As regards the future:
for now, I think we will continue to organize the series along the lines
of past editions.
In 2024, I was also the initiator and one of the organizers of the
Virtual Kant Congress (together with Andrew Chignell, Z
Quanbeck and Luis Garcia). The idea was to celebrate Kant’s 300th
birthday by means of a series of sessions organized by Kant groups based
in a particular country or region. In this way, many Kant scholars who
could not travel to one of the many conferences were able to share their
ideas and get to know each other or reconnect with old friends and
colleagues. For me, this was a very rewarding experience even though
some aspects of it were more challenging than we had expected.
MR: You are also active as one of the four editors of the Archiv
für Geschichte der Philosophie, and you are on the editorial boards of
many other journals. How do you see the discipline today? What are the
strengths of philosophy journals and what could be improved?
KB: In one sense, much of the way in which academic research in
philosophy is conducted is problematic. The peer-review process takes a
lot of time, many important journals are owned by large companies whose
primary aim is to make money, and much of the content is not accessible
by readers who do not have academic positions. Editors, reviewers,
authors, and universities have little leverage to change the situation.
Changes that are currently being made can be improvements, but it seems
to me that they are quite marginal. Apart from the economic issues, the
very idea of a peer-reviewed academic journal might be considered
old-fashioned. Yet it seems to me that high-end academic philosophy
journals are important in that they set the bar very high for potential
authors, thus challenging them to push back their boundaries. In this
way, the journals contribute to the fostering of serious and original
philosophical research.
I also value the fact that academic philosophy journals, regardless
of their role in the academic rat race, take decisions based on fair and
careful deliberations, which means that they can foster a type of
rationality that is increasingly threatened in contemporary media,
culture, and politics. In this sense, they act as small sanctuaries.
Most importantly, perhaps, I hold that the articles published in
journals such as Archiv allow its authors and readers to be
part of something that Hegel would call ‘spirit’ – an incredible tangle
of strands each of which testifies to philosophical rationality, that
is, to forms of rationality that proceed by means of their own
principles and do so in order to comprehend the forms of rationality of
which human beings are capable. In this sense, engaging oneself with the
history of philosophy means engaging with one of the highest
achievements of human rationality.
MR: The quality of peer review is a common concern, especially
for early career researchers. I find reviews valuable—even if a reviewer
misunderstands my argument—because it signals that I need to be clearer
in any case. However, challenges remain, such as the risk of confusing
disagreement with poor quality. Based on your editorial experience, what
do you think are the best ways to improve the peer review
process?
KB: In the context of the Virtual Kant Congress, the UK Kant Society
organized a panel discussion on publishing in peer-reviewed journals. I
can recommend the video to all researchers. I agree that the
quality of reviews can widely differ but it is hard to see how this can
be remedied. Measures that are already in place include flagging
reviewers who do not support their recommendation very well. Most
editors base
their decisions on two reviews, and it seems to me this is good
practice. I further think it is important to invite reviewers from a
large and global pool rather than to rely on a small pool of
well-established scholars who share more or less the same perspective
and might be less likely to foster innovation.
MR: Let me finish with a larger question. You see Kant as sifting
the wheat from the chaff in the Wolffian tradition before him. If we, as
philosophers of the 21st century, decide to sift the wheat
from the chaff of Kant’s philosophy, what should stay and what should
go?
KB: Without the act of sifting the wheat from the chaff, philosophy
would not have had a history. Throughout its reception, Kant’s
philosophy has been the subject of many sifting operations. From at
least Reinhold onward, the idea was to separate the spirit from the
letter of Kant’s philosophy, abolish the latter, and develop the former
in new contexts and by new means. Neo-Kantians intended to abolish the
speculative aspects of Kant’s philosophy and to develop his views on the
principles of the natural sciences in new contexts. Clearly, in our time
Kant, Hegel, and other philosophers who represent the canon of Western
philosophy are scrutinized in view of their accounts of human races and
hierarchical conceptions of world history. Evidently, researchers have
very different opinions on the extent to which Kant’s racist comments
can be disentangled from his conception of world history and his
critical philosophy as a whole. I believe that the debates on this issue
are important, but I personally do not feel drawn to them. For me, it is
more important to sift the wheat from the chaff contained in
interpretations of Kant developed in early post-Kantianism, German
idealism, and neo-Kantianism, all of which left their stamp on how we
are reading Kant today.
