Schulting, D. (ed.), Kantian Nonconceptualism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. In “Kant and Nonconceptual Content,” Robert Hanna argues that Immanuel Kant is a significant early proponent of nonconceptual mental content—Kant’s notion of intuitional cognitive content is fundamentally equivalent to contemporary notions of nonconceptual content. Hanna contends that Kant’s famous dictum “intuitions without concepts are blind” should be understood as … [continue reading]

(Byrne, 2006) Precisely how and precisely where is human conscious experiencelocated in the natural world? “The Extended Conscious Mind Thesis”says this: The constitutive mechanisms of human conscious experience includeboth extra-neural bodily facts and also extra-bodily worldly facts. In “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness Is (Probably) Still in the Head,” Andy Clark has … [continue reading]

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) is arguably the single most brilliant, important, and difficult book in modern philosophy. Its main topic is the nature, scope, and limits of human cognition and reason; and its main conclusion is that necessary truth, a priori knowledge, and freedom of the will in a … [continue reading]

Morality is the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and following principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and our leading ideals and values. But this presupposes that our “human, all-too-human” lives actually do have some meaning that, in turn, captures our basic personal and social commitments, and our … [continue reading]

Building on contemporary research in embodied cognition, enactivism, and theextended mind, this book explores how social institutions in contemporary neoliberal democratic states systematically affect our thoughts, feelings, and agency, Human beings are, necessarily, social animals who create and belong to social institutions. But social institutions take on a life of their own, and literally shape … [continue reading]

Robert Hanna’s Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism is about the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, political philosophy, and real-world politics. More specifically, Hanna uses Kant’s 18th century philosophical ideas in order to develop a radically agnostic doctrine in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and also an existential Kantian … [continue reading]

The version of Kantian ethics that Robert Hanna develops in Kantian Ethics and Human Existence is “existential” in four senses of that term. First, it’s a specifically anthropocentric, humane version of Kantian ethics, that takes philosophical anthropology fully seriously for the purposes of ethical theory, and not as an inessential add-on or mere elaboration. Second, … [continue reading]

What is free will? What is practical agency? What is human personhood? And how are human free will, practical agency, and human personhood really possible in the natural world as it is correctly characterized by the modern natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, biology, and cognitive neuroscience? Or more compactly put: given the truth of modern … [continue reading]

In Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, Robert Hanna works out and defend a five-stage contemporary Kantian theory of (i) intentionality and its contents, including nonconceptual content and conceptual content, (ii) sense perception and perceptual knowledge, including perceptual self-knowledge, (iii) the analytic-synthetic distinction,(iv) the nature of logic, and (v) a priori truth and knowledge in … [continue reading]

Most contemporary philosophers (71.1%, according to a recent survey) believe that a priori knowledge is really possible. Indeed, since the late 1980s there has been a renewed and steadily growing interest in rationalism and the a priori; and gradually what George Bealer has dubbed a rationalist renaissance has emerged onto the contemporary philosophical scene. At … [continue reading]