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Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Grice, "Freedom and morality in Kant's 'Foundations'"

No! I'm not promoting a technology, but browsing through S. Priest's online pdf on Kant on freedom (recall that there's this essay by Grice that covers the same ground, "Freedom and morality in Kant's foundations") I found the symbolisation that Priest provides for his exegesis of Kant of some interest:

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0015/1374/Kants_Concept.pdf

Priest writes:

"Kant writes:

"The condition of that which happens is entitled the cause"

[Da heißt nun die Bedingung von dem, was geschieht, die Ursache.]

"Kant does not say what sort of condition he has in mind," Priest notes.

"He might mean ‘necessary condition’ such that, if p is a ‘condition’ of q

(Nec. Cond)

~p ⊃ ~q

But Kant "might [merely] mean ‘sufficient condition’ such that:

(Suff. Cond)

p ⊃ q

Priest notes: "Kant’s use of ‘the’ in ‘the condition’ does not logically guarantee which condition. He might be using ‘the’ in a generic sense roughly equivalent to ‘any’ so that

(Nec. Cond Univ.) -- higher-order calculus:

(∀p) (∀q) (~p ⊃ ~q)

or else something like

(Suff. Cond. Univ.)

(∀p) (∀q) (p ⊃ q)

Priest goes on to say:

"I shall read Kant's 'the condition' ('die Bedingung') here to mean 'both necessary and sufficient condition'. So, some event 'q' is a *caused* event iff there exists (or existed) _at least_ one other event p, such that if p failed to occur then q could not occur, and if p does occur then q could not fail to occur:

(Nec. &Suff. Cond)

(∀p) (∀q) ((~p ⊃ ~q) /\ (p ⊃ q))

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