Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series Presents
The Lorne Maclachlan Lecture on Kant

ʺA Scandal of Philosophyʺ: Kantʹs Refutation of External World Skepticism

Janum Sethi, University of Michigan

Thursday, March 28, 2024

4:00-6:00 pm

Watson Hall, Room 517 

In his “Refutation of Idealism,” Kant notoriously attempts to refute external world skepticism by arguing that the mere awareness of our subjective states proves the existence of an external world. Interpreters disagree widely about how to read Kant’s argument in the Refutation, but they agree almost universally that it does not succeed as published. In this paper, I begin by rejecting the most prominent interpretive strategy to reconstruct Kantʹs Refutation: the so‐called Causal Reading. I argue that the starting point of Kant’s argument according to the Causal Reading—namely, causal knowledge of one’s subjective states—begs the question against the skeptic. In its place, I defend a different interpretation of the Refutation, according to which its starting point is the mere awareness of one’s temporally unified subjective states. I conclude by responding to two objections that are often thought to tell decisively against Kant’s argument.