Affects and Activity in Leibniz's De Affectibus

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Kant and natural kind terms

As is well known, the linguistic/philosophical reflection on natural kind terms has undergone a remarkable development in the early seventies with Putnam and Kripke’s essentialist approaches (cf. §3), touching upon different aspects (metaphysical and epistemological in particular) of Kant’s slant. Preliminarily, however, it might be useful to review some of the theoretical stages in Locke and Leibniz’s approaches on natural kind terms in the light of contemporary reflections (cf. § 2), to eventually pinpoint Kant’s contribution and see how some commentators have placed it within the theory of direct reference (cf. §4). Starting with textual evidence even from the logical corpus (cf. §§5-6), in the present essay I will attempt to discuss some of the arguments dismissing Kant’s adherence to this view. These assume that in his approach to the semantics of natural kind terms, Kant appears to be still holding on to a nominalist/conceptualist position, though he seems to be well aware of a few key issues for the theorists of direct reference (§§7-8).; Como es bien sabido, la reflexión lingüístico-filosófica sobre los términos de género natural experimentó un notable desarrollo a principios de los setenta con las aproxima ciones esencialistas de Kripke y Putnam, que tocaban distintos aspectos (metafísicos y epistemológicos en particular) de orientación kantiana. Preliminarmente, sin embargo, puede ser útil revisar algunas de las etapas teóricas en las aproximaciones de Locke y Leibniz a los términos de género natural a la luz de las reflexiones contemporáneas, para finalmente determinar la contribución de Kant y observar cómo algunos comentaristas le han situado dentro de la teoría de la referencia directa. Comenzando con pruebas textuales que incluyen incluso el corpus lógico, en este ensayo me propongo discutir algunos de los argumentos que desestiman la adhesión de Kan t a esa concepción. Estos argumentos asumen que, en su acercamiento a la semántica de los términos de género natural, Kant parece sujetarse aún a una posición nominalista-conceptualista, aunque parece ser plenamente consciente de algunas cuestiones centrales para los teóricos de la referencia directa

Kant and Natural Kind Terms

As is well known, the linguistic/philosophical reflection on natural kind terms has undergone a remarkable development in the early seventies with Putnam and Kripke’s essentialist approaches, touching upon different aspects of Kan’s slant. Preliminarily, however, it might be useful to review some of the theoretical stages in Locke and Leibniz’s approaches on natural kind terms in the light of contemporary reflections, to eventually pinpoint Kant’s contribution and see how some commentators have placed it within the theory of direct reference. Starting with textual evidence even from the logical corpus, in the present essay I will attempt to discuss some of the arguments dismissing Kant’s adherence to this view. These assume that in his approach to the semantics of natural kind Kant appears to be still holding on to a nominalist/conceptualist position, though he seems to be well aware of a few key issues for the theorists of direct reference