Publications
Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant: The Violence and the Charity. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Abstract: Heidegger has a reputation for reading himself into the philosophers he interprets, and his interpretation of Kant has therefore had little uptake in anglophone Kant scholarship. In this book, Morganna Lambeth provides a new account of Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant, arguing that it is more promising than is typically recognized. On her account, Heidegger thinks that Kant’s greatest insights are located in moments of tension, where Kant struggles to articulate something new about his subject-matter. The role of the interpreter, then, is to disentangle competing strands of argument, and to determine which strand is most compelling. Lambeth traces Heidegger’s interpretive method across his reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and situates Heidegger’s reconstruction of Kant’s best line of argument against other post-Kantian readings. She finally shows how Heidegger’s deep engagement with Kant sheds light on Heidegger’s own philosophical views.
Order online here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/heideggers-interpretation-of-kant/22BB714B19ABC3577CDC42D4E24B45BE.
2022: “Resisting Tiny Heroes: Kant on the Mechanism and the Scope of Imaginative Resistance,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80.2: 164-176.
Abstract: Traditionally, theorists suggested that imaginative resistance (e.g. when a reader does not imagine what a literary work entreats her to imagine) is limited to morally repugnant claims. More recently, theorists have argued that the phenomenon of imaginative resistance is wider in scope, extending to descriptive claims (e.g. those that are conceptually contradictory). On both sides, though, theorists have focused on cases where imaginative resistance goes right, tracking something that is wrong with the story – that it is morally repugnant, or conceptually contradictory. I use a rarely-cited discussion from Kant to argue that imaginative resistance can also occur when something goes wrong with the reader – namely, when a reader imports her own biases into the story, and resists a descriptive claim as a result. In identifying this new class of claims that can meet imaginative resistance, Kant presses the question: when should we cultivate imaginative resistance and when should we fight it?
Full article -- online early.
“A Tale of Two Faculties: Heidegger’s Method of Interpreting Kant,” in: History of Philosophy Quarterly 38.1 (2021): 57-80.
Abstract: This paper concerns Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Against the consensus view that Heidegger reads his own philosophical views into Kant’s text, I argue that Heidegger takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant’s most plausible line of response to it, consulting the claims in Kant’s text alongside Heidegger’s own beliefs about Kant’s subject matter. Because Heidegger seeks to attribute true claims to Kant, his method of interpretation resembles that of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson. However, I suggest that Heidegger improves upon their method, because he abandons the demand to maximize truth. Heidegger reads the first Critique as having two strands of argument that are in tension with one another, differentiating a line of argumentation that he deems true from a less promising line. Further, Heidegger offers an error theory explaining why Kant makes the less promising line of argument. I use Heidegger’s Kant interpretation to show that he provides a distinctive model of charitable, reconstructive interpretation that nonetheless avoids the potential pitfalls of such interpretation, in brief: the inability to recognize differences of view between interpreter and text.
Get access here.
2021: “A Case for Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Kantian Imagination,” in: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress ‘The Court of Reason’ (Oslo, 6-9 August 2019). Camilla Serck- Hanssen and Beatrix Himmelmann (Eds.). Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Abstract: Commentators often dismiss Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that Heidegger abandons the issues with which Kant was concerned in favor of his own philosophical preoccupations. However, I argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of the Kantian imagination is in dialogue with a problem of central importance to Kant: Kant's refutation of Hume’s skepticism about causation. Kant is at pains to deny Hume’s suggestion that the concept of cause is a “bastard of the imagination” and establish to the contrary that the concept has its source in the understanding. However, in Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, he appeals to grounds internal to Kant’s text to regard the imagination as the source of categories like causality. Further, Heidegger’s argument takes the form of an argument from elimination, in remarkable similarity to Hume and Kant’s own arguments about the source of the concept of cause. In making this argument, I claim, Heidegger offers a deep challenge to Kant’s proposed line of response to Hume.
2021: "A Proposal for Translating Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant," in: Gatherings 11: 20-57.
Abstract: Translators of Heidegger’s interpretations of other thinkers face a challenge: they must contend not only with Heidegger’s distinctive choice of words, but also the terminology of his subject, whether it be Aristotle, Kant, or Schelling. The response by and large has been to focus on Heidegger’s turns of phrase, at the expense of the thinker he interprets. In this paper, I challenge this practice, using Heidegger’s interpretive works on Kant as a test case. If we overlook the terms of the author Heidegger interprets, we miss a major source of Heidegger’s phrasing, and lose the connotations that he invokes by using these terms. Further, such translations reinforce the damaging assumption that Heidegger’s interpretations venture far off-topic. I argue that when Heidegger references Kantian turns of phrase, these terms should be translated to match the standard English translation of Kant, and show how following this method of translation deepens our understanding of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. In the appendix, I provide two passages exemplifying this method of translation.
Full article available open access.
2021: Entries for “Apperception,” “Certainty,” and “Stand,” in: Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, ed. Mark Wrathall, Cambridge University Press.
Get access here.
2020: Review of Heidegger's Shadow: Kant, Husserl and the Transcendental Turn by Chad Engelland in: Journal for Transcendental Philosophy.
Full book review available online.
2019: “Heidegger, Technology, and the Body,” in: Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy: Selfhood, Embodiment, Materiality, 28-47.
Abstract: While the human body is not a point of focus in Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology, I argue that considering our contemporary relationship to our own bodies provides crucial support to Heidegger’s account. Heidegger suggests that, in our contemporary age of technology, humans are taken to be “human resources”: like natural resources and technological devices, humans should be available for efficient and flexible incorporation into any number of projects. I argue that the contemporary attitude toward the human body provides evidence confirming this suggestion. Moreover, I identify the body as a unique site of resistance to the age of technology, an anomaly to the technological paradigm, as the body constantly resists our attempts to transform it into a resource.
Full article available online.
2017: “Do We Identify Human Events with Kant’s Concept of Cause? A Defense of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant,” in: Perspektiven mit Heidegger, ed. Gerhard Thonhauser, Verlag Karl Alber.
Abstract: While Kant’s term »experience« is usually interpreted to encompass any encounter we have with an object, Heidegger offers a narrower interpretation, arguing that we only have experience (in Kant’s sense) of the present-at-hand, objects considered in terms of their individual, physical properties. I argue that, by narrowing the scope of Kant’s claims, Heidegger’s unconventional interpretation allows Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy of Experience to avoid the counterexample of human events. While Kant’s argument claims that we must use the concept of cause to identify events, Heidegger suggests that this does not apply to historical events; rather than being identified in terms of what they follow accordingto a rule, Heidegger suggests that historical events are identified in terms of their consequences. I argue that the historical identification of events mirrors our identification of contemporaneous (not yet historical) human-initiated events: we do not understand human-initiated events as following necessarily from the perceived past, but as providing conditions for the anticipated future.
Full Text.
2015: “An Objection to Kant’s Second Analogy,” in: Kant Yearbook 7: Kant and Empiricism, 97-114.
Abstract: In the Second Analogy of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to address Hume’s causal skepticism. Kant argues that the concept of cause must be employed in order to identify objective changes in the world, and that, therefore, all events are caused. In this paper, I will challenge Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy, arguing that we can identify objective changes without using the concept of cause, but by using the concept of logical condition instead. Rather than objectively ordering our perceptions through the idea that one thing that was perceived is the cause of the next thing that was perceived, the first necessitating the second, we can objectively order our perceptions through the idea that the first thing perceived is the logical condition of the second. In terms of Kant’s debate with Hume, I find that, though my objection undermines some of Hume’s own conclusions, it does allow Hume to avoid Kant’s argument against his causal skepticism
Full Text.
2011: “Heidegger’s Last God” (with Mark Wrathall), in: Inquiry 54.2, 160-182.
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss Martin Heidegger's position on the so-called godlessness of our current age. Rather than holding that we must either await the advent of god or enthusiastically embrace our godlessness, Heidegger holds that a third option is available to us: we could fundamentally change the way we experience the world by leaving behind all remnants of metaphysical thinking. In Section II, we show that, despite the absence of god, our current historical moment shares a metaphysical structure with the god-oriented epochs that preceded it. A metaphysical epoch involves a single, all-encompassing understanding of the entities in the world and how they ought to be arranged, usually established by a God who serves as a paradigm for those entities. In Section III, we discuss how the metaphysical age arose in the first place; the polytheistic world of the ancient Greeks was tumultuous and unpredictable, such that its inhabitants began to desire a stable, planned-out world that could be established by a single God. In the final section, we examine Heidegger's obscure discussion of the last god, who is to lead us out of metaphysics by a fundamental shift of the sort that led us into metaphysics. We discuss the basic features that will define a post-metaphysical age, and the last god's role in bringing this age about. We argue that this age resembles the pre-metaphysical age of the ancient Greeks, but rather than being polytheistic, it will be “polydivinistic”.
Get access here.
Abstract: Heidegger has a reputation for reading himself into the philosophers he interprets, and his interpretation of Kant has therefore had little uptake in anglophone Kant scholarship. In this book, Morganna Lambeth provides a new account of Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant, arguing that it is more promising than is typically recognized. On her account, Heidegger thinks that Kant’s greatest insights are located in moments of tension, where Kant struggles to articulate something new about his subject-matter. The role of the interpreter, then, is to disentangle competing strands of argument, and to determine which strand is most compelling. Lambeth traces Heidegger’s interpretive method across his reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and situates Heidegger’s reconstruction of Kant’s best line of argument against other post-Kantian readings. She finally shows how Heidegger’s deep engagement with Kant sheds light on Heidegger’s own philosophical views.
Order online here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/heideggers-interpretation-of-kant/22BB714B19ABC3577CDC42D4E24B45BE.
2022: “Resisting Tiny Heroes: Kant on the Mechanism and the Scope of Imaginative Resistance,” in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80.2: 164-176.
Abstract: Traditionally, theorists suggested that imaginative resistance (e.g. when a reader does not imagine what a literary work entreats her to imagine) is limited to morally repugnant claims. More recently, theorists have argued that the phenomenon of imaginative resistance is wider in scope, extending to descriptive claims (e.g. those that are conceptually contradictory). On both sides, though, theorists have focused on cases where imaginative resistance goes right, tracking something that is wrong with the story – that it is morally repugnant, or conceptually contradictory. I use a rarely-cited discussion from Kant to argue that imaginative resistance can also occur when something goes wrong with the reader – namely, when a reader imports her own biases into the story, and resists a descriptive claim as a result. In identifying this new class of claims that can meet imaginative resistance, Kant presses the question: when should we cultivate imaginative resistance and when should we fight it?
Full article -- online early.
“A Tale of Two Faculties: Heidegger’s Method of Interpreting Kant,” in: History of Philosophy Quarterly 38.1 (2021): 57-80.
Abstract: This paper concerns Heidegger’s method of interpreting Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Against the consensus view that Heidegger reads his own philosophical views into Kant’s text, I argue that Heidegger takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant’s most plausible line of response to it, consulting the claims in Kant’s text alongside Heidegger’s own beliefs about Kant’s subject matter. Because Heidegger seeks to attribute true claims to Kant, his method of interpretation resembles that of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Donald Davidson. However, I suggest that Heidegger improves upon their method, because he abandons the demand to maximize truth. Heidegger reads the first Critique as having two strands of argument that are in tension with one another, differentiating a line of argumentation that he deems true from a less promising line. Further, Heidegger offers an error theory explaining why Kant makes the less promising line of argument. I use Heidegger’s Kant interpretation to show that he provides a distinctive model of charitable, reconstructive interpretation that nonetheless avoids the potential pitfalls of such interpretation, in brief: the inability to recognize differences of view between interpreter and text.
Get access here.
2021: “A Case for Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Kantian Imagination,” in: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress ‘The Court of Reason’ (Oslo, 6-9 August 2019). Camilla Serck- Hanssen and Beatrix Himmelmann (Eds.). Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Abstract: Commentators often dismiss Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, claiming that Heidegger abandons the issues with which Kant was concerned in favor of his own philosophical preoccupations. However, I argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of the Kantian imagination is in dialogue with a problem of central importance to Kant: Kant's refutation of Hume’s skepticism about causation. Kant is at pains to deny Hume’s suggestion that the concept of cause is a “bastard of the imagination” and establish to the contrary that the concept has its source in the understanding. However, in Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, he appeals to grounds internal to Kant’s text to regard the imagination as the source of categories like causality. Further, Heidegger’s argument takes the form of an argument from elimination, in remarkable similarity to Hume and Kant’s own arguments about the source of the concept of cause. In making this argument, I claim, Heidegger offers a deep challenge to Kant’s proposed line of response to Hume.
2021: "A Proposal for Translating Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant," in: Gatherings 11: 20-57.
Abstract: Translators of Heidegger’s interpretations of other thinkers face a challenge: they must contend not only with Heidegger’s distinctive choice of words, but also the terminology of his subject, whether it be Aristotle, Kant, or Schelling. The response by and large has been to focus on Heidegger’s turns of phrase, at the expense of the thinker he interprets. In this paper, I challenge this practice, using Heidegger’s interpretive works on Kant as a test case. If we overlook the terms of the author Heidegger interprets, we miss a major source of Heidegger’s phrasing, and lose the connotations that he invokes by using these terms. Further, such translations reinforce the damaging assumption that Heidegger’s interpretations venture far off-topic. I argue that when Heidegger references Kantian turns of phrase, these terms should be translated to match the standard English translation of Kant, and show how following this method of translation deepens our understanding of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. In the appendix, I provide two passages exemplifying this method of translation.
Full article available open access.
2021: Entries for “Apperception,” “Certainty,” and “Stand,” in: Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, ed. Mark Wrathall, Cambridge University Press.
Get access here.
2020: Review of Heidegger's Shadow: Kant, Husserl and the Transcendental Turn by Chad Engelland in: Journal for Transcendental Philosophy.
Full book review available online.
2019: “Heidegger, Technology, and the Body,” in: Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy: Selfhood, Embodiment, Materiality, 28-47.
Abstract: While the human body is not a point of focus in Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology, I argue that considering our contemporary relationship to our own bodies provides crucial support to Heidegger’s account. Heidegger suggests that, in our contemporary age of technology, humans are taken to be “human resources”: like natural resources and technological devices, humans should be available for efficient and flexible incorporation into any number of projects. I argue that the contemporary attitude toward the human body provides evidence confirming this suggestion. Moreover, I identify the body as a unique site of resistance to the age of technology, an anomaly to the technological paradigm, as the body constantly resists our attempts to transform it into a resource.
Full article available online.
2017: “Do We Identify Human Events with Kant’s Concept of Cause? A Defense of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant,” in: Perspektiven mit Heidegger, ed. Gerhard Thonhauser, Verlag Karl Alber.
Abstract: While Kant’s term »experience« is usually interpreted to encompass any encounter we have with an object, Heidegger offers a narrower interpretation, arguing that we only have experience (in Kant’s sense) of the present-at-hand, objects considered in terms of their individual, physical properties. I argue that, by narrowing the scope of Kant’s claims, Heidegger’s unconventional interpretation allows Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy of Experience to avoid the counterexample of human events. While Kant’s argument claims that we must use the concept of cause to identify events, Heidegger suggests that this does not apply to historical events; rather than being identified in terms of what they follow accordingto a rule, Heidegger suggests that historical events are identified in terms of their consequences. I argue that the historical identification of events mirrors our identification of contemporaneous (not yet historical) human-initiated events: we do not understand human-initiated events as following necessarily from the perceived past, but as providing conditions for the anticipated future.
Full Text.
2015: “An Objection to Kant’s Second Analogy,” in: Kant Yearbook 7: Kant and Empiricism, 97-114.
Abstract: In the Second Analogy of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant attempts to address Hume’s causal skepticism. Kant argues that the concept of cause must be employed in order to identify objective changes in the world, and that, therefore, all events are caused. In this paper, I will challenge Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy, arguing that we can identify objective changes without using the concept of cause, but by using the concept of logical condition instead. Rather than objectively ordering our perceptions through the idea that one thing that was perceived is the cause of the next thing that was perceived, the first necessitating the second, we can objectively order our perceptions through the idea that the first thing perceived is the logical condition of the second. In terms of Kant’s debate with Hume, I find that, though my objection undermines some of Hume’s own conclusions, it does allow Hume to avoid Kant’s argument against his causal skepticism
Full Text.
2011: “Heidegger’s Last God” (with Mark Wrathall), in: Inquiry 54.2, 160-182.
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss Martin Heidegger's position on the so-called godlessness of our current age. Rather than holding that we must either await the advent of god or enthusiastically embrace our godlessness, Heidegger holds that a third option is available to us: we could fundamentally change the way we experience the world by leaving behind all remnants of metaphysical thinking. In Section II, we show that, despite the absence of god, our current historical moment shares a metaphysical structure with the god-oriented epochs that preceded it. A metaphysical epoch involves a single, all-encompassing understanding of the entities in the world and how they ought to be arranged, usually established by a God who serves as a paradigm for those entities. In Section III, we discuss how the metaphysical age arose in the first place; the polytheistic world of the ancient Greeks was tumultuous and unpredictable, such that its inhabitants began to desire a stable, planned-out world that could be established by a single God. In the final section, we examine Heidegger's obscure discussion of the last god, who is to lead us out of metaphysics by a fundamental shift of the sort that led us into metaphysics. We discuss the basic features that will define a post-metaphysical age, and the last god's role in bringing this age about. We argue that this age resembles the pre-metaphysical age of the ancient Greeks, but rather than being polytheistic, it will be “polydivinistic”.
Get access here.