Oh yes, they Kan

The Christian Science Monitor published my letter in response to Dinesh D’Souza's “What atheists Kant refute.” D’Souza is a conservative author who, like Ann Coulter, uses over-the-top controversy to sell books and land College Republican speaking engagements.

His op-ed piece is based on a reading of the early sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While it's probably not fair to refer to D’Souza as a pseudo-intellectual, he clearly hasn't done his homework here. Of course, his reason for taking up Kant is not to engage in serious and fair-minded Kantian scholarship; it’s to cherry-pick the philosophical tradition for arguments that may be made to serve the cause of social conservatism. D’Souza’s arguments rest on two fallacies.

The first is the alleged authority of Kant. D’Souza asserts that Kant has never been refuted. It's true that no work has ever been produced which is universally recognized as a refutation of Kant’s Critique, but philosophy doesn't really work that way. A lot of philosophers never saw Kant’s arguments as an adequate rebuttal of Humean empiricism. Others took the Kantian paradigm as far as it could go, but a critique can only bear so much fruit. There are certainly elements of Kantian philosophy still in currency, and I sympathize with quite a few of them. But unreconstructed Kantians are rare in the academy.

The second fallacy is inappropriately using the noumenon-phenomenon distinction to place one’s confidence in the existence of God outside the reach of human reason. Had D’Souza read the second half of the Critique, or perhaps read a commentary on it, he would know that Kant himself argues against this approach. When we’re debating whether or not God exists, we’re taking up an idea of God—a phenomenon—for consideration. D’Souza is arguing for a noumenal God. If my reading is correct, Kant allows that his Critique can free one for such a belief, but denies that it can be used in defense of such a belief. A noumenal God is not one that D’Souza would much care for, anyway: it would be unknowable, featureless, and unrelated to human life.

Note: This is a bit more purely philosophical than usual; I’ll get back to the tech talk soon!