About

Karl Schafer is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic focus includes ethics, epistemology, the history of modern philosophy, and Kant. The information provided indicates his involvement in these areas, emphasizing his expertise in philosophical inquiry and teaching within these domains.

Research topics

• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Pedagogy
• Cognitive science
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Intelligibility, Idealism, and Alienation in Post-Kantian Metaethics

  2026-04-08

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  Abstract This chapter explores some avenues for developing Kantian views in metaethics in a more post-Kantian direction. In doing so, it focuses on motivating a broadly idealist approach to metaethics through the idea that the normative domain is essentially intelligible—so that reasons and values are necessarily apt objects of certain forms of practical understanding. It provides several reasons for thinking that an intelligibility constraint of this sort is plausible, focusing on three ideas: (1) that we should not be deeply alienated from the normative domain; (2) that the normative domain must be free of arbitrariness; and (3) that reasons and values can play their characteristic functions only if they are intelligible. Then the chapter turns to whether this supports a form of metaethical idealism. Finally, it turns to a worry about these claims and explains why this actually supports the post-Kantian picture against more thoroughgoing forms of normative realism.

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• Was Kant an Expressivist?

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-09-19

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• Mental Faculties and Powers and the Foundations of Hume's Philosophy

  2024-05-08 · 1 citations

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  Hume is famous for his critique of attempts to make robust use of terms like “power” or “faculty” in a philosophical or scientific context. But at the same time, his philosophy is itself structured around the attribution to human beings of a variety of basic faculties or mental powers. Indeed, there is a case to be made that despite his deflationary account of our concept of power, Hume continues to treat certain basic powers or faculties as forming something like the explanatory bedrock for his new “science of man.” This chapter considers how this apparent tension in Hume’s philosophy is best resolved. It begins by distinguishing a variety of worries one might associate with Hume’s critique of the use of terms like “power” or “faculty” by other philosophers. It then isolates the most problematic of these for Hume, which it locates in the role that a teleological conception of mental faculties plays in Hume’s philosophy. This chapter concludes by examining the best Humean response to these concerns, with special attention to the question of how this illuminates Hume’s place in the development of early modern conceptions of the proper method for philosophy.

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• In Search of Hume's Anti-Rationalism

  2024-09-05

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  In this chapter, I explore one of the most familiar aspects of Hume’s philosophy: namely, his opposition to rationalism. Much ink has been spilled about this topic, but I hope to show that its significance is often misunderstood. In particular, I will argue that the most radical and interesting aspects of Hume’s opposition to “rationalism” (in its various forms) relate – less to the psychological/cognitive issues that is the focus of the standard picture of an empiricist/rationalist divide in early modern philosophy – and more to normative, meta-normative, and (indeed) meta-philosophical claims about the role of the faculty of reason in ethics and epistemology. More precisely, I will argue that much of Hume’s philosophy can be seen as attacking the philosophical significance of the faculty of reason in both an explanatory and a normative context. This, in turn, will raise a further puzzle – namely, why Hume does not go further in advocating for a sort of meta-philosophical skepticism about the use of concepts like REASON in philosophy. In response, I’ll argue that Hume’s continuing use of such concepts illustrates something significant about the “conceptual ethics” that is implicit in his philosophical project. This will provide a further illustration of a larger theme in my recent work on Hume – the importance of Hume’s conception of the conventional “artificial virtues” for the foundations of his philosophy.

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• The PSR as a practical principle in Kantian ethics

  Belgrade Philosophical Annual · 2024-01-01

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  The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is the canonical expression of the idea of reality as fundamentally rational or intelligible, such that there is always a sufficient ground or explanation for everything about which such questions can be asked. In this essay, I argue that recent attempts to rehabilitate the PSR, despite their many virtues, have not gone far enough in emphasizing the centrality of this principle within all areas of philosophy - both theoretical and practical. Thus, I hope to show that to fully appreciate the significance of the PSR, we need to attend to the role it plays in reasoning of both a theoretical and a practical sort. As we will see, this point is especially important from a Kantian perspective, where it is practical, and not theoretical reason that is the home of our deepest and most substantive commitment to a version of the PSR. Thus, for a Kantian, to understand the nature of our commitment to the PSR, we need to consider this question first and foremost from a practical perspective - or perhaps ultimately from a point of view that somehow transcends the practical-theoretical distinction itself.

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• Kant on Method

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-10-22 · 1 citations

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  Abstract This chapter offers an opinionated overview of the central elements of Kant’s philosophical methodology during the Critical period. It begins with a brief characterization of how Kant conceives of the aims of human inquiry—focusing on the idea that inquiry ideally aims at not just cognition (Erkenntnis), but also the more demanding cognitive achievements that Kant labels insight (Einsehen) and comprehension (Begreifen). It then explores the implications of this picture for philosophy, emphasizing Kant’s distinction between critical and doctrinal phases of philosophical inquiry, with the first of these playing both a negative and a positive role with respect to the second. It argues that this positive role is possible, according to Kant, only insofar as philosophy follows a ‘capacities-first’ methodology—that is, one that treats basic cognitive capacities (such as reason) and their self-conscious activities as fundamental (in both a cognitive sense and in an explanatory sense) for the sort of philosophy human beings are capable of. It is this methodology that allows Kant to introduce the first principles that philosophy in its doctrinal phase requires in a manner that is neither arbitrary nor (at least obviously) incompatible with Kant’s own Critical restrictions on cognition. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the implications of this methodological picture, including the methodological significance of self-consciousness and regressive or ‘transcendental’ arguments, Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic methods in philosophy, and Kant’s conception of reason as autonomous.

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• The Autonomy of Reason and the Capacity for Autonomy

  2023-08-22

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  Abstract This chapter turns to the idea of reason as the capacity for a sort of genuinely autonomous activity or self-organization. In doing so, it develops the claims of the last three chapters by arguing that the idea of reason as autonomous ultimately expresses the same fundamental conception of reason as the idea of reason as the capacity for comprehension or cognition from principles. The chapter attempts to show that comprehension and autonomy are simply two (equally important) ways of capturing what is valuable about the distinctive activity of reason as Kant understands it. As we will see, each of these ways of thinking about reason’s activity is useful for certain purposes, but both are required if we are to fully understand Kant’s conception of reason and its unity. In other words, for Kant, the unity of theoretical and practical reason can only be fully understood if we understand the unity of comprehension and autonomy.

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• Self-Consciousness, Cognition, and the Taking Condition

  2023-08-22

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  Abstract This chapter develops Kant’s understanding of the connections between rationality and self-consciousness, focusing on the manner in which our rational powers are capacities for cognition (Erkenntnis). The chapter gives a detailed reading of what cognition for Kant involves, taking care to distinguish it from the conception of knowledge that has dominated the contemporary epistemological debate. Then it turns to the connections between this notion and the idea that rational powers are essentially self-conscious. There we will see that it follows from Kant’s conception of cognition that acts of cognition always involves a kind of (often implicit) consciousness of their own standards of correctness. Thus, any faculty for cognition is also a capacity for a consciousness of the standards that apply to that form of cognition. This provides one important way of understanding why Kant takes rational or cognitive powers to be self-conscious—one which establishes interesting connections between Kant’s philosophy and the recent debate about whether inference is governed by a “taking condition”.

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• Kant's Reason

  2023-08-22 · 81 citations

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  Abstract Kant’s Reason develops a novel interpretation of Kant’s conception of reason and its philosophical significance, focusing on two claims. First, it argues that Kant presents a powerful model for understanding the unity of theoretical and practical reason as two manifestations of a unified capacity for theoretical and practical understanding (or “comprehension”). This model allows us to do justice to the deep commonalities between theoretical and practical rationality, without reducing either to the other. In particular, through it we see why the activities of both theoretical and practical reason are governed by a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and why reason is essentially autonomous. At the same time, Kant’s Reason reads Kant as presenting us with a compelling picture of the role that reason (as a capacity or power) should play in a systematic approach to foundational philosophical questions. In doing so, it argues for an account of the fundamental norms that apply to rational beings that treats as fundamental neither substantive reasons or values nor merely structural rationality, but instead a robust conception of reason as a power or capacity for theoretical and practical understanding. The result is a form of “rational constitutivism,” which contrasts both with the forms of “reasons fundamentalism” that are currently fashionable and the forms of “agency-first constitutivism” that have dominated Kantian metaethics. In this sense, the book’s aim is to vindicate Kant’s insistence that his philosophy represents nothing more or less than reason’s implicit self-understanding coming to explicit and systematic self-consciousness.

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• List of Abbreviations

  2023-08-22

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  Extract Titles of works of Kant are abbreviated according to their German titles and in the style recommended by Kant-Studien. Except as noted otherwise, citations are to volume and page of the Akademie Ausgabe (AA): Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed.: Vols 1–22 Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 23 Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, from Vol. 24 Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. Berlin: Reimer then De Gruyter, 1900–. Unless noted otherwise, Kant is quoted according to the Cambridge translations of the works of Kant specified below. Where no translation is listed, the Cambridge series does not include one. References to Hume and Hegel are similarly formatted as noted below. Abbreviations of Kant’s Works ... Abbreviations of Hegel’s Works ... Abbreviations of Hume’s Works

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Frequent coauthors

• Remy Debes

  4 shared

• K Krug

  3 shared

• Fritz Grau

  2 shared

• Ernst Wichards

  2 shared

• Richard Ebel

  2 shared

• Sigmund Cohn

  2 shared

• Reinhold Lehnert

  2 shared

• Jesse Prinz

  1 shared