APPENDICES
Acknowledgments and Historical Sketch
by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)
This study began almost exactly twelve years prior to the date when the book is expected to appear in print: on 1 October 1980 my wife and I left sunny California on a plane to England, where I was to begin a graduate program at Oxford University. My intention was to write up some of my youthful ideas on the relation between love and human nature, with the hope of coming away with a relatively quick doctorate, if our savings could be made to last for two years. Within the first month my initial supervisor, Peter Bide, convinced me that, before writing anything else on love, I should read some western philosophy to find out how my own theory of human nature compared to the tradition. Not having studied any philosophy beyond an uninspiring Introduction class as part of my B.A., I thought it would be best to start at the beginning. So I spent my first year reading relevant selections from the major works of about thirty major western philosophers, from Plato down to Heidegger. My journey into philosophy had begun.
As it turned out, my doctoral studies required nearly the maximum seven years to complete. During my first year, the only one of those thirty philosophers whose ideas seemed to me to be on the right track was Kant. I spent March of 1981 pouring through his three Critiques and several supporting works. The experience of reading of the entire Critique of Pure Reason over a ten day period, interrupted by little else but eating and sleeping, was truly sublime. Here, it seemed, was finally someone who thought as I thought: he helped me to clarify and articulate my former views on such topics as the perspectival nature of all knowable truth, the need to search for a middle path expressing the truth contained in both sides of any two opposing views, the theoretical unknowability of all real absolutes, the inappropriateness of using happiness as a measure for moral goodness, the importance of universal respect for humanity, and the theoretical unknowability (yet practical reality) of God. There were a number of times when, after thinking to myself 'If I am right in my interpretation, then on the next page he should say...', I would turn the page and jump with delight at the confirmation of my previous inkling. This rare, Platonic experience of learning-as-remembering convinced me to cut love out of my thesis in order to focus instead on developing my theory of human nature in dialogue with Kant.
After pursuing this course throughout my second year of study, and completing about half of my proposed thesis, I decided I should read some secondary literature on Kant. Discovering what other scholars thought Kant was saying was nearly as great a shock as discovering the apparent compatibility between his ideas and my own. After several months of intense study of the literature, I decided I simply could not say what I wanted to say about Kant without referring to some previously published interpretations. Since I had at that point not yet discovered any interpretations with anything like a perspectival interpretation of Kant, I decided I would take out a month from working on my thesis in order to remove some of the foundational arguments in my chapters on Kant, with a view towards publishing them as an article. That way, I naively reasoned, I could avoid the criticism in my oral exam that my thesis was based on a way of interpreting Kant which (as I then believed, quite wrongly) was not represented in the literature.
From January to June of 1983 I experienced one of the most productive periods of my life-in more ways than one. The one month had expanded to six, because the one article had expanded into five! During this time, my wife was pregnant, so I was eagerly anticipating two very different kinds of birth at the same time, wondering which would come first, the birth of our first child or the notification of the acceptance of my first article. The body preceded the mind in this case, but only by a matter of hours. My first child was born just after midnight on 13 July; and later that same morning I found a letter of acceptance from The Heythrop Journal waiting at my front door.
Those first five articles are listed in the Bibliography as Pq1-Pq4 and Pq6. They are early versions of the following parts of the present book: Pq1 corresponds to Chapter V; Pq2 corresponds to Appendix V; Pq3 corresponds to Chapter VI; Pq4 corresponds to Chapter III; and Pq6 corresponds to Chapter IV. I am grateful to the publishers of these articles for granting their permission for me to use those portions which have remained the same after my fairly thorough revisions. (Before completing my doctorate I also wrote several other articles, including Pq5, Pq7-Pq9, and Pq11; but, aside from a few paragraphs of the latter which have been incorporated into Chapter X, these have not been used in the present work. In addition, I compiled Pq10 during this period, though it was not made available to other scholars until I came to Hong Kong in 1987.) In mid-1983-which was when I had originally assumed I would be finished with the degree-I suddenly realized that I now had the makings of a completely different thesis, focusing entirely on introducing a new way of interpreting Kant's philosophical System. Faced with two half-finished theses, I chose Kant, much to the surprise of John Macquarrie, who kindly supervised my work from the end of my first year until the beginning of my last year.
I first completed my thesis on Kant in early 1985, after enjoying a year of co-supervision under the late W.H. Walsh. Having read an early draft of the thesis, he started our first meeting by asking: 'Where did you get this interpretation?' He was rather surprised to find I had never studied Kant under any other Kant scholars; but he encouraged me to continue pursuing the perspectival approach, in spite of the lack of an established tradition on which to base it. In our subsequent meetings Professor Walsh provided the expertise needed to enable me to fine-tune my interpretation in a number of ways.
Unfortunately, my thesis examiners were not so positively inclined. The two-and-a-half hour oral exam, which I thought went quite well, ended with my internal examiner telling me the thesis would be 'referred' (i.e., given back to me for major revisions). He told me that, although the thesis contained 'publishable material', it could never be published as long as the 'logical apparatus' (i.e., my explanation of the logical structure of the diagrams) remained in tact. Only at that point did I mention that, in fact, five chapters of the thesis had already been accepted for publication, including an earlier version of the disputed chapter on the diagrams (now Chapter III). But umpires are not supposed to change their decisions; and this fellow was not about to make himself an exception. The examiners' report offered me a clear choice: 'The formal logical apparatus must be removed or it must be expounded adequately, and its application to the three [sic] perspectives justified more fully.'
Being slightly stubborn in my defense of views I believe have been misunderstood, and having been gifted with an extraordinarily patient wife, I decided to tackle this new problem the hard way. I spent the next year doing an intensive study of logic and its relationship to geometry and geometrical figures. During this time, from mid-1985 to mid-1986, I don't recall ever opening a book by Kant. Instead, I wrote the initial manuscript for a book entitled The Geometry of Logic [Pq18], which I hope to publish once I have a chance to revise it. I then used the last half of 1986 to do a thoroughgoing revision of my thesis, including the incorporation of a much clearer and more consistent defense of my so-called 'logical apparatus'. During this time, Professor Macquarrie retired, so I was assigned to a new supervisor, David Brown. After enjoying much frank and open debate, and numerous invaluable suggestions, I finalized the revised version. Unfortunately, after discussing my revisions with the internal examiner, Dr. Brown then strongly recommended that I remove the diagrams after all. When I reminded him about the choice I was given in the examiners' report, he responded by saying that, although there was nothing he could do to stop me from submitting the thesis with the diagrams in tact, he would not support any attempt to appeal the decision, if it was negative once again.
With nearly seven years of research (and a job offer) hanging in the balance, I decided to join my supervisor in interpreting the examiners' previous words as a polite way of demanding 'take out the diagrams'. After about a month of cut-and-paste, I resubmitted the thesis with its heart removed, bound in a white cover. During these final days, Kant's own response to academic disagreements, arising as they generally do out of a clash of prejudices, was instructive to me. In a letter to Christian Garve [K2:10.321(Z1:104-5)] Kant defends himself at length against an unjust review of Kt1; but then, with characteristic acumen, he confesses that the true source of such discrepancies often lies elsewhere: 'Oh cares of men! Weak men, you pretend that you are only concerned with truth and the spread of knowledge, whereas in fact it is only your vanity that occupies you!' Eight long weeks after submitting the revised thesis, I was informed that it would be accepted-just in time to enable me to take up a teaching post in Hong Kong in September of 1987.
Financial support for the first seven of these twelve years of philosophizing came from a variety of sources. Among the non-miraculous sources were the following: the income earned from several jobs held by my wife; three successive years of receiving assistance from the 'Overseas Research Student Fees Support Scheme', offered by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom; and one-off grants from the Oxford University Committee on Student Hardship and from the Oxford Society. After coming to Hong Kong in August of 1987, I received a grant from Hong Kong Baptist College and from the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, which greatly assisted in the process of making numerous further revisions to the unadulterated version of the revised thesis. The most significant revision has been that, as suggested by the University Press of America's anonymous referee, I have removed the chapters on theological and religious implications, which I plan to revise and use in writing Pq20 (as summarized above in Chapter X).
Throughout these twelve years many people have contributed in significant ways to the development of my interpretation of Kant. Indeed, any clarity or depth of insight which might be found in this book is due in large part to the input of the various people mentioned in the remainder of this Appendix. (Of course, the responsibility for the errors which inevitably remain rests solely with me.) In addition to the supervisors and examiners mentioned above, and a number of editors and anonymous referees for various journals and publishers, the following persons merit special mention. Attending five successive years of P.F. Strawson's Kant seminars gave me the opportunity to read and discuss very early versions of various parts of this book with other graduates, as well as with one of this century's most eminent analytic philosophers. Other university lecturers who assisted me were John Kenyon and Michael Inwood, who each met with me once or twice in the capacity of temporary supervisor. Richard Mapplebeckpalmer, Paul McKechnie, Alan Padgett and the late David Long also read and discussed portions of my work in Oxford from time to time. Of these, Rev. Mapplebeckpalmer's assistance was particularly stimulating and helpful. He read most of what I wrote while in Oxford, and took the time and effort to dig with me in countless hours of discussion deep into the heart of my subject. Among the many valuable seeds of thought planted in my mind during these sessions were those which resulted in my choosing the word 'perspective' as the name for the key conception in my interpretation of Kant, and in the development of my use of models as visual aids in clarifying the resulting System.
While in Hong Kong I have been able to clarify and deepen my understanding of Kant through stimulating conversations with many students, among which those with Chang Chun Wen and Man Sui On have been particularly insightful. My colleagues, Gerhold Becker and Tsang Lap Chuen, have also provided helpful advice in various ways-the former especially with regard to the German language. During this same period I have also benefitted by the opportunity to correspond with a number of scholars, most of whom I have not yet met. Those whose letters led to the refining and/or clarification of my interpretation are Sidney Axinn, Lewis White Beck, J. Fang, Gunnar Johansson, Manfred Kuehn and Rollin Workman.
Most of all, my dear wife, Dorothy, who has read much of this book in more than one previous version, always suggesting numerous helpful revisions, and has conceived and cared for our three lovely children, deserves my deepest thanks. Without her steadfast encouragement and loving support on all fronts, I may well have given up on this project long ago. While training as an artist, she introduced me to her art teacher, whose ideas we were discussing one evening some fifteen years ago when the two of us hit upon an intuition, the implications of which are still in the process of being explored, in works such as the present one. Together we dedicate this book to that teacher, Tom Soule, who, in the youthful ignorance of our college days, sparked us both into viewing ourselves and the world in a completely new way-a way which I now associate with the term 'philosophy'.
