About

R. Lanier Anderson is the J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor of the Humanities and a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He works in the history of late modern philosophy, with a primary focus on Kant and his influence on nineteenth-century philosophy. Anderson has authored the book The Poverty of Conceptual Truth and has published numerous articles on Kant, Nietzsche, and the neo-Kantian movement. His research interests include Kant’s theoretical philosophy, Nietzsche’s moral psychology, Montaigne, and topics concerning existentialism and the relations between philosophy and literature. He has been at Stanford since 1996 and has also taught at Harvard, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Penn. Additionally, Anderson has played a significant role in Stanford’s Philosophy and Literature Initiative and currently serves as Stanford’s Senior Associate Dean for Humanities and Arts.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Aesthetics
• Linguistics
• Law

Selected publications

• MICHAEL L. FRIEDMAN (1947–2025)

  Kantian Review · 2025-06-01

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• Nietzschean Perspectivism: Representation and Values

  The Monist · 2024-07-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Nietzsche’s perspectivism can fruitfully be understood as a claim that all our representations are perspectival and absolute representations are impossible. But that treatment leaves unclear another key aspect of Nietzschean perspectivism—the idea that our representations are perspectival because they are ultimately rooted in some way in our values. I motivate this latter aspect of Nietzsche’s account through an argument that relies on the contrast between Bernard Williams’s rejection of “external reasons statements” in the case of practical reasoning, and his reliance on an “absolute conception of the world” in theoretical reasoning. Nietzsche holds, by contrast, that theoretical reasoning, too, can offer only “internal,” and hence perspectival, reasons.

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• What is Nietzschean about Nietzsche’s perspectivism? Preliminary reflections

  Inquiry · 2023-12-26

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  Nietzsche's perspectivism has received restricted and unrestricted interpretations. The latter take the cognitive effects of 'perspectives' to be pervasive and general; the former argue they are restricted to special subject matters, have limited effects, or are not essentially cognitive at all. I argue on textual grounds that Nietzsche was committed to the unrestricted view. Comparison to A.W. Moore's treatment of perspectival representation in Points of View illuminates both the nature of perspectivism and key arguments needed to defend it. Nietzschean perspectivism must deny the very possibility of absolute representations (sensu Moore), and to do so, it must block a form of argument that promises to integrate perspectival representations into progressively less restricted, and ultimately absolute, representations of the world. Such arguments depend on a strong assumption about the unity of the independent world, which Moore accepts and Nietzsche denies. Nietzsche's pluralism about perspectives thereby turns out to rely on pluralism about the world, which shapes his understanding of us as essentially bounded cognitive agents. Nietzsche holds that the longing for absolute representation manifest in Moore, Leibniz, and many other philosophers, which aspires to overcome the limitations of perspective, amounts to ascetic self-denial about our cognitive condition.

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• The Primordial Event & The Eternal Present

  2023-06-11

  dissertationOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  <p>The appeal to and use of events in philosophical theorising, implicitly or explicitly, is utterly ubiquitous. However, relatively little attention has been given to events themselves, compared to other entities, like objects. This is unfortunate because events are as problematic, if not more so. This thesis has two aims. The first is a ‘negative’ aim. I argue that the two most natural construal of events, that they are entities that occur at some time or over some interval of time, are untenable posits in our ontology and that we should deny that they exist (except for one). This is because they run into problems to do with either Zeno’s paradoxes, the perception of change, or ineliminable arbitrariness in their individuation. The second is a positive aim. I argue that, in light of the negative conclusions reached, we are forced into certain views not only about events, but time as a whole. Namely, I argue that a view I call event monism is true. This is the view that there is single event constitutive of the entire duration of the history of the universe. I defend this view from objections and show that it has far-reaching consequences both for how we conceive of the entities that exist and our role as inquirers into the structure of this event.</p>

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• Transcendental idealism as formal idealism

  European Journal of Philosophy · 2022 · 20 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Aesthetics

  Abstract Transcendental idealism is the basic worldview shaping Kant's critical philosophy, but its proper interpretation is enormously contested. I identify five constraints on an adequate interpretation, which collectively stand in apparent tension. These serve to highlight internal difficulties of the view itself, and also to reveal serious challenges for both the more standard phenomenalist and deflationary interpretations, and newer “moderate metaphysical” approaches. Difficulty centers on how to reconcile Kant's widespread claims that things in themselves are identical to appearances, in some sense, with his equally widespread insistence that they are (and must be) non‐identical. I suggest that Kant's view must have been that the objects of knowledge are (strictly) partially mind‐dependent, and that the Kantian hylomorphic idea of formal idealism can explain this partial mind‐dependence. The result points toward an anti‐metaphysical interpretation of Kantian idealism, according to which the metaphysical question of identity between things in themselves and appearances should be rejected as illegitimate, rather than answered.

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• Transcendental Idealism as Formal Idealism: an Anti-Metaphysical Reading

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2021 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Linguistics
  PublisherDOI

• Nietzschean Autonomy and the Meaning of the “Sovereign Individual”*

  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2021 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  Abstract This paper has two goals, one narrower and one wider. The limited goal is to address an interpretive dispute over the Genealogy ’s description of the “sovereign individual,” a character type whose features bear on Nietzsche’s distinctive conceptions of conscience, promising, and what it is to take responsibility for oneself. The wider goal is to characterize Nietzschean autonomy. The basic idea is that the meaning of the sovereign individual emerges clearly in light of a distinction from Bernard Williams between two senses of responsibility—one tied to voluntary action, the other to an ambitious conception of responsible agency. What we learn from Williams about responsibility then illuminates Nietzschean autonomy, which is understood as a matter of overcoming psychological weakness by unifying the self.

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• The Psychology of Perspectivism: A Question for Nietzsche Studies Now

  The Journal of Nietzsche Studies · 2018-11-30 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2 (Autumn 2018), in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for discussions about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work.

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• Is Clarissa Dalloway Special?

  Philosophy and literature · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

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  Clarissa Dalloway seems to hold an odd, panpsychist version of extended-mind theory; for her, consciousness can "spread out" into the world, enabling a person to think together with another mind or even feel herself within the trees she passes. If Clarissa could really do this, she would be quite special. I argue that the novel forces the question of Clarissa's exceptional psychological sensitivity onto the reader but provides seriously conflicting evidence bearing on it. Qua reader, I endorse Clarissa's special capacity on the strength of effects arising from the style of Woolf's presentation of her patterns of thought.

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• <i>Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and His Realism</i>

  The Philosophical Review · 2017-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  There is no doctrine more central to Kant's philosophy, nor one more confusing in its fundamental workings, nor one more contested within the reception, than transcendental idealism. In Manifest Reality,1 Lucy Allais develops an interpretation of the doctrine that manages to be genuinely novel and philosophically level-headed, while still rendering Kant's idealism sufficiently radical to have provoked all the controversy in the first place. The book's basic procedure is admirable. Allais begins with a measured, fair-minded analysis of previous interpretations that brings out why the leading approaches—which have either treated Kant as a phenomenalist about the objects of our knowledge, or attempted to deflate the metaphysical implications of his idealism altogether in favor of strictly epistemological points—have each had so much difficulty with central features of the textual evidence. She then uses that analysis to identify constraints on any satisfactory interpretation.Those constraints are daunting. The interpretation of transcendental idealism is so contested largely because it is quite hard to see any way through to joint satisfaction of all the undeniable constraints. Here are formulations for three important constraints, together with an indication of what makes each problematic:Kant's doctrine entails that we cannot cognize things as they are in themselves but only “appearances” (Kantian humility). But it also claims to establish that there are things in themselves and that they are not spatial or temporal—indeed, those items of knowledge are supposed to be part of the humility, which insists that there is something (some “room”; B xxx) beyond the boundaries of our cognition.Kant's position is a form of idealism—it holds that the objects we know are mind-dependent. But when it was compared to Berkeleyan idealism, Kant reacted with terrific impatience, insisting that he never denied that there are real things outside us in space (Prol. Ak. 4:289), and more, that his transcendental idealism was the only coherent route to realism about them.Kant construes the appearances that we know as “aspects,” or “ways of appearing,” or “ways of considering” the very same things that, considered in themselves, we cannot cognize (the identity thesis). But he also holds that “appearances are not things in themselves” (A 190/B 235), indeed that “absolutely nothing that is intuited in space is a thing in itself” (A 30/B 45)—call this, the nonidentity thesis.So the doctrine is a realist kind of idealism, holding that we cannot know anything about things in themselves because of their (known) non-spatio-temporal character, all based on the idea that the appearances both are and are not identical to things in themselves. Our colleagues who view Kantianism as some kind of cult with strange rituals and jargon get their start right here: we went off the rails, they imagine, by making it a first principle that things must be distinguished from themselves. (In all seriousness, Kant puts it in exactly those terms at B 69.)It is therefore a striking achievement when Allais carves through this terrain with a clean cut, articulating a comprehensive interpretation responsive to the constraints. Allais's main addition to the usual mix of constraints can be inferred from the others, as a way of making joint sense of their apparent contradictions—namely, that the mind-dependence of appearances must be partial (but only partial). That position stands a chance, at least, of affording one sense in which appearances are distinct from the mind-independent things in themselves that ground them, but another in which they can be treated as identical, a sense in which Kant's view is realist despite involving mind-dependence, and a clear sense that there is something about things that we do not know, if we are limited to cognition of what is mind-dependent. In my view, Allais is right that this (strictly) partial mind-dependence was Kant's idea.Allais traces Kantian mind-dependence to the work of intuition, excluding any “mind-structuring” effects due to the understanding and its categories (MR 18, et passim). The objects of knowledge are mind-dependent because (1) cognition is impossible without direct acquaintance with the object through intuition, and (2) our intuition is sensible, conditioned by mind-dependent forms of intuition (space and time) that do not represent any property or relation of things as they are in themselves. Allais's most distinctive contribution is her explanation of the type of mind-dependence pertaining to spatio-temporal properties: they represent “essentially manifest qualities” (chapter 5)—qualities that (like color qualities under Allais's interpretation of them) essentially pertain to the way things appear to us (for example, in the case of color, to how things look). Despite essentially pertaining to how things appear, these qualities are still rightly attributable to the objects that appear to have them, because they interact in regular causal patterns, reliably track stable properties of the underlying objects, and exist unperceived (in the form of objects' reliable dispositions to produce these qualities).This picture underwrites an attractive package of positions about transcendental idealism, organized to meet the main constraints. First, it affords a recognizable sense in which Kantian appearances are ideal (mind-dependent) without being merely in the mind. Appearances are partly mind-dependent because they are individuated by spatio-temporal properties that cannot transcend experience. Still, the objectivity of experience arises from contact with mind-independent things (albeit represented in an essentially manifest way). Empirical realism thus rests on acquaintance with mind-independent objects, not on the phenomenalist idea that purelymental appearances are regular and harmonize across different individual subjects. Second, Allais can offer a straightforward account of the identity thesis. Cognitions capture the essentially manifest qualities of appearances, but since they acquaint us directly with the objects, that is just a specialway of their being about the very same things in themselves that appear. Third, Allais provides a substantive and natural account of humility. There is a way things are in themselves that goes beyond what we can know about them. They have intrinsic natures that could notbe spatio-temporal, because such order is essentially a way things can be intuited, not a way things could be outside of relation to a form of sensibility. Allais thereby outlines a clear, metaphysically plausible sense of partial mind-dependence, which smoothly accommodates the main constraints (idealism, identity, humility).All this makes the book a terrific achievement, and no one who has spent time in these thorny patches of the Kantian terrain could fail to appreciate it. Still, important difficulties remain. Allais's account of Kant's idealism is thoroughly intuition-centric. This fits with her broader reading of Kant's theory of cognition, which belongs among “non-conceptualist” interpretations that emphasize the importance of (what we now call) non-conceptual content within Kant's picture. At one level, recent non-conceptualist readings are surely on to something—it is basic Kantian doctrine that intuitions are a distinctive logico-semantic type of representation fundamentally different from concepts, and that they make an ineliminable contribution to cognition. Indeed, Kantians must defend these commitments into the last ditch, for without them, there could be no basis for irreducibly synthetic cognition, and Kant's view would threaten to collapse into a version of Leibnizianism. These points are underappreciated in the strongest conceptualist interpretations (descended from McDowell and motivated by “myth of the given” worries not obviously present in Kant). Nevertheless, non-conceptualists like Allais pay an interpretive cost of their own when it comes to Kant's equally central commitments that intuition always operates together with concepts in cognition and that all representational content in experience (without exception!) must be subject to the (conceptual) categories. Those commitments give Kant's position a more rationalistic flavor than non-conceptualist readings allow. Given Allais's non-conceptualist leanings, many moderate conceptualists will find reasons to resist the book's new reading of the Transcendental Deduction. For my money, that reading underplays both the substantiveness of the categories' role in the theory of cognition overall and their important “mind-shaping” role in idealism (as part of the form of possible experience that shapes appearances).A second worry, however—about the relation between the identity and nonidentity theses—bears more directly on Allais's account of Kantian idealism. This difficulty, too, can be motivated through the imperative to preserve the intended anti-Leibnizian force of Kant's position. After all, from a high enough altitude, Kant's idealism can seem troublingly similar to the Leibnizian view it purports to tear out root and branch: like Kant, Leibniz held that spatio-temporal properties are phenomenal, and he also held that the mathematized description of the spatio-temporal world is “well founded” in a way that affords greater objectivity than any merely subjective appearance. In privileging identity over nonidentity, Allais's interpretation brings Kantian idealism uncomfortably close to that Leibnizian picture. For her, intuition involves the presence of its object in acquaintance (156–60). Indeed, this is what explains the realism in manifest realism, underwriting the basic metaphysics of Allais's interpretation—through intuition, we directly cognize things, which are in fact (that is, are identical to) mind-independent objects with intrinsic natures, even though we represent them as appearances through their essentially manifest qualities. So construed, Kantian idealism threatens to collapse into a variant of official Leibnizian doctrine: spatio-temporal structure is a pattern of arrangement for essentially manifest qualities that the underlying objects merely appear to have, so our mathematized knowledge of nature remains—however “well founded”—fundamentally just an indistinct, confused representation of those intrinsically natured objects (call them “monads”), which lack any such relational, mathematical properties apart from their relation to us.Kant's well-known reply to this objection relies crucially on the nonidentity thesis. For Kant, cognition of appearances must not be taken as obscure or confused knowledge of things as they are in themselves; it is perfectly exact and detailed knowledge of something else. When the exact sciences describe the spatio-temporal structure of appearances, they offer theories that are strictly speaking true of the objects to which they refer. But (per Kant's idealism) those claims cannot be true of things in themselves. It follows that the things in themselves cannot be the relevant objects. Instead, mathematics is true of something else—the appearances. Kant is entitled to that claim, however, only if his idealism is metaphysically ambitious enough to entail a substantial ontological distinction between things in themselves and appearances.2 Allais's realism-friendly version of transcendental idealism does render it more plausible by the lights of current-day metaphysical common sense, but in my view, Kant relied on a stranger and more metaphysically controversial version of idealism for his own anti-Leibnizian purposes.Thanks to Andrew Chignell for discussion.

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Frequent coauthors

• D.B. Gustavson

  78 shared

• D. M. Ritson

  73 shared

• J. R. Johnson

  San Francisco State University

  52 shared

• B.H. Wiik

  42 shared

• I. Overman

  SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

  31 shared

• R. Talman

  19 shared

• W. W. Ash

  Yale University

  19 shared

• D. L. Worcester

  NIST Center for Neutron Research

  19 shared

Labs

• Modern Thought & LiteraturePI

  N/A