Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of culture has been much discussed in recent years. However, it remains unclear how it evolved from his older theory of knowledge. This study deals with this question on the basis of Cassirer's 'disposition' of a 'philosophy of the symbolic', reconstructed here for the first time. This text shows that the 'symbolic' refers to culture as a whole and to its inherent diversity. Therefore, 'the symbolic' includes the relationship between the general transcendental conditions of culture and its (...) empirical specificities in language and languages, art and the arts, myth and myths, science and disciplines. Cassirer does not comprehend this empirical and specific reality of symbolization depending on pre-existing transcendental conditions. Instead, he proceeds from the empirical diversity of the symbolisations and reflects on their simultaneously general and specific conditions. Thus, Cassirer embarks on a path that he finds paved in Kant's "Critique of Judgement": He consequently defines 'the symbolic' as the horizon for a reflective approach based on empirical findings - and not as the foundation of a systematic derivation of the diversity of culture in the style of the idealistic tradition. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Between the first two Critiques, Kant wrote what he called a “conjectural history” of the development of human freedom through a reading of Genesis. In the essay, reason itself is conceived of in terms of its “genesis,” and Kant primarily reads “Genesis” as an account of reason’s ascension or becoming. Just as humankind becomes itself through the Fall, so too does reason simultaneously come into its own. Adam indeed acts as a template for the conception of (...) moral agency that Kant will go on to develop in much more detail in the second critique. More significantly, however, as I argue below, the “genesis” and ascension of reason is only made possible through Eve’s covering up of herself. I argue that the act naturalizes both shame and clothing onto a feminine body conceived as un-reasonable. It is against this foil of unreason that reason is able to reach its own heights. I argue that Kant’s reading of Genesis in the “Conjectures” naturalizes women and clothing as superfluous: to humankind and to the ascent of reason alike. However, their function as the condition of possibility for Kant’s own system will show that they are anything but superfluous. Rather, they are essential. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive account of Kant’s development from the 1755/56 metaphysics to the cosmological antinomy of 1781. With the Theory of the Heavens (1755) and the Physical Monadology (1756), the young Kant had presented an ambitious approach to physical cosmology based on an atomistic theory of matter, which contributed to the foundations of an all-encompassing system of metaphysics. Why did he abandon this system in favor of his critical view that cosmology runs into an antinomy, according to the (...) Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)? This book answers this question by focusing on Kant’s methodology and the internal problems of his 1755/56 theory of nature. A decisive role for Kant’s critical turn plays the argument from incongruent counterparts (1768), which drew much attention among philosophers of science, though not sufficiently in Kant research. Furthermore, the book analyses the genesis of the cosmological antinomy in the 1770s, the logical structure of the antinomy in the CPR, its relation to transcendental idealism, as explained in the “experiment of pure reason” (1787), and its role for the teleology of human reason. The book is addressed to Kant scholars, philosophers of science, and students of Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

"In this study," Zammito writes at one point, "the philological-historical question takes precedence over the epistemological one". Zammito's primary task is not to discuss the contemporary relevance of Kant's thought, but to identify what Kant himself was trying to do within his own context. Yet the result is not just a commentary on Kant's third Critique. It is an intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from (...) the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

This paper aims to pay tribute to Figal’s comprehensive and innovative analysis of the artwork and beauty, while challenging both his realist position on the immediacy of meaning and his monist stance that reduces sublimity to beauty. To enquire into the origin of aesthetic feelings and sense, and thus, to break the hermeneutic circle, we first trace the origin of this reduction to the reception of Burke’s concept of the sublime by Mendelssohn and Kant. We then recur to Husserl and (...) Dufrenne to trace the origin of the sense of the feeling of sublimity in the realm of affectivity or sensuousness. This genesis takes place in passive experience, where we identify an excess of sensuous sense over categorial meaning that is constitutive of the affective sense that our bodily sensations give to hyletic material. It is argued that this sensuous excess evokes a sublime experience in the phenomenological sense, involving an affective and disruptive bodily experience and an endless process of sense formation. Affective or sensuous sense is thus an event that irreversibly affects the bodily surface. To elucidate this phenomenon, we draw on the theoretical framework of Breton and Bataille, positing it as a form-transgressive ‘convulsive’ sublime, which we then illustrate in the architectural works of Tschumi and Eisenman. In short, we have retrieved the origin of aesthetic experience and redefined the feeling of the sublime as a phenomenological ‘convulsive’ sublimity. (shrink)

This article compares the differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the “transcendental.” It argues that, for Kant, the term “transcendental” stands for what is otherwise called “metaphysical,” i.e. non-empirical knowledge. As opposed to his predecessors, who had believed that such non-empirical knowledge was possible for meta-physical, i.e. transcendent objects, Kant’s contribution was to show how there can be non-empirical (a priori) knowledge not about transcendent objects, but about the necessary conditions for the experience of natural, non-transcendent objects. Hence the (...) transcendental for Kant ends up connoting a philosophy that claims to show how subjective forms of intuition and thinking have objective validity for all objects as appearances. By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy takes a different set of problems for its starting point. His quest is to avoid the uncertainty of empirical knowledge about all kinds of objects that present themselves to us as something other than, something transcendent to, consciousness. Transcendental or reliable knowledge is made possible through the phenomenological reduction that focuses strictly on consciousness as immediately self-given to itself—reflection upon “pure” consciousness. The contents of such consciousness are not the same for everyone and at every time, so they are not necessary and invariant in the way that Kant’s pure forms of subjectivity are. Since Husserl however also claims that the all objects, as intentional objects, are constituted in and for consciousness, an investigation into the structures of pure subjectivity can also be called “transcendental” in a further sense of showing the genesis of our knowledge of objects that are transcendent to consciousness. Moreover, since Husserl’s philosophical interest is precisely upon the structures of that consciousness, he also concentrates on necessary conditions for the constitution of these objects in his philosophical work. Hence, there ends up being a great deal of overlap between his own transcendental project and Kant’s in spite of the differences in what each of them means by the term “transcendental.”. (shrink)

The text of Martin Heidegger’s 1927–28 university lecture course on Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presents a close interpretive reading of the first two parts of this masterpiece of modern philosophy. In this course, Heidegger continues the task he enunciated in Being and Time as the problem of dismatling the history of ontology, using temporality as a clue. Within this context the relation between philosophy, ontology, and fundamental ontology is shown to be rooted in the genesis of the (...) modern mathematical sciences. Heidegger demonstrates that objectification of beings as beings is inseparable from knowledge a priori, the central problem of Kant’s Critique. He concludes that objectification rests on the productive power of imagination, a process that involves temporality, which is the basic constitution of humans as beings. (shrink)

The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Kant's three Critiques, and his second work in moral theory after the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Its systematic account of the authority of moral principles grounded in human autonomy unfolds Kant's considered views on morality and provides the keystone to his philosophical system. The essays in this volume shed light on the principal arguments of the second Critique and explore their relation to Kant's critical philosophy as (...) a whole. They examine the genesis of the Critique, Kant's approach to the authority of the moral law given as a 'fact of reason', the metaphysics of free agency, the account of respect for morality as the moral motive, and questions raised by the 'primacy of practical reason' and the idea of the 'postulates'. Engaging and critical, this volume will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars of Kant and to moral theorists alike. (shrink)

David-Ménard examines the problem of the genesis of Kant's moral philosophy. The separation between Kantian practical reason and the inclinations of sense which it regulates is shown by the author to originate in Kant's attempt to regulate his own tendency to hypochondria. Her argument links the themes from two of Kant's precritical works which attest to this tendency-"An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind" and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime-to the (...) final form of the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Resumen La cuestión del tiempo es uno de los principales objetos de estudio que ocuparon a Simone Weil. En efecto, está intensamente presente en su obra desde sus primeros textos hasta sus últimos escritos. La razón es de peso: para esta autora es a través del tiempo que accedemos a la realidad y a toda posibilidad de sentido en sta. Ahora bien, nuestra intención es mostrar que si bien es cierto que la concepción del tiempo de S. Weil, en sus (...) años de madurez, se erige desde una perspectiva espiritualista, mística y religiosa, en su primera época la filósofa se instala en una ontológica fuertemente influenciada por Kant, que la lleva a restringir lo temporal al marco de la experiencia posible, en el sentido que le da el pensador alemán.The question of time is one of the most important subjects in Simone Weil’s philosophy. Indeed, time’s issue is intensively present in her works from her earlier texts until her last writings. This can be explained by the fact that, for this author, it is through time that we can access to reality and find any sense into the latter. That being said, our goal is to show that, if certainly it can be affirmed that S. Weil’s conception of time in her maturity years is constructed from a spiritual, mystic and religious perspective, at the opposite, in her first period, the philosopher settles her views through an ontology strong influenced by Kant, which conducts her to limited temporal matters into the frame of possible experience, according to the definition of this expression given by the German thinker. (shrink)

This article examines Kant’s pragmatic anthropology as a specific model of perceiving a human, his nature which German philosopher started to elaborate in the beginning of 1770s. This issue found its reflections in the new course of university lectures on pragmatic anthropology that Kant read before his retirement in 1796. Basic ideas of this academic course Kant has presented in his treatise “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” (1798) which highlights a new model of studying human nature. Based on (...) the thorough analysis of this particular tractate and on the materials for the lectures, as well as Kant’s notes, the research on conceptual differences between pragmatic anthropology model and other human studies that German philosopher developed in his transcendental philosophy, as well as in metaphysic and naturalistic subjects, which he also taught in University of Königsberg, can be conducted. Theoretical backgrounds that enabled genesis of pragmatic view on a human are a part of this investigation. On this connection, a special attention is paid to the role of physical geography, its conceptual language in the genesis of pragmatic view on a human. It was physical geography, which Kant taught long before a new model of anthropology, which has led to a gradual metaphysical interpretation of Kant's view on a human, his soul and freedom. Conceptual matter of pragmatic anthropology model, its connection to perceiving a human as an active subject who with his own efforts constitutes his own nature, which, in its turn, is the part of the nature, is studied. Basic concepts of Kant’s anthropology are analyzed in this regard; their dissimilarities to empirical and moral dimensions with the help of which German philosopher is trying to answer the question: “What a human is?” are deliberated on. However, the answer to this question is fundamentally differing from the answers offered by Kant's pragmatic anthropology. Anthropological ideas of the German philosopher have essentially affected its pedagogical doctrine. (shrink)

New Ukrainian translation of the Preface to the famous Immanuel Kant`s Cri­tique of Pure Reason. Translator Yurii Fedorchenko emphasizes the correctness of the translation of certain propositions of the original text, as well as the adequacy of the reader’s understanding and, accordingly, the need for a correct translation of certain terms of Kant’s philosophy, such as “Vermögen”, “Gebrauch”, “Anwendung”, “Ausführlichkeit”, “ Ziel”, “Zweck”, etc. This translation is accompanied by an analyti­cal article by the translator, which is posted above in the (...) same issue of the magazine “Philosophy of Education”. (shrink)

Frederick Beiser’s book is a valuable contribution to the revival of neo-Kantian studies characterizing the past few years: a trend that is blowing the dust off this important, yet hitherto neglected chapter of the history of philosophy. The quality of Beiser’s writing is excellent throughout, showing mastery of an impressive range of sources and treating with equal competence a variety of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of religion.In part 1, Beiser advances his most original historical claim about neo-Kantianism. (...) He argues that the movement has its origin in what he calls the “lost tradition”, that is, the empirical-psychological approach to Kant’s transcendental philosophy.. (shrink)

Drawing on resources from both the Analytical and Continental traditions, Form and World argues that a comprehension of Kant's aesthetics is necessary for grasping the scope and force of his epistemology. Fiona Hughes draws on phenomenological and aesthetic resources to bring out the continuing relevance of Kant's project. One of the difficulties faced in reading the Critique of Pure Reason is finding a way of reading the text as one continuous discussion. This book offers a reading at each (...) stage of Kant's epistemological argument, showing how various elements of Kant's argument, often thought of as extraneous or indefensible, can be integrated. This incisive study, arguing for the centrality of aesthetics in philosophy, and within experience in general, challenges a blind spot in the Anglo-American tradition of philosophy and will contribute to a growing interest in the general significance of aesthetic culture. (shrink)

This reissue of Kemal’s introduction to the first half of the Critique of Judgment, first published in 1992, adds a new five-page Preface to the otherwise unchanged text. The author discusses several works on Kant’s aesthetic theory that have been published since the first appearance of his book. The most extensive treatment is given to John H. Zammito’s “The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment” and Paul Guyer’s “Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality”. In (...) Kemal’s view, Zammito is right in hypothesizing a cognitive turn that would have led Kant to explore the nature of reflective judgments and in interpreting Kant’s position on art as part of Kant’s concept of culture. On the other hand, Kemal reproaches Zammito for having fragmented the third Critique and for failing to resolve several philosophical issues such as the relation between the cognitive and ethical turns as hypothesized by Zammito, and the nature and promise of art, the close association between genius and the sublime, and the differences between Kant and Herder on genius and the sublime. Kemal’s conclusion is that Zammito has overemphasized the process of constructing the third Critique at the expense of the theory presented there. With respect to Guyer, Kemal argues that Guyer makes an unwarranted assumption, based on an overly narrow understanding of Kant’s use of the word “nature,” namely, that the “Analytic of the Beautiful” had to be cast in terms of natural beauty. Kemal’s view is that Kant’s explanations of the nature of beauty in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” cover the objects of our experience and therefore include both natural beauty and fine art. Kemal argues that this is the basis of a misconstrual on Guyer’s part of his explanation described in chapter 6 of the distinctive interests and values that should be ascribed to fine art and natural beauty. (shrink)

There was no other work which accompanied Kant in his life and philosophy for such a long time and influenced his own thoughts on metaphysics to the extent that Baumgarten's Metaphysica (Metaphysics) did. For more than four decades, Kant based his lectures on this work and developed his own philosophy while constantly dealing with and analyzing Baumgarten's work. In 2000, Kant's first annotated copy of the Metaphysica was discovered, containing his earliest notes from the year 1756. Apart from their (...) didactic application, they also provide a unique insight into his interests in literature, history and philosophy at that time. What is remarkable is that in these notes Kant already outlined the ontotheological argument for the existence of God, the genesis of which refers back to Baumgarten. This spectacular discovery is contained for the first time in this edition, which also includes a detailed introduction as well as explanations of the subjects and indexes. German description: Kein anderes Werk hat Kant in seinem philosophischen Leben so lang begleitet und sein eigenes metaphysisches Denken derart gepragt wie Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Metaphysica. Uber vier Jahrzehnte lang legt Kant sie seinen metaphysischen Vorlesungen zugrunde und entwickelt seine eigene Transzendentalphilosophie in bestandiger Auseinandersetzung mit ihr. Im Jahr 2000 ist Kants erstes Handexemplar der Metaphysica entdeckt worden, das seine fruhesten Notate zu diesem Werk enthalt. Die vorliegende Ausgabe publiziert diese spektakulare Entdeckung nun erstmals mit einer ausfuhrlichen Einleitung sowie Sacherlauterungen und Registern. Kant hat die Notate zur Vorbereitung auf das Metaphysik-Kolleg angefertigt, das er fur das Sommersemester 1756 angekundigt hatte. Sie sind zu etwa gleichen Teilen in lateinischer und deutscher Sprache verfasst und entsprechen dem didaktischen Zweck der Lehrveranstaltung. Die Notate gewahren daruber hinaus einen einmaligen Einblick in seine literarischen, historischen und philosophischen Interessen zu dieser Zeit. Bemerkenswert ist, dass Kant hier bereits das ontotheologische Argument fur Gottes Existenz skizziert, dessen Genese auf Baumgarten zuruckweist. (shrink)

The late 1960s saw the emergence of new philosophical interest in Kant's philosophy of mathematics, and since then this interest has developed into a major and dynamic field of study. In this state-of-the-art survey of contemporary scholarship on Kant's mathematical thinking, Carl Posy and Ofra Rechter gather leading authors who approach it from multiple perspectives, engaging with topics including geometry, arithmetic, logic, and metaphysics. Their essays offer fine-grained analysis of Kant's philosophy of mathematics in the context of (...) his Critical philosophy, and also show sensitivity to its historical background. The volume will be important for readers seeking a comprehensive picture of the current scholarship about the development of Kant's philosophy of mathematics, its place in his overall philosophy, and the Kantian themes that influenced mathematics and its philosophy after Kant. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Deleuze developed a series of original philosophies of time and applied them successfully to many different fields. Now James Williams presents Deleuze's philosophy of time as the central concept that connects his philosophy as a whole. Through this conceptual approach, the book covers all the main periods of Deleuze's philosophy: the early studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson and Spinoza, the two great philosophical works, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, the Capitalism and Schizophrenia works with (...) Guattari, and the late influential studies of literature, film and painting.The result is an important reading of Deleuze and the first full interpretation of his philosophy of time. (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

This book explores the main stages and key concepts in the development of Kant's critical philosophy, from the early 1760s to the 1790s. Karl Ameriks provides a detailed and concise account of the main ways in which the later critical works provide a plausible defense of the conception of humanity's fundamental end that Kant turned to after reading Rousseau in the 1760s. Separate essays are devoted to each of the three Critiques, as well as to earlier notes and lectures (...) and several of Kant's later writings on history and religion. A final section devotes three chapters to post-Kantian developments in German Romanticism, accounts of tragedy up through Nietzsche, and contemporary philosophy. The theme of an elliptical path is shown to be relevant to these writers as well as to many aspects of Kant's own life and work. The topics of the book include fundamental issues in epistemology and metaphysics, with a new defense of the Amerik's 'moderate' interpretation of transcendental idealism. (shrink)

In his reconstruction of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole, Deleuze argues that the cognitive and practical faculties are genetically grounded in the affective, enlivening dynamics of the reflecting power of judgment. In this paper I propose to take Kant’s account of self-organisation as model for understanding this genesis of the faculties in terms of a circular causality that is purposively animated from within by a self-productive and self-maintaining tendency. The key argument I develop is that this generative tendency (...) may be understood as a conatus that is inherent to the power of judgment and comes to the fore in the subject’s feeling of life. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

In the first Critique, Kant famously holds a novel practical notion of Belief (Glauben) as assent justified not by evidence but by practical considerations. This paper examines the early development of Kant’s practical notion of Belief prior to the first Critique. It aims to make clear what prompted Kant to develop this notion in the first place, and how this notion came to assume its crucial role in Kant’s critical system. This development, I argue, has two main steps. The first (...) is his introduction of a practical notion of Belief in mid-to-late 1760s. I argue that he did so because he regards this notion as a useful tool to get ordinary people to justifiably commit to the existence of God and an after-life. The second step is Kant’s abandonment of the objective validity of his logical proof of God around 1772. This step elevated Belief from a merely useful means to the only justified way to commit to the existence of God and an after-life. This second step, I argue, is closely connected to Kant’s pivot to the view that the objective validity of concepts requires sensibly given objects, and it is motivated by Kant’s concern with subject-cancelling real repugnance. (shrink)

Kant’s Inferentialism draws on a wide range of sources to present a reading of Kant’s theory of mental representation as a direct response to the challenges issued by Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature. Kant rejects the conclusions that Hume draws on the grounds that these are predicated on Hume’s theory of mental representation, which Kant refutes by presenting objections to Hume’s treatment of representations of complex states of affairs and the nature of judgment. In its place, Kant combines (...) an account of concepts as rules of inference with a detailed account of perception and of the self as the locus of conceptual norms to form a complete theory of human experience as an essentially rule-governed enterprise aimed at producing a representation of the world as a system of objects necessarily connected to one another via causal laws. This interpretation of the historical dialectic enriches our understanding of both Hume and Kant and brings to bear Kant’s insights into mental representation on contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. Kant’s version of inferentialism is both resistant to objections to contemporary accounts that cast these as forms of linguistic idealism, and serves as a remedy to misplaced Humean scientism about representation. (shrink)

Kant’s doctrine of the Fact of Reason is one of the most perplexing aspects of his moral philosophy. The aim of this paper is to defend Kant’s doctrine from the common charge of dogmatism. My defense turns on a previously unexplored analogy to the notion of ‘matters of fact’ popularized by members of the Royal Society in the seventeenth century. In their work, ‘facts’ were beyond doubt, often referring to experimental effects one could witness first hand. While Kant uses the (...) German equivalent in different contexts, I argue that the scientific analogy opens up a new framework for interpreting his strategy of justification in the Critique of Practical Reason. In the final section, I address a few possible objections to my reading, one of which I anticipate coming from Dieter Henrich and Ian Proops, who have argued that Kant’s Fact of Reason is best understood under a legal analogy. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled _The Life of the Mind_. Unfortunately, Arendt lived to complete only the first two parts, _Thinking_ and _Willing_. Of the third, _Judging_, only the title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. As the titles suggest, Arendt conceived of her work as roughly parallel to the three _Critiques_ of Immanuel Kant. In fact, while she began work on _The Life of the Mind_, Arendt lectured (...) on "Kant's Political Philosophy," using the_ Critique of Judgment_ as her main text. The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area. (shrink)

In its own contemporary context, Kant’s views on the relationship between reason and religion played a crucial role in debates about the nature of the Enlightenment. The terms of that debate, as they were most sharply formulated by F. H. Jacobi, posed an either/or choice of reason or faith, between which Kant offered a third option that would synthesize reason and faith. A newly published collection of essays, Kant’s Philosophy of Religion Reconsidered, not only echoes this debate in current terms (...) but also suggests that the unfinished business of the Enlightenment in regard to morality, religion, and the historicity of reason is still with us. (shrink)

An extended philosophical analysis of the concept of judgement, important in many areas of contemporary philosophy, including epistemology, the philosophy of value and aesthetics.Kant's philosophy understands judgement in different ways in the cognition of nature, the appreciation of natural beauty, and in the determination of moral action. This book aims to explore these three 'philosophies' of judgement, producing in the process a new and creative reading of Kant's work. The result is a unique book-length study of judgement in (...) general. At the core of this reading is an interpretation of how Kant understands reflection, presentation and activity. Novel aspects include accounts of the transcendental object, the implications of considering cognition as an activity, the structure of sensible givenness, Kant on the sublime, and the moral argument.The book draws upon ideas from within the Continental philosophy tradition, particularly from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. To Nietzsche there is devoted a whole chapter on the subject of sensation and physics, which aims to expand upon and illuminate parallel discussions in the reading of Kant. Readers will find much of interest in this wide-ranging text, including treatments of key features in Kant's epistemology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, philosophy of religion as well as his practical philosophy.Features* The first book to consider Kant's account of judgement in general.* A unique interpretation of Kant, employing philosophers in the Continental tradition - e.g Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze.* Contains a sustained study of Nietzsche on the subject of sensation and physics. (shrink)

Perhaps the ultimate significance of Kant's Copernican revolution in philosophy lies in its attempted reconciliation of the transcendental, logical orientation of continental rationalism with the humanistic, psychological approach of British empiricism. With the rationalists, Kant distinguished sharply between questions concerning the causes and origins of our knowledge and questions about its limits and objective validity. Thus, a rigorous critique of psychologism, i.e. of any attempt to explain, or explain away the validity of either our cognitive or moral principles by (...) means of an analysis of their basis in human nature or their genesis in human experience, is one of the most characteristic traits of the Kantian philosophy. Yet this transcendental, logical investigation of the nature and limits of knowledge, and of the fundamental principles of morality leads Kant back to the human subject, in whose cognitive faculties he finds the a priori principles of human knowledge and in whose autonomy he finds the basis of the categorical imperative. This gives rise to a paradoxical conception of man as on the one hand, together with the rest of creation, a part of nature, subject to its laws, and on the other hand, in his capacity as knower and actor, a rational being who not only transcends nature in the sense that he is not completely determined by its laws, but who is actually the author of these laws. (shrink)

In this volume, thirteen distinguished contributors from the United States, Canada, Britain, and Germany cast light on important aspects of Kant's liberal thinking.

This book, ten years in the making, is the first factual and conceptual history of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), a key twentieth-century text whose background until now has been conspicuously absent. Through painstaking investigation of European archives and private correspondence, Theodore Kisiel provides an unbroken account of the philosopher's early development and progress toward his masterwork. Beginning with Heidegger's 1915 dissertation, Kisiel explores the philosopher's religious conversion during the bleak war years, the hermeneutic breakthrough in the war-emergency semester (...) of 1919, the evolution of attitudes toward his phenomenological mentor, Edmund Husserl, and the shifting orientations of the three drafts of Being and Time. Discussing Heidegger's little-known reading of Aristotle, as well as his last-minute turn to Kant and to existentialist terminology, Kisiel offers a wealth of narrative detail and documentary evidence that will be an invaluable factual resource for years to come. A major event for philosophers and Heidegger specialists, the publication of Kisiel's book allows us to jettison the stale view of Being and Time as a great book "frozen in time" and instead to appreciate the erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions of what remains a challenging philosophical "path.". (shrink)

This article explores the surprisingly decisive role that Kant’s “incongruity theory” of laughter plays in his aesthetic and broader critical philosophy. First, laughter constitutes a highly specific form of aesthetic judgment in Kant. Laughter involves a discordant relation between the cognitive faculties characteristic of the sublime, but this relation obtains between the understanding and the imagination, the two faculties at play in judgments of taste on the beautiful. Second, laughter is the transcendental condition of possibility for both the beautiful and (...) the sublime. While most commentators dismiss laughter as an afterthought of Kant’s aesthetics, laughter in fact constitutes the most basic aesthetic judgment in Kant. Third, an account of aesthetic judgment that begins with laughter transforms how we understand Kant’s argument that judgment unites nature and freedom. Namely, it reveals how an empirical world at odds with the subject’s purposes can nevertheless advance the subject’s rational vocation to think and act beyond the empirical. I conclude by arguing that Kantian critical philosophy is itself a philosophy of laughter. (shrink)

Wood (1970) convincingly argues that Kant’s notion of moral faith is a response to a “dialectical perplexity” or antinomy. Specifically, moral faith is a response to the threat of moral despair. In line with this suggestion, I make the case that moral faith is the resolution of a crisis about how to go on with one’s life in the face of the threat of moral despair. If this is right, then we have a potential solution to two related anxieties: (1) (...) why the matter of our moral faith or despair deserves to be a topic of practical philosophy instead of empirical psychology, and (2) how despair could be a real threat even though Kant holds that rational beings could never truly lack faith. But, to fully see how these concerns can be answered, we must go beyond Wood’s initial analysis. I first argue that Kant’s philosophy suggests two kinds of moral faith: external and internal. I then argue that internal moral faith is analogous to self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit) in the second Critique’s practical antinomy. Together, these arguments suggest that moral faith is a response to a real threat of moral despair, and that faith and despair dialectically require one another within practical reason. (shrink)

Schopenhauer's philosophy was formed during the years 1810–18. This chapter looks at the influences that shaped it, principally Kant, but also Plato, and the Upanishads. Schopenhauer aimed at a synthesis of these influences. Although indebted to Kant for the framework of his thought, he developed a conception of metaphysics and a ‘better consciousness’ of objective reality that would be free from the limitations imposed by Kant. Schopenhauer's antagonistic relationship with Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is also mentioned.

This concise volume is at once an excellent introduction to Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonand an original analysis of Kant's ideas.

One of the persistently controversial issues in the discussion of Kant’s moral philosophy is his view of the relation between the metaphysics of morals and human nature.

This paper argues that recent accounts of Kantian virtue as “strengthened” inner freedom apply much more clearly to the avoidance of violations of perfect duties than to the fulfillment of imperfect duties, leaving us with the question of how inadequate commitment to morally required ends impacts the exercise of inner freedom. The question is answered through the development of a model of inner freedom that emphasizes the relationship between moral self‐governance and participation in an ethical community.

Kant's views about mathematics were controversial in his own time, and they have inspired or infuriated thinkers ever since. Though specific Kantian doctrines fell into disrepute earlier in this century, the past twenty-five years have seen a surge of interest in and respect for Kant's philosophy of mathematics among both Kant scholars and philosophers of mathematics. The present volume includes the classic papers from the 1960s and 1970s which spared this renaissance of interest, together with updated postscripts by (...) their authors. It also includes the most important recent work on Kant's philosophy of mathematics. The essays bring to bear a wealth of detailed Kantian scholarship, together with powerful new interpretative tools drawn from modern mathematics, logic and philosophy. The cumulative effect of this collection upon the reader will be a deeper understanding of the centrality of mathematics in all aspects of Kant's thought and a renewed respect for the power of Kant's thinking about mathematics. The essays contained in this volume will set the agenda for further work on Kant's philosophy of mathematics for some time to come. (shrink)