This paper examines the formation of the philosophical canon in the period immediately after Kant. After a general introduction to the “historiography of philosophy,” it brings together three strands of contemporary scholarship in this area: a historical criticism of the empiricism/rationalism distinction that is often still used to understand early modern philosophy (Vanzo), histories of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy in the late eighteenth century (O’Neill), and histories of the exclusion of non-European (...) class='Hi'>philosophy (Park). Though these scholars have different agendas, their studies share many conclusions, including the key claim that the little-known Kantian historian of philosophy Wilhelm Tennemann is the central figure in the formation of the standard story. The paper closes by comparing the main outline of Tennemann’s surprisingly familiar narrative of the history of philosophy with the standard text from before the Kantian revolution in the historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

Despite the praise his writing garnered during his lifetime, e.g., from readers such as Einstein and de Broglie, Émile Meyerson has been largely forgotten. The rich tradition of French épistémologie has recently been taken up in some Anglo-American scholarship, but Meyerson—who popularized the term épistémologie through his historical method of analyzing science, and criticized positivism long before Quine and Kuhn—remains overlooked. If Meyerson is remembered at all, it is as a historian of classical science. This paper attempts to rectify both (...) states of affairs by explicating one of Meyerson׳s last and untranslated works, Réel et déterminisme dans la théorie quantique, an opuscule on quantum physics.I provide an overview of Meyerson׳s philosophy, his critique of Max Planck׳s interpretation of quantum physics, and then outline and evaluate Meyerson׳s neo-Kantian alternative. I then compare and contrast this interpretation with Cassirer׳s neo-Kantian program. Finally I show that, while Meyerson believes the revolutionary new physics requires "profoundly" modifying our conception of reality, ultimately, he thinks, it secures the legitimacy of his thesis: that science seeks explanations in the form of what he calls "identification." I hope my research will enable a more general and systematic engagement with Meyerson׳s work, especially with a view to assessing its viability as a philosophical method today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the WillDavid A. Wisner‘Tis not Wit merely, but a Temper, which must form a Well-Bred Man. In the same manner, ‘tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and a Resolution which must compleate the real Philosopher. 1In order to possess the world of culture we must incessantly reconquer it by historical recollection. But recollection does not mean merely the act of reproduction. It is (...) a new intellectual synthesis—a constructive act.... History is not knowledge of external facts or events; it is a form... an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for building up our human universe. 2Ernst Cassirer is probably best known to historians of ideas for his work on the problem of knowledge, which began with a neo-Kantian historical analysis of epistemological questions and culminated in the philosophy of symbolic forms. As he himself always admitted, even in his last public writings, this focus on epistemology was the foundation of his philosophical interests. Yet by the last two decades of his life he had in true Socratic fashion endowed his investigations with heightened emphasis. “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry,” he wrote in the opening lines of An Essay on Man, “appears to be generally acknowledged.” 3 Cassirer perceived, however, [End Page 145] that the need for such an effort to be made had reached monumentally critical proportions: the early twentieth century had engendered grave historical and philosophical crises which threatened to reverse the progress of modern thought. Paradoxically, modern philosophy had many tools for attaining “knowledge of human nature” and yet stood farther from its goal than ever before. What Cassirer called “anthropological philosophy,” concerned as it was “with the whole destiny of man,” still required special consideration, in both its theoretical and its historical dimensions. 4 It was essentially to these twin domains that Cassirer would devote himself in his later years.The transformation of Cassirer’s philosophical perspectives thus had two facets. In order to outline his program Cassirer had first to consider a broader range of human activities than thought alone, from which he concluded that human culture consisted of a hierarchy of symbolic forms beginning with myth and culminating in science. However, he also felt compelled to elucidate the historical process by which these symbolic forms could progressively manifest themselves, and more specifically the individual human effort which was required for true self-knowledge. This he did principally in his historical works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and with particularly profound results: from a historian of knowledge Cassirer became a historian of the will; from an epistemologist he became an ethical thinker; from an academic he became an exemplar of self-conscious moral action, a paragon of human autonomy and freedom. Indeed, in this endeavor he proved to be more thoroughly and fundamentally a Kantian than ever his theory of knowledge would reveal.I would go so far as to suggest that Cassirer’s history of the will was an integral part of his mature constructive philosophy. On the surface this history can be restated in the following terms. First, Cassirer insists on a fundamental opposition between the rationalism and intellectualism of ancient Greek philosophy and the voluntarism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, both of which represent in Cassirer’s view manifestations of a struggle in Western thought continuing well into the twentieth century. Second, he suggests that the historical task of Western philosophy since the first mature articulation of Latin Christian theology by Saint Augustine has been to liberate the individual human will from any and all forms of subservience. Such views are most forcefully expressed in The Myth of the State, Cassirer’s last book, but they actually constitute an essential and coherent element in all of Cassirer’s later work on the history of ideas and culture. Indeed, Cassirer’s history of the will provides us with a particularly keen and nuanced account of this essential Western legacy, while at the same time reading into it in Kantian manner a moral for the life of the individual human being. [End Page 146]In making such claims I am situating myself among... (shrink)

Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should (...) not elide the differences between the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Historians of science have long been intrigued by the impact of disparate cultural styles on the science of a given country and time period. Richard Olson’s book is a case study in the interaction between philosophy and science as well as an examination of a particular scientific movement. The author investigates the methodological arguments of the Common Sense philosophers Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and William Hamilton and the possible transmission of their ideas to scientists from John (...) Playfair to James Clerk Maxwell. His findings point out the need for modifications to the Duhem-Poincaré interpretation of British scientific style and the reassessment of the extent of Kantian influence on British physics. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Kant once wrote, “Many historians of philosophy... let the philosophers speak mere nonsense.... They cannot see beyond what the philosophers actually said to what they really meant to say.’ Rae Langton begins her book with this quotation. She concludes it, after a final pithy summary of the position that she attributes to Kant, with the comment, “That, it seems to me, is what Kant said, and meant to say”. In between are some two hundred pages of admirably clear, (...) tightly argued exegesis, supplemented by detailed references, in which she offers what the dust jacket blurb fairly describes as “a new interpretation and defence of Kant’s doctrine of things in themselves.” This is an extremely engaging and thought-provoking book. I am pleased to recommend it. (shrink)

Kant describes the concept of freedom as "the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason." Kant's theory of freedom thus plays a foundational and unifying role in all aspects of his philosophy and is thus of significant interest to historians of Kant's philosophy. Kant's theory of freedom has also played a significant role in contemporary debates in metaphysics, normative ethics, and metaethics. This volume brings historians of Kant's (...) class='Hi'>philosophy into conversation with contemporary metaphysicians and ethicists with the aim of representing the current state of scholarship on Kant's and Kantian accounts of freedom while at the same time opening new avenues of exploration. The Idea of Freedom includes papers by leading scholars on a range of historical and contemporary topics centrally related to the Kantian theory of freedom, including transcendental idealism, determinism, Kant's normative ethical theory, Kant's conception of cognition, Kant's theory of beauty, Kant's conception of logic, and many others. (shrink)

Ranging from Joseph Bellamy to Hilary Putnam, and from early New England Divinity Schools to contemporary university philosophy departments, historian Bruce Kuklick recounts the story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the United States. Readers will explore the thought of early American philosphers such as Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon and will see how the political ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson influenced philosophy in colonial America. Kuklick discusses The Transcendental Club (members Henry David (...) Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson) and describes the rise of pragmatism centered on Metaphysical Club of Cambridge (and members William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Peirce). He examines the profound impact Darwinism had on American philosophy and looks at Idealists such as the Kantian Josiah Royce and the Hegelian John Dewey. The book shows how, in the twentieth century, the Nazi conquest of Europe unleashed a flood of European intellectuals onto these shores, including such major thinkers as Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, Rudolph Carnap, and Alfred Tarski. Finally, Kuklick examines the contributions of such contemporary philosophers as Sidney Hook and Willard Quine and such books as John Rawl's A Theory of Justice and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. Kuklick pulls no punches in portraying the state of American philosophy today and its contested role in the intellectual life of the nation and the world. The range of philosophical thought in our nation's history has been great, from Edwards's Religious Affections to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Bruce Kuklick has captured it all in a book that blends intricate details with sweeping vision. (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have (...) done so much to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant and Henry Sidgwick are towering figures in the history of moral philosophy. Kant's views on ethics continue to be discussed and studied in detail not only in philosophy, but also theology, political science, and legal theory. Meanwhile, Sidgwick is emerging as the philosopher within the utilitarian tradition who merits the same meticulous treatment that Kant receives. As champions of deontology and consequentialism respectively, Kant and Sidgwick disagree on many important issues. However, close examination reveals a surprising (...) amount of consensus on various topics including moral psychology, moral epistemology, and moral theology. This book presents points of agreement and disagreement in the writings of these two giants of philosophical ethics. The chapters will stimulate discussions among moral theorists and historians of philosophy by applying cutting-edge scholarship on each philosopher to shed light on some of the more perplexing arguments and views of the other, and by uncovering and examining points of agreement between Sidgwick and Kant as possible grounds for greater convergence in contemporary moral philosophy. This is the first full-length volume to investigate Sidgwick and Kant side by side. It will be of major interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy and its history. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy, science, and mathematics explore the influence of Kant's philosophy on the evolution of modern scientific thought.

The historical techniques of theodor gomperz, Friedrich jodl, Wilhelm jerusalem, And rudolf eisler are described. All four excelled at expositing and comparing widely divergent doctrines. Gomperz and jerusalem discussed how social practices influenced doctrines. Eisler was perhaps the most encyclopedic historian of philosophy ever. Johnston's book "the austrian mind" (berkeley, 1971) relates the four philosophers to seventy other austrian thinkers.

This paper traces the ancestry of a familiar historiographical narrative, according to which early modern philosophy was marked by the development of empiricism, rationalism, and their synthesis by Immanuel Kant. It is often claimed that this narrative became standard in the nineteenth century, due to the influence of Thomas Reid, Kant and his disciples, or German Hegelians and British Idealists. The paper argues that the narrative became standard only at the turn of the twentieth century. This was not due (...) to the influence of Reid, German Hegelians, or British Idealists as they did not endorse the narrative, although Thomas Hill Green may have facilitated its uptake. The narrative is based on Kant’s historiographical sketches, as corrected and integrated by Karl Leonhard Reinhold. It was first fleshed out into full-fledged histories by two Kantians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle. Numerous historians, several of whom were not Kantians, spread it in the English-speaking world. They include Kuno Fischer, Friedrich Ueberweg, Richard Falckenberg, and Wilhelm Windelband. However, the wide availability of their works did not suffice to make the narrative standard because, until the 1890s, the Hegelian account was at least as popular as theirs. Among the factors that allowed the narrative to become standard are its aptness to be adopted by philosophers of the most diverse persuasions, its simplicity and suitability for teaching. (shrink)

Clanak analizira razvoj istorijskofilozofskog istrazivanja kasnosholastickih izvora Dekartove teorije ideja. U prvom delu analizira se dugo vremena dominantan stav medju istoricarima filozofije da je Dekartova teorija ideja u biti epistemologija. Uzroci napustanja takve, umnogome novokantovstvom uslovljene slike bili su pojava nove generacije istoricara filozofije koja je istrazivala i nemetafizicke oblasti Dekartove misli, ali i rad na samoj kasnosholastickoj filozofiji. U drugom delu pokazuje se zasto je za Dekarta relevantna kasna sholastika, a ne, na primer, Toma Akvinski i zasto se od (...) kasnosholastickih mislilaca po znacaju posebno izdvaja Francisko Suarez. (shrink)

Franz Brentano was a leading philosopher and psychologist of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the impact of his scholarship was so great that he became synonymous with a school of thought and a new approach in scientific philosophy. The Brentano School stood against the Idealistic and post-Kantian German tradition and Brentano played a crucial role in the founding of Austrian philosophy. He had an enormous impact on the work of Husserl and Heidegger, as well as on Moore’s _Ethics_ (...) and Stout and Russell’s analysis of mind. In particular, situated between the phenomenology movement and the analytic tradition, the concept of intentionality was redefined by Brentano and has been—and remains—a key concept of twentieth- and twentieth-first century philosophy of mind. But Brentano not only reshaped philosophy of mind; he was also a remarkable and innovative thinker in several other fields of philosophy, and recent debate in metaethics, metaphysics, and the history of analytic philosophy shows a strong resurgence of interest in Brentano’s thought. Published to coincide with the centenary of Brentano’s death, this four-volume collection, a new title from Routledge Major Works, provides an essential intellectual tool for the exegetical evaluation of all aspects of Brentano’s work. Bringing together early reviews and reactions from his contemporaries—many of which have never before been translated into English—as well as the best critical assessments of Brentano’s work, this ‘mini library’ provides Brentano scholars, historians of philosophy and psychology, and phenomenologists, with a rigorous historical appraisal of Brentano’s thought and influence. Brentano’s relationships with Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological tradition are examined in depth, alongside investigations of key themes from his work on Aristotle, medieval and modern philosophy, philosophy of mind, logic, ontology, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history. (shrink)

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (first published in 1797 and revised in 1803), one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In (...) the revisions of 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

Providing a concise but comprehensive overview of Joseph B. Soloveitchik's larger philosophical program, this book studies one of the most important modern Orthodox Jewish thinkers. It incorporates much relevant biographical, philosophical, religious, legal, and historical background so that the content and difficult philosophical concepts are easily accessible. The volume describes his view of Jewish law and how he answers the fundamental question of Jewish philosophy, namely, the "reasons" for the commandments. It shows how many of his disparate books, essays, (...) and lectures on law, specific commandments, and Jewish religious phenomenology can be woven together to form an elegant philosophical program. It also provides an analysis and summary of Soloveitchik's views on Zionism and on interreligious dialogue and the contexts for Soloveitchik's respective stances on issues that were pressing in his role as a leader of a major branch of post-war Orthodox Judaism. The book provides a synoptic overview of the philosophical works of Joseph B. Soloveitchik. It will be of interest to historians and scholars studying neo-Kantian philosophy, Jewish thought, and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (first published in 1797 and revised in 1803), one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. (...) In the revisions of 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay considers the relationship between history of science and philosophy of science from Thomas Kuhn to the present. This relationship, of course, has often been troubled, but there is now new hope for an ongoing productive interaction—due to an increasing awareness, among other things, of the mutual entanglement between the development of modern science and the development of modern philosophy on the part of both professional (historically minded) philosophers and professional historians of science. This idea (...) is illustrated with several examples, including the entanglement of Einstein's theory of relativity with logical empiricism and its precursors and the entanglement of the analytic tradition in philosophy first with mathematical logic and then (through mathematical logic) with the cognitive sciences. Against this background, finally, the essay considers the emergence of contemporary social and cultural history of science from the Kantian and neo‐Kantian philosophical traditions. (shrink)

These essays originated from an international conference of the same name. The collection brings together philosophers and historians of philosophy for fruitful interchange to foster the current revival of interest in this important sector of 20th century philosophy. Contents: Empiricism: The Key Question, Wesley C. Salmon; Pragmatics and the Principle of Empiricism, Brian Skyrms; The Logic of 20th Century Empiricism, Joseph Hanna; Reduction Sentence "Meaning Postulates", James H. Fetzer; The Context of Justification, John Kekes; Logical Positivism and (...) the Demise of "Moral Science", Geoffrey Sayre-McCord; "The First Man who almost wholly understands me": Carnap, Dingler and Conventionalism; Conventionalism Reconsidered, Werner Diederick; Carnap's Scientific Realism: Irenic or Ironic?, Richard Creath; Idealism and the Aufbau, Alberto Coffa; The Neo-Kantian Origin of Hans Reichenbach's Principle of Induction, A. Kamlah. Co-published with the Center for Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Interactive theorem provers might seem particularly impractical in the history of philosophy. Journal articles in this discipline are generally not formalized. Interactive theorem provers involve a learning curve for which the payoffs might seem minimal. In this article I argue that interactive theorem provers have already demonstrated their potential as a useful tool for historians of philosophy; I do this by highlighting examples of work where this has already been done. Further, I argue that interactive theorem provers (...) can continue to be useful tools for historians of philosophy in the future; this claim is defended through a more conceptual analysis of what historians of philosophy do that identifies argument reconstruction as a core activity of such practitioners. It is then shown that interactive theorem provers can assist in this core practice by a description of what interactive theorem provers are and can do. If this is right, then computer verification for historians of philosophy is in the offing. (shrink)

In 2019, Christia Mercer has published a paper in which she does a reassessment of the 2015 debate between Garber and Della Rocca on what would be the correct interpretation of Spinoza. Following Mercer, the two philosophers instantiated two main positions regarding the concept and the methodology of doing history of philosophy, namely, contextualism and appropriationism. As Mercer puts it, it is pivoted around the acceptance or rejection of one single principle, i.e. the “Getting Things Right Constraint” (GTRC), which (...) can be rendered as the clause that forbids the attribution of claims or ideas to historical figures without concern for whether or not they are ones the figures would recognize as their own. However, rather than be an undoubtful principle, it conceals a great number of tough questions about the very meaning of what one should understand by “getting things right”. Following what Mulligan names the “Austrian approach” to the history of philosophy, this paper aims to unfold some aspects of Brentano’s “philosophy of history of philosophy” to look for his contributions to a problem that was already present at the origins of contemporary philosophy. Keywords: Brentano. Contextualism. Appropriationism. History of Philosophy. (shrink)

A translation of the small volume originally published in 1939 based on De Vleeschauwer's classic La Déduction transcendentale dans l'œuvre de Kant, in which the author approaches the subject as "the historian of a great system and the biographer of a great mind." In addition to the detailed historical information, the study is valuable for exhibiting the philosophic perplexities involved in the construction of Kant's critical philosophy.--R. J. B.

Plotinus's theory of dual selfhood is one of the best-known and most puzzling aspects of his philosophy. Each human being, he held, is both a compound of body and soul and a discarnate member of the hypostasis Intellect. He built evaluative norms into this duality, all of which derive from what he argued to be the ontological superiority of the discarnate element in us over the body-soul compound. This led him, in turn, to claim that the best and happiest (...) human life is a life of self-purification, mostly devoted to the care of the higher self.Until fairly recently, scholarly consensus had been that, in so centering his "ethics" around the higher self, Plotinus had downplayed what we moderns take to be the very core of the moral life, namely, concern for the needs and entitlements of other agents . It was also generally agreed that, in his description of the ethical life, Plotinus had done no more than develop a claim that is prevalent in ancient theories of ethics, most of which present the life of rational self-fulfillment as the best life for a human being to lead. Ancient ethics, it was then concluded, crucially differs from its modern, post-Kantian, counterpart.This interpretation is now under attack. While some historians of ethics have for some time argued that it is exegetically misleading to set up a sharp dichotomy between ancient and. (shrink)

Bergman's view on the History of philosophy can be characterised as a heuristic doctrine which helps the philosophical pedagogue. Some problems arising from Bergman's religious way of thinking are revealed as underpinning the objections to it, as there are: the multiplicity of systems, the possibility of acquiring final truth, etc. In spite of these objections Bergman's ideas can be maintianed as a very efficient means for a teacher of academic philosophy.

In this paper I examine Kant's conception of the history of pure reason and its relation to his metaphilosophy as it is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason [Kritik der reinen Vernunft] (KrV). In particular, I will attempt to answer the following question: why did Kant conclude the KrV with the history of pure reason and why did he insist that, without it, a gap would remain in his system? In the course of attempting to answer this question, I (...) will argue that Kant chose to conclude the KrV with a sketch of the history of pure reason because he took his ability to provide the history of pure reason to be a mark of the adequacy and success of his own philosophical system, in so far as it is the system which comprehends the nature of human reason, specifically the teleological nature of human reason (i.e., the system that recognizes that reason has intrinsic, self-imposed interests and goals) and insofar as it is the only system which, as the culmination of all the past systems of philosophy, is in a position to identify and satisfy all of the interests of human reason. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s LegacyPaul Richard BlumChristopher S. Celenza. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 210. Cloth, $45.00This is a programmatic book about why and how philosophy should care about Renaissance texts. Celenza starts with an assessment of the neglect of the wealth of Latin Renaissance [End Page (...) 485] sources by nineteenth-century historiography, followed by portraits of two prototypal twentieth-century historians and their philosophical approach. He proposes a method of study for Renaissance thinkers and exemplifies it with two key figures and with the concept of honor. A survey of the field of study and an appendix concerning Renaissance research in the US conclude the book."The Renaissance" as a field of research between the Middle Ages and what is now cowardly called "Early Modern" became legitimate through the awakening of national consciousness in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the emphasis lay on vernacular language works in Italy and elsewhere. Latin Renaissance literature never was worthy of Grossforschung, i.e., of national projects like the academy enterprises concerning world history or classical studies, even though classical philology originated in the humanists' emulation of the ancients. This however would be absorbed by the nineteenth-century idea of national character (12).Italian Hegelianism of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century included Renaissance philosophy in the evolution of national spirit, and the late Eugenio Garin as its pupil spent his scholarly life portraying with astounding precision and detail Italian Humanism and Renaissance as a dialectic and rational development. Equally diligent was the German born Paul Oskar Kristeller, clinging, however, to a very different understanding of philosophy, which Celenza describes as rationalist in the Kantian and metaphysical in the Platonico-Aristotelian tradition (41). Here the author underestimates the influence of Heidegger on Kristeller: his dissertation was clearly an interpretation of Plotinus in the light of existentialism, which still transpires in his famous Ficino book and many later philosophical statements. The problem with both approaches, that of Garin and that of Kristeller, is that those philosophers who ignore history (deliberately or incidentally) and those who lost an understanding of metaphysics do not know how to read Renaissance thinkers.'Microhistory' is the formula Celenza proposes: Richard Rorty's abolishing the notion of 'representing' reality in favor of evocation and conversation—both for the interpretation of the past and the past itself—and Pierre Bourdieux's notions of 'field' and 'relational thinking' open the possibility of locating past thinkers in their community and, consequently, the meaning of their philosophical endeavor. What Celenza exercised with Garin and Kristeller applies also to Renaissance authors. Under the heading 'Orthodoxy,' Celenza shows that it is unfortunate to censure Lorenzo Valla (+ 1457) or Marsilio Ficino (+ 1499) as being unorthodox or as precursors to the Reformation, because this perspective misses the point of their lives' work—namely, to find out what makes Christian beliefs and their sources Christian. Valla's discoveries in Greek and Latin philology and Ficino's experiments with magic are part of their scrutiny of orthopraxy (my term), the right way of Christian life, and are embedded in their conversations with friend and foe, who in some cases still await discovery. The far-reaching message of these two samples is: reading their work and studying their conversations is the way to study philosophy in the fifteenth century.The same is proven by engaging in social concepts such as 'honor.' Starting with a surprising appreciation of gender studies, Celenza suggests taking a look at intellectual masculinity among courtiers and writers. Then it turns out that Machiavelli bequeathed to modernity—perhaps as a caricature—the structure of struggle for power, ideas, and provision in which humanists were engaged, being the first large generation of intellectuals outside the safe haven of cathedrals and convents."What is really there?" is the concluding question. A new canon, the prelude to early modern sociology of scholarship, and models of—presently highly acclaimed—contextualization of intellectual productivity. Returning to the Latinity of Renaissance sources Celenza shows that even the emergence of vernacular literature, which bewitched nationalist historiography, was by itself a fruit... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 (2002) 268-270 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 Anthony J. La Vopa. Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 449. Cloth, $54.95. Few philosophers have led more dramatic lives than J. G. Fichte, whose serendipitous ascent from rural poverty to (...) academic celebrity was only the beginning of a career filled with conflict and punctuated by moments of public triumph and failure. Though Fichte's philosophical writings are among the most abstract and difficult in the history of modern philosophy, it is nevertheless possible to observe certain parallels between his technical "philosophy of striving" and his personal striving to establish himself financially and professionally, [End Page 268] to win an audience for his thought, and, above all, to have an effect upon his age. The links between Fichte's "times," career, and philosophy are the topic of Anthony La Vopa's fine new study of the first thirty-eight years of the philosopher's life. La Vopa is a historian, not a philosopher, and he has little to say about the specific details and originality of Fichte's philosophical contributions, and what he does say on this subject--for example, his claim that one of Fichte's advances over Kant was to assign the productive imagination a central role in cognition, or his assertion that Fichte collapsed the Kantian distinction between willing and cognizing--often betrays a certain naiveté on his part and an unfamiliarity with the specifically philosophical context of Fichte's project.Though La Vopa is not interested in the complex details of the foundational portion of Fichte's system and has nothing to say about the important evolution of the same during Fichte's tenure at Jena, he is quite concerned with Fichte's social, legal, and economic theories, as articulated in the Grundlage des Naturrechts and the ClosedCommercial State (despite the fact that the latter work really falls outside the "Jena period"), and he provides a detailed and enlightening account of Fichte's eccentric labor-based neo-mercantilism and its relationship to other economic theories. Even here, though, La Vopa is less interested in Fichte's own ideas than in the relation of the same to his life and the relation of both his life and his thought to larger intellectual and social currents. It is in this spirit that he attempts to show, for example, that Fichte's strategy of grounding both theoretical and practical reason upon an analysis of the "pure I" is best understood as a continuation of the "subjective turn" characteristic of Protestantism as a whole and that his Sisyphean efforts to create a Publikum for his philosophy were deeply rooted in the Protestant conception of a "calling."The aim of this volume, according to its author, is to "contextualize Fichte's construal of selfhood" and to view his thought through eighteenth-century lenses, rather than through "the distorting lenses of modern ideologies." La Vopa thus interprets the development of Fichte's thought as "a series of moments in the secularization of Lutheranism," a project that he finds most clearly expressed in Fichte's vision of spiritual regeneration and in his uncompromising moral rigor. This experiment in historical contextualization largely avoids the kind of anti-philosophical reductionism common to such efforts, and La Vopa never claims to have "explained" Fichte's philosophy simply by placing it so squarely in the context of its age. On the contrary, he displays a fine sensitivity to questions concerning the relationship between history and philosophy, and he wisely leaves it to his readers to judge for themselves the philosophical value of his enterprise. As an intellectual biography, this book is reliable, expertly informed, and genuinely readable. Any philosopher interested in early post-Kantianism will learn a great deal from La Vopa's account of the larger intellectual, social, economic, and political landscape of the period. To take but two examples: La Vopa's detailed discussion of... (shrink)

This sub Introduction, Theory, points on the four parts and conclusions. In the "Introduction", the author first introduces the history of philosophy of Kant and Hegel's views, but the authors believe that two views have a certain problem is that Kant's philosophy of history to look too lightly, and Hegel the history of philosophy was too close. In the "General Theory", in order to explore the significance of the history of philosophy essays for the fundamental, the (...) author lists a number is supplied, as a reflection of the base, including: Kant on the "School of the meaning of philosophy" and "philosophy of world significance," the difference between philosophy and activities of the "situation" question, the history of philosophy essays for the situation involving the gap between philosophy and history of past and future-oriented philosophy, history and progress of the initiative problems, history of philosophy and the various phases and the mark of the complexity of the philosophical history and context of development issues, and so on. In the "sub-theory", in order to illustrate the history of the Yao Mu essays on philosophy and understanding for the profound impact, the authors cited the history of Western philosophy, the most representative of the various phases and standard names to show which may involve the all the complexity and make the initial critical reflection. In the "conclusion", the authors bring out the "real" and "Spirit of the Void" two essays for the history of philosophy the difference between style , and that must be further developed in the former over the latter , historian of philosophy to the essays in the history of philosophy as a method to obtain the initiative and make sense of the history of philosophy to open up space to be creative. This paper consists of four sections. In section one, it starts with a criticism of the Kantian and Hegelian views of the history of philosophy, which the author considers both problematic, as they render the historiography of philosophy an intellectual undertaking which is either too trivial or too rigid. in section two, in order to secure for the historiography of philosophy a more meaningful basis, a number of features pertinent to the issue were outlined, such as: Kant's own distinction between philosophy in scholastic sense and in cosmic sense, the problem of "situation", the discrepancies of situations in the historiography of philosophy, past and future orientations, the question of activeness and progress, simplicity and complexity in periodization and nomenclature, the notion of development and of context, etc. In the third section , to exemplify how these features merit our serious attention, the various phases or periods of the history of Western philosophy are discussed so that the complexities of their possible reinterpretation are exposed for critical reflection. In the last section, the paper concludes with a brief demarcation between the historiography of facts and the historiography of meaning, and suggests that only by developing the latter on top of and beyond the former can a more comprehensive programme be attempted, so that historiography of philosophy can become methodologically active on the one hand and thematically open to innovative reflections and reinterpretations on the other. (shrink)

Kant stated that there are three mental faculties: cognition, feeling, and desire. The faculty of feeling has received the least scholarly attention, despite its importance in Kant's broader thought, and this volume of new essays is the first to present multiple perspectives on a number of important questions about it. Why does Kant come to believe that feeling must be described as a separate faculty? What is the relationship between feeling and cognition, on the one hand, and desire, on the (...) other? What is the nature of feeling? What do the most discussed Kantian feelings, such as respect and sublimity, tell us about the nature of feeling for Kant? And what about other important feelings that have been overlooked or mischaracterized by commentators, such as enthusiasm and hope? This collaborative and authoritative volume will appeal to Kant scholars, historians of philosophy, and those working on topics in ethics, aesthetics, and emotions. (shrink)

This is an English translation of Schelling's Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, one of the most significant works in the German tradition of philosophy of nature and early nineteenth-century philosophy of science. It stands in opposition to the Newtonian picture of matter as constituted by inert, impenetrable particles, and argues instead for matter as an equilibrium of active forces that engage in dynamic polar opposition to one another. In the revisions of 1803 Schelling incorporated this dialectical (...) view into a neo-Platonic conception of an original unity divided upon itself. The text is of more than simply historical interest: its daring and original vision of nature, philosophy, and empirical science will prove absorbing reading for all philosophers concerned with post-Kantian German idealism, for scholars of German Romanticism, and for historians of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FERMENT IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE REVISITED PAUL T. DURBIN University of Delaware Newark, Delaware I N 1986 I published a survey of some then-recent works in academic philosophy of science, primarily in the United States (The Thomist 50/4 (Oct. 1986): 689-700). My theme was continuity amid change, with a secondary focus on the diversity of philosophers' discussions of science-a diversity much greater than many academic philosophers of (...) science were then admitting. In my earlier survey, I conceded that one recent contribution, by Ronald Giere, represents something genuinely novel in philosophy of science. I was concentrating there on an early adumbration, in article form, of Giere's new approach, which-following W. V. Quine-he has dubbed "naturalized philosophy of science." Giere soon produced a book length version of this approach, Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach (1988), and it is with that book that I want to begin my survey here. Giere says that from the beginning of his graduate studies in philosophy he had been " troubled... because philosophical discussions of induction seemed so remote from scientific practice as [he] had known it (Explaining Science, p. xv). But, twentyfive years later, his skepticism had increased markedly: From this skepticism, and some fortuitous encounters with work in cognitive science, Giere quickly went on to perceive the I began to lose my faith in the general program.... My skepticism progressed to the point that I now believe there are no special philosophical foundations to any science. There is only deep theory, which, however, is part of science itself (p. xvi). 655 656 PAUL T. DURBIN outlines of his new naturalized philosophy of science. This involves the view that, in general, " cognitive agents... develop representations of the world and make judgments about both the world and their representations of it." And, in particular in Giere's view, "scientists [are] cognitive agents and... scientific models [are] a special type of representation" (pp. xvi-xvii). Philosophy of science is not exactly expendable, but its task becomes one of understanding what scientists do, not of providing rational foundations for it. Later, Giere is even more explicit about the rejections this naturalized approach entails. It means, he says, giving up philosophical definitions of rationality, where he explicitly mentions Karl Popper and Larry Laudan-with their conflicting definitions of rationality-as examples (p. 8). And Giere equally forcefully repudiates other alleged philosophical foundations, whether empiricist, positivist, Kantian, etc. (p. 15). What Giere includes in his approach is an evolutionary naturalism (with debts to Donald Campbell and George Gale, among others), openness to social influences on cognitive resources, and close parallels with " traditional [internalist] historians of science " (p. 19). However, Giere goes on, "evolutionary models of scientific development recommend some changes in the way the history of science is conceived," moving it in the direction that "social historians" have moved for other reasons: "To see the processes of variation and selection at work, one must look at many members of a research community, including those who are unsuccessful" (p. 19).1 Despite Giere's repudiation of "over fifty years [of] philosophy of science " in which its practitioners " have labored to·elucidate the nature of scientific theories and the [rational] criteria for choosing one theory over others " (Explaining Science, 1 An approach very similar to Giere's (in my opinion) has been provided in David Hull's Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (1988)-though Hull makes no use of cognitive science models, and his examples are from the history of biological research communities. PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 657 p. 5), that enterprise continues unabated. And it is to these continuing efforts that I turn next. I. Conventional Philosophy of Science I begin with an excellent textbook that clearly and authoritatively summarizes all the traditional issues-and defends their continued relevance against the critics. The textbook is Merrilee Salmon et al., Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (1992), a collaborative work produced by members of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Focusing on this one textbook is not meant to disparage the others that are now appearing with increasing frequency in a field... (shrink)

Though any talk about a "Reinhold renaissance" would be decidedly premature, it is nevertheless the case that his writings are currently being read and examined to a degree that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The better-known works continue to be reissued in newly edited editions, and plans for the first collected edition of Reinhold's writings continue to proceed, albeit at a glacial pace. Reinhold has also been the subject of numerous recent articles and monographs. This new (...) interest in Reinhold on the part of European scholars has yet to be matched by Anglophone authors. No doubt, this is to some extent a reflection of the simple fact that only one work of his has hitherto been available in English translation, namely, George di Giovanni's abridged version of The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge, included in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, which is now, unfortunately, out of print. A chapter of Frederick Beiser's The Fate of Reason was devoted to Reinhold, and there have also been a few essays on his philosophy published in English by other historians of philosophy. (shrink)

This essay shows how Gentile's 'method of immanence' informed his distinctive approach to the history of philosophy. By reference to Gentile's influential studies of thinkers such as Rosmini, Gioberti and Vico, Haddock shows how a method of internal criticism that he had employed throughout his work on history of philosophy could be distilled as an appropriate method for philosophy itself. Gentile always denied that a disciplined approach to philosophy could be attained without serious engagement with the (...) history of philosophy. In important respects, he saw them as aspects of a single enterprise. (shrink)

In this response to Lu-Adler’s “Kant on Public Reason and the Linguistic Other,” I summarize the restrictions the scholarship condition imposes on the public use of reason in Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” I then agree that Lu-Adler identifies an even more radical set of restrictions on the public use of reason, confirming that Kant is not the liberal egalitarian he is often supposed to be by intellectual historians, historians of philosophy, and Kant scholars. After that, I (...) suggest that what Lu-Adler calls “the construction of a linguistic other” in Kant’s lectures on logic and anthropology can also be understood as “Kantian linguistic racialization.” I close with a short reflection on how we should respond to Kant’s illiberal, inegalitarian, linguistic racism. (shrink)

A Kantian Utopia in Russia: Erikh Solov'ëv. The article deals with Erikh Solov'ëv, a historian of philosophy who is one of the best Soviet and post-Soviet exponents of Kant. In several of his works and articles, published in the 1990s, Solov'ëv has attempted to apply the ideas of Kant's social philosophy to post-Soviet realities. Kant is important above all as a theoretician of a free subjectivity, human rights, and a critic of paternalism in social life. Several (...) class='Hi'>Kantian motives came to the fore during the perestrojka when the Marxist "class approach" was abandoned and "all-human" values entered into the discussion. Later, Solov'ëv attempted to develop Kantian guidelines for a post-Soviet society, including moral norms for businessmen in the new Russia, but these attempts bore the distinct hallmark of social utopianism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:544 BOOK REVIEWS vide critical editions of the contributions by Richard Rufus and·-even more important-Richard Fishacre to the theology of Oxford and the continent Bayerishe Akademie der Wissenschaften Munich, West Germany RICH.ARD SCHENK, O.P. The Logic of Being: Historical Studies. Edited by SIMO KNUUTTIL.A and J.A.AKKO HINTIKK.A. Synthese Historical Library, 28. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985. Pp. xvi + 300 pp. $54.00 (cloth). Unlike many examples of the genre, this (...) collection of articles on the concept of being from Parmenides to Frege should and will be profitably consulted by philosophers of various stripes. Whether read piecemeal or straight through, these investigations carry on an open-ended dialogue in which historians of philosophy, philosophers of logic, and semanticists can participate equally. The editors are to be commended for presenting eleven articles (about an equal number of previously published and new studies) that are generally complementary to one another. What makes the collection so useful and interesting·, however much one disagrees with the thesis, is its concentrated focus on the difficulties of attributing to philosophers from Plato to Kant the Frege-Russell view that verbs for being are multiply ambiguous. It will perhaps be useful 'to begin with the concluding essay,· L. Haaparanta 's study " On Frege's Concept of Being," where the ambiguity thesis is discussed in greatest detail. She presents Frege's well-known articulation of the meanings of the verb ' to be ' as follows : (1) the is of identity (2) the is of predication (3) the is of existence, expressed by means either (i) of the existential quantifier and the symbol for identity or (ii) of the existential quantifier and the symbol for predication (4) the is of class-inclusion or generic implication Two points are worth noting. First, most of the contributors explore the ambiguity with reference to the is of identity, predication, and existence. Sceond, while ithe verb has several different meanings for Frege, most of the other philosophers discussed distinguish, at most, different uses. Many of the arguments against applying Frege's ambiguity thesis to earlier philosophers depend on this distinction between meaning and use; I will assess its cogency in specific contexts as they arise. BOOK REVIEWS 545 In Frege's analysis the crucial distinction is between the first-order copulative is and existence, a second-order concept. Since in Frege's view existence is a property of a first-order concept, it must lack all content. Haaparanta sums up the position well: "We presuppose the existence of objects; we do not say that they exist. For Frege, every predication carries with itself the claim of existence" (277). Influenced by Kant's argument that u existence is not predicate of a thing itself," Frege is willing to regard it as a proper concept, but not a first-order concept. This superordination of existence sounds reminiscent of Aristotle 's focus on predication and identity at the expense of existence (here it is better to speak of subordination, as the studies of Dancy and Hintikka on Aristotle indicate), but Frege's sharp distinction between concepts and objects is much closer to the Kantian position that we cannot know the essence of things in themselves. Thus, existence is a conceptual property though applicable to the instantiation of an object's properties; and identity statements, since they concern objects in themselves, are beyond the ken of reason. Certainly, Frege's thesis is " epistemologically motivated", as Haaparanta observes, but one is tempted to adopt a stronger conclusion: that the shift from an Aristotelian, or even Thomistic, ontology to Kantian epistemology contributes greatly to the emergence of the ambiguity thesis and renders it inapplicable to ancient and medieval metaphysics, even if, as Hintikka argues ("Kant on Existence and Predication"), Kant does not clearly distinguish different meanings of is·. The first four articles present a multi-faceted assault on the contemporary penchant for reading the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis into the Greek philosophers. C. H. Kahn's ''Retrospect on the Verb ' To Be' and the Concept of Being " is a useful precis of his indispensable work on the Greek verb for being. His particular concern is to further the "campaign against the uncritically ' existential ' interpretation... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Filosofia ellenistica e cultura moderna: Epicureismo, stoicismo e scetticismo da Bayle a Hegel by Giovanni BonacinaJosé R. Maia NetoGiovanni Bonacina. Filosofia ellenistica e cultura moderna: Epicureismo, stoicismo e scetticismo da Bayle a Hegel. Firenze: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1996. Pp. 358. Paper, L 52,000.The Hellenistic schools played a major role in the rise of modern philosophy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stoicism was influential in the (...) development of a secular ethics emancipated from theology, Epicureanism in the mechanical and corpuscular views of the new science, and Skepticism in the predominant role that epistemology assumed in modern philosophy. Bonacina shows that this influence continued to be considerable during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the treatment of these three Hellenistic philosophies by a large number of (mostly German) historians of philosophy and by the main philosophers of the period. Among the historians, Bonacina detects a progressive drive towards historical objectivity. However, the religious interest in the assessment of the ancient schools is still noticeable until the early eighteenth century when it begins to be increasingly replaced by contemporary philosophical sympathies and affiliations. This interest is even stronger among the main philosophers of the period, who use the Hellenistic philosophies as weapons in the intellectual battles in which they were engaged. A brief summary of the main aspects of this use, first of Stoicism and Epicureanism, and then of Skepticism, by some of the major philosophers examined by Bonacina will illustrate this central point of the book.Bayle continues Gassendi’s project of rehabilitating Epicurus. But his effort is not to make Epicureanism compatible with Christianity. He uses Epicurus’ philosophy to enhance his opposition to rational theology and Epicurus’ alleged virtuous life to corroborate his view that forced conversions cannot be justified by the need to make atheists or heretics good citizens. According to Bayle, Stoics—unlike Skeptics and Epicureans and like Catholic monks—are intolerant dogmatists, holding views incompatible with the true religion. A few years later, in the context of the French Enlightenment, the assessment of Stoicism and Epicureanism is still determined by antireligious controversy, but now revelation itself becomes the main target. Diderot, d’Holbach and La Mettrie all hold that a Stoic ethics which despises the passions is incompatible with human nature (just like Christian morals and contrary to Epicurean morals). Voltaire’s evaluation of Stoicism and Epicureanism strikes both his contemporary materialists and Christianity. Stoic deism is for Voltaire the alternative both to materialism and to revealed religion. Bonacina also shows that the Stoic/Epicurean opposition in ethics is an important weapon among the British moralists. While Shaftesbury finds in Stoicism [End Page 324] support for his view of innate moral feelings, Mandeville opposes him, attacking Stoicism and defending Epicureanism. Moving to the German context, Bonacina shows that Kant is often sympathetic towards Epicurus, in particular when the ancient philosopher is contrasted with modern ones. Epicurus’s materialism may have had only a phenomenal status and is more internally consistent than a modern materialism such as Locke’s, who accepts the existence of a nonmaterial God and soul. As to Stoic ethics, Kant claims that it is partially true—to the extent that virtue is not conditioned—and partially false, for the Stoics think of the summum bonum as empirically available whereas it is an ideal of practical reason. Hegel also uses Stoicism and Epicureanism for the vindication of his own philosophy and criticism of established ones. For instance, Stoic ethics is a step in the development of the Mind, but just like Kantian ethics it is empty, deprived of ethicity and therefore in need of being dialectically overcome.Skepticism plays perhaps an even larger role in the philosophical debates of the period. Bayle takes the Skeptic standpoint (in opposition to the dogmatist in general and to the Stoic in particular) as the model for the historian of ideas who must objectively report the views and critically examine them without religious and philosophical preconceptions. Even more than Epicurus, Pyrrho is presented as a foe of rational theology and as indirectly showing the need of appealing to pure faith. Bonacina then examines the role played by Skepticism in the... (shrink)

To become fully aware of the original and radical character of his transcendental phenomenology Edmund Husserl must be located within the historical tradition of Western philosophy. Although he was not a historian of philosophy, Husserl's his torical reflections convinced him that phenomenology is the necessary culmination of a centuries-old endeavor and the solution to the contemporary crisis in European science and European humanity itself.l This teleological viewpoint re quires the commentator to consider the tradition of Western philosophy (...) from Husserl's own perspective. Husserl maintained that the Cartesian tum to the "Cogito" represents the crucial breakthrough in the historical advance of Western thought toward philosophy as rigorous science. Hence 2 he concentrated almost exclusively on the modem era. Much has been written of Husserl's relationship to Descartes, Kant, and the neo-Kantians. His connections with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume have not been examined as closely despite his fre quent allusions to these British empiricists. Among these thinkers David Hume gained from Husserl the more extensive considera tion. Commentators have pointed out correctly that Husserl always criticized unsparingly Hume's sheer empiricistic approach to the problem of cognition. Such an approach, in Husserl's view, can only result in the "naturalization of consciousness" from which stem that "psychologism" and "sensualism" which lead Hume inevitably into the contradictory impasse of solipsism 3 and skepticism. (shrink)

Most scholars regard Ernst Cassirer as a thinker in the Marburg Neo-Kantian tradition whose writings take him from its concern with the analysis of the logical foundations of science to problems in intellectual history, theory of language, and culture. The critical work on his thought has reflected and supported this view. There is a second image of Cassirer which is shared by the large number of students and general readers who have come to his thought through two works that (...) appeared at the end of his life—An Essay on Man and the Myth of the State. These works have gone through numerous printings and have appeared in editions in most major Western and Oriental languages. These readers have found in Cassirer not primarily an epistemologist and historian of thought but a philosopher of humanity, an interpreter of the fragmentation of contemporary cultural life and the nature of the political world. These two sides shown by Cassirer’s thought are not exactly opposed, but also they are not joined. (shrink)

In spite of the fact that ideas in line with the world-outlook format of realism (as also those in the format of irrealism) come back already to Antiquity, it was not earlier than from the end of the 18th century that the metaphilosophical concept under discussion has begun to evolve. The initial becoming of the concept of philosophical realism during score of years from the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (1801) (...) is just being dealt with in this paper. The term came about eighty years later than “idealism” (introduced in 1702 by Leibnitz), and Kant inaugurated it most likely to distance his system from that of Berke­ley to whom he was indebted, it seems, still more than to Hume (their congeniality is spe­cified in the article in the mirror of intercultural philosophy, i.e. in both systems, just as in the Buddhist vijňānavāda, our persuasion that we can perceive outer things as existing independently from our mind was regarded as the radical illusion of mind). The author stands up for Friedrich Jacobi by offering specification of the advantages of “the robust realism” over “feigned” Kantian realism. Meanwhile, he suggests also the distinction be­tween the transcendental idealistic doctrine of Kant and realistic potency of his philosophy, which, in his opinion, becomes more intelligible after Hilary Putnam’s theory of realism. In this context the Kantian term “transcendental realism” itself could acquire not negative but mostly affirmative connotations. The author also suggests actualization of Kant’s “re­alistic capacity” for today’s ontology by highlighting his implicit differentiation of the layers of reality. In contrast, Fichtean and Schellingean dialectical sports with cor­relations of idealism and realism could be of interest, in the author’s view, only to histori­ans of philosophy. (shrink)

In his introduction to this selection of writings Hans Reiss makes the claim that Kant is not generally regarded in English-speaking countries as a political philosopher of any special significance. He gives several reasons for this neglect and misunderstanding by historians of philosophy and even by Kantian scholars. These historians have neglected Kant’s political writings because the philosophy of his three critiques has absorbed their attention almost entirely. Then too, they have not focused on his (...) political philosophy because he did not write a masterpiece in this field. Also, Kant’s works of critical philosophy are so formidable that they have made his political writings appear to historians of philosophy as much less weighty and have helped to encourage the mistaken assumption by these historians that the latter are not central to his thought. Furthermore, the rise of nationalism has prevented Kant’s work from being the dominant force in German political thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which it might easily have been. The Romantic mode of thought instilled in German political thought an element of irrationalism which permeated almost all areas of German thinking for a century and a half between the Napoleonic wars and the end of the Second World War. (shrink)