scholarly journals Kant, Hegel, and the Bounds of Thought

2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 56-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Deligiorgi
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Standard Account ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Absolute

Hegel's relation to Kant is often portrayed in terms of epistemic impatience. For W.H. Walsh, for example, whereas Kant seeks to ‘demonstrate that certain kinds of thing [cannot] be objects of human knowledge’, and thus that there are ‘limits to men's cognitive aspirations’, Hegel issues the ‘demand that thought be free to range unchecked wherever it chooses’ and claims the ‘Absolute’ as an object of human knowledge. There are two flaws in this standard account. First, it underestimates the cognitive confidence of Kant's project of a critique of pure reason. Central to this project is the idea that reason has the resources to adjudicate its own claims and thus to know itself. Second, it neglects Hegel's conception of dialectic as the inner discipline of thought. I shall deal with each of these issues in turn. The first part of the paper examines the intellectual commitments entailed by the very idea of a critique of pure reason; the second part addresses the boundary-determining function of dialectic. A fuller understanding of what is meant by ‘critique’ and ‘dialectic’ should enable us not only to re-assess Hegel's relation to Kant, but also to retrieve their shared conception of philosophical reflection as rational self-knowledge. The aim of this paper therefore is to highlight the common ground between the two projects, rather than to emphasise their critical distance. I seek to show that Hegel shares Kant's conviction that ‘philosophy consists in knowing its bounds’ (seine Grenzen zu kennen), even though he accords such knowledge a different status from Kant.

scholarly journals TINJAUAN KRITIS TERHADAP EPISTEMOLOGI IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804)

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Lailiy Muthmainnah
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Metaphysical Problem ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
Personal Invitation

The background of this article is a metaphysical problem that arose in Immanuel Kant's thought in his Critique of Pure Reason. Through a hermeneutic approach this article aims to analyze the metaphysical problems that arise in Immanuel Kant's epistemology of thought. Based on the research results can be concluded that the unequivocal separation between phenomena and noumena will cause humans will never come to the knowledge of the Transcendent, as well as with moral and aesthetics. This is because such knowledge can only be obtained through my participation as a Subject through the process of continuous existence and more of a personal invitation. In the end it can be concluded that the nature of analog knowledge is the meaning of multidimensional side of human life. This brings consequences to the need for intersubjective dialogue and continual openness. Knowledge is an infinite thing. Human knowledge therefore will never reach the end of the journey but only continuously expanded its horizon.

Proofs of the Existence of God in the Critique of Pure Reason and Morning Hours

2020 ◽  
pp. 103-141
Author(s):  
Paul Guyer
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Existence Of God ◽  
Belief In God

This chapter examines Kant’s continued criticism of the classical arguments for the existence of God in the Critique of Pure Reason and his critique of his own earlier new argument for God as the ground of all possibility. Kant’s conclusion is that belief in the existence of God must be defended on practical rather than theoretical grounds. In Morning Hours Mendelssohn defended the ontological and cosmological arguments and added a new argument from the incompleteness of human knowledge. Mendelssohn does not accept Kant’s argument for belief in God on moral grounds only but instead adopts a pragmatic position that we have no choice but to rely on the results of the unimpaired use of our own cognitive powers.

Cartography and Autobiography

2020 ◽  
pp. 263-288
Author(s):  
Alison Laywine
Keyword(s):  
Special Problem ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Inner Sense ◽  
Empirical World ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Special Case

This chapter completes the examination, started in Chapter Four, of the second half of the Transcendental Deduction, as found in the second edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The focus of this chapter is §24 and §25. The special problem of these sections is empirical self-knowledge. The author argues that Kant treats self-knowledge as a special case of the cosmology of experience: the problem is how I situate myself in the empirical world. The solution to the problem is to build up in thought an understanding of the world by legislating universal laws to nature by means of the categories and to map my geographical and historical place in the world by means of the cartographic resources available to the productive imagination. The chapter has two parts. The first part is devoted to a paradox Kant claims to be associated with self-affection. It tries to understand his claim as a reflection on his own views in the mid-1770s about self-apprehension by inner sense and apperception. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the specialized cartography Kant takes to be involved in empirical self-knowledge and considers how Kant distinguishes between biography and autobiography.

scholarly journals Kant on the Transcendental Deduction of Space and Time: an Essay on the Philosophical Resources of the Transcendental Aesthetic

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Melissa McBay Merritt
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Deduction ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Modes Of Representation

Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has focused intensively on the transcendental deduction of the categories – the pivotal chapter of the book that governs our understanding of much that precedes it and just about all that follows it. One simple way to understand the systematic function of the Transcendental Deduction is to appreciate that it provides an account of how the ‘two stems of human knowledge’ (A15/B29) – sensibility and understanding – must relate to one another in the production of knowledge. On Kant's view, these capacities are distinguished by their radically different modes of representation: intuition and concept. Although sensibility and understanding are fundamentally distinct – they ‘cannot exchange their functions’ – they must nevertheless cooperate in the production of knowledge: ‘Only through their unification can cognition arise’ (A51/B75–6). The task of the Deduction is to show how the categories – concepts that stem from the ‘nature of the understanding’ alone – apply necessarily to objects that can only be given in experience, and represented as given through sensible intuition.

Mendelssohn, Kant, and Idealism

2020 ◽  
pp. 167-202
Author(s):  
Paul Guyer
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Transcendental Argument ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
External Objects ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Refutation Of Idealism ◽  
Empirical Realism

After examining the dispute between Mendelssohn and Kant over the ideality of time in 1770, this chapter argues that Kant’s addition of a “Refutation of Idealism” to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787 is a response to Mendelssohn’s treatment of idealism in his 1785 Morning Hours. Both defend the position that Kant calls empirical realism, but only Kant defends it by means of a transcendental argument that knowledge of external objects is a necessary condition of empirical self-knowledge, although only within the framework of transcendental idealism. Mendelssohn accepts that human experience can never tell us how things are in themselves, but does not accept Kant’s outright denial of the non-spatiality and non-temporality of things in themselves.

Realität als vermeintliche Grenze der Erkenntnis: Hegels Metaphysik im Anschluss an und in Abgrenzung zu Kant

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-417
Author(s):  
Ermylos Plevrakis
Keyword(s):  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Science Of Logic ◽  
Kantian View ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
True Knowledge ◽  
Scientific System ◽  
Aristotelian Metaphysics

While Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason aims to 'humiliate' reason by declining any possibility of knowledge of things 'in themselves', he does conceive such critique as 'the necessary preparation for a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics'. In this paper I examine in what sense Hegel's Science of Logic goes beyond that Kantian view without neither relapsing back into dogmatic metaphysics nor turning into a mere pragmatism. I argue that reality in itself is ontologically deficient so that it is already reality itself (and not just the categories of understanding) that makes true knowledge of real things impossible. Nonetheless I contend that there is something in Hegel's Science of Logic that is truly absolute and turns Logic into 'a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics', namely what Hegel calls the Concept or the Absolute Idea. Furthermore I point out the concrete importance of these metaphysical claims for human theoretical and practical knowledge. This finally provides a new reading of Hegel's Logic as a de-ontologised Aristotelian metaphysics that not just claims to regulate empirical knowledge in a Kantian manner, but to also conceptually constitute reality 'in itself'.

Miłosz i Lévinas – modernistyczny dwugłos o zadaniach literatury

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-180
Author(s):  
Marcin Telicki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Liminal Experiences ◽  
Century Literature

Summary The article examines a parallel between Emmanuel Lévinas’s and Czesław Miłosz’s philosophical reflection about the duties of literature. The common ground can be found in Lévinas’s well-known idea of encountering the Other through the Face. This form of communication, which is by no means easy, is given extra depth by liminal experiences of transience and death. As the examples from the second part of this article show these experiences seem to mark the greatest achievements of twentieth-century literature. Finally, the question is asked about the two writers’ views on the place of philosophy and reflection on transcendence. Even though they do not see eye to eye on these points, the plurality of values and judgments expressed by them should not compel us to classify their work as completely disparate and incomparable.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document