2. Origins of Continental Philosophy: How to get from Kant to German Idealism

2001 ◽  
pp. 12-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Critchley
Keyword(s):  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
German Idealism

Continental Realism and Its Discontents

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
The Real ◽  
New Realism ◽  
History Of

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction.

scholarly journals The Noumenal Morass: Post-Kantian Representationalism and Its Relationalist Critique in the Light of Strong Disjunctivism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.A. Bandurin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Perceptual Judgment ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
Direct Knowledge

This epistemological essay addresses the issue of representational content’s existence in the case of true direct knowledge. Contrary answers to it are considered as a basis for the distinction between representationalism and relationalism. The first part of the essay contains a critical analysis of the fundamental features of German Idealism as a kind of representationalism, which determined the main epistemological trend of continental philosophy in the form of post-Kantian representationalism. In the second part, after a brief excursion into certain contemporary continental issues, the current discussion between representationalism and relationalism in analytical philosophy is considered. It is concluded that relationalism, while correctly recognizing the nature of direct perception as being without representational content, is incapable of ensuring the unity of direct perception and a perceptual judgment, and a solution is proposed that could lead out of this epistemological impasse.

Knot of the World

2021 ◽  
pp. 35-53
Author(s):  
Kirill Chepurin
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
World History ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Friedrich Schlegel ◽  
Conceptual Space ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This essay re-reads German Idealism as a thinking oscillating between world-justification or theodicy, on the one hand, and the utopic or the non-place at which the world is delegitimized and even annihilated, on the other. For Hegel, world-history is theodicy: to think the way the world has been historically constructed or produced by spirit is to justify this world as necessarily the way it is. This essay calls it “the transcendental knot”: to think the possibility of the world is to justify it as necessary—a problem with which post-Kantian thinkers but also contemporary political theology and continental philosophy grapple. Through an analysis of the ultimate telos of the world and the subject’s striving in the world in Schelling, the late Fichte, and Friedrich Schlegel—as well as via such a-worldly concepts as the absolute, bliss, nothingness, God, chaos, and irony—this essay reconfigures German Idealism and Romanticism as spanning the conceptual space between two poles, world-annihilation and world-construction, and traces the ways in which these thinkers attempt to resolve the transcendental knot, or to think the way the world is without absolutizing it.

scholarly journals Walter Benjamin and the Weak Messianic Power

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-88
Author(s):  
Anatoliy Denysenko
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
Jewish Descent ◽  
Western Marxism

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German intellectual of Jewish descent, a well-known literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator and essayist, and a key figure in continental philosophy. His works on topics such as historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism have had a marked influence on contemporary aesthetic theories and the development of Western Marxism, including the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. These articles will focus on the analysis of the concept of messianism, which Benjamin develops in his work “On the concept of history” or “Theses on the philosophy of history” (1940). Messianism here is neither a theological dogma nor a modern figure of the utopian. Benjamin’s messianic time does not refer to the future, but to the urgency of the “now.” The author contrasts the “weak messianic force” of the tradition of the oppressed, which demands the past with the realization of happiness and liberation in the present, and Jetztzeit – a model of messianic time, open and nonlinear time of rupture, based on modern (contemporary) forms of collective experience past and liberation memory (Eingedenken).

German Idealism Comes Home

1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (11) ◽  
pp. 949-951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard E. Gruber
Keyword(s):  
German Idealism

Extra Time and the Death Penalties: On a Newly Arisen Violent Tone in Philosophy

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-150
Author(s):  
Martin McQuillan
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Future Challenge ◽  
Extra Time

In light of recent writing on politics and violence within contemporary continental philosophy, this text revisits Derrida's frequently articulated philosophical opposition to the death penalty. This essay expresses dismay at a certain theoretical discourse today that finds within itself the resources to mount a defence from within the humanities of political violence and by extension an overt justification of the death penalty. Slavoj Žižek's essay on Robespierre is unpicked as one such representative text. It is contrasted to Derrida's scrupulous reading of Kant as an advocate of the death penalty. This essay seeks to name and question a new Maoist, thanato-theological current in contemporary theoretical writing and should be considered as an opening salvo in a sustained future challenge to such thought.

Cloud, Precinct of the Theological-Historical

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Copjec
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Islamic Philosophy ◽  
Switch Point ◽  
Late Work ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Imaginal World ◽  
Unity Of God

Regarded by many as the pre-eminent Islamicist of the twentieth century, Henry Corbin is also the subject of much criticism, aimed primarily at his supposed overemphasis on the mythological aspects of Islamic philosophy and his idiosyncratic privileging of the concept of the imaginal world. Taking seriously an unusual claim made by Steven Wasserstrom in Religion after Religion that the redeployment of Schelling's concept of tautegory by Corbin reveals all that is wrong with his work, this essay seeks to defend both the concept and Corbin's use of it. Developed by Schelling in his late work on mythology, the concept of tautegory turns out to be, for historical and theoretical reasons, a revelatory switch point. Not only does it make clear why the imaginal ‘locus’ is key to understanding the unity of God – the oneness of his apophatic and revealed dimensions – it also gives us profound insights into the links connecting Islamic philosophy, German Idealism, and psychoanalysis, which all take their bearings from the esoteric or mystical idea of an unconscious abyss.

Music, Landscape, and the Sound of Place

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Grimley
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Place ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Cultural Geography ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
British Library ◽  
Musical Meaning ◽  
Final Time ◽  
Walking Tour ◽  
Meaning Representation ◽  
Critical Literature

One of the most poignant scenes in Ken Russell’s 1968 film Delius: Song of Summer evocatively depicts the ailing composer being carried in a wicker chair to the summit of the mountain behind his Norwegian cabin. From here, Delius can gaze one final time across the broad Gudbrandsdal and watch the sun set behind the distant Norwegian fells. Contemplating the centrality of Norway in Delius’s output, however, raises more pressing questions of musical meaning, representation, and our relationship with the natural environment. It also inspires a more complex awareness of landscape and our sense of place, both historical and imagined, as a mode of reception and an interpretative tool for approaching Delius’s music. This essay focuses on one of Delius’s richest but most critically neglected works, The Song of the High Hills for orchestra and wordless chorus, composed in 1911 but not premiered until 1920. Drawing on archival materials held at the British Library and the Grainger Museum, Melbourne, I examine the music’s compositional genesis and critical reception. Conventionally heard (following Thomas Beecham and Eric Fenby) as an imaginary account of a walking tour in the Norwegian mountains, The Song of the High Hills in fact offers a multilayered response to ideas of landscape and nature. Moving beyond pictorial notions of landscape representation, I draw from recent critical literature in cultural geography to account for the music’s sense of place. Hearing The Song of the High Hills from this perspective promotes a keener understanding of our phenomenological engagement with sound and the natural environment, and underscores the parallels between Delius’s work and contemporary developments in continental philosophy, notably the writing of Henri Bergson.

War in Social Thought

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Original Argument

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.

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