The New Philosophy

Anxiety ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 36-76
Author(s):  
Bettina Bergo

Kant’s transcendental revolution temporarily cut through debates between Humian skeptics and rationalists of a Leibniz-Wolffian stripe. It established reason as an immanent tribunal, judging its possibilities and errors. Through an analysis of the structure of intuition and the deduction of the categories intrinsic to judgement, largely scientific, the edifice of the first Critique raised epistemology out of metaphysics and psychologism. Together, the Antimonies and Paralogisms of pure reason indicated the contradictions and misuse of concepts into which rational speculation had hitherto fallen. The paralogisms of the erstwhile rational psychology had argued in favor of the simplicity, substantiality, and the personality of the soul, thereby following a logic of substance and accidents where passions and affects were the latter, attaching to that soul. By showing the errors of the paralogisms, Kant effectively “dispatched” virtually all affects to his “science of man and the world,” the anthropology of human practice. However, the solution to Kant’s Paralogisms of the soul opened a new circle, such that our inner sense and its logical condition, transcendental apperception preceded, but could only be thought thanks to, the categories of understanding. At stake was the intrinsic unity of consciousness within the transcendental project. Although the Critique of Practical Reason retained a crucial intellectual affect, Achtung (attention and respect), Kant’s epistemology required clear distinctions between understanding, reason, and affects. In a sense, ontology and epistemology bifurcate into the domains of a transcendental approach to experience as representation and what lays outside it (including pre-reflective sensibility and affects).

Author(s):  
Alison Laywine

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.


Kant Yearbook ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Morganna Lambeth

AbstractIn the Second Analogy of the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), Kant attempts to address Hume’s causal skepticism. Kant argues that the concept of cause must be employed in order to identify objective changes in the world, and that, therefore, all events are caused. In this paper, I will challenge Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy, arguing that we can identify objective changes without using the concept of cause, but by using the concept of logical condition instead. Rather than objectively ordering our perceptions through the idea that one thing that was perceived is the cause of the next thing that was perceived, the first necessitating the second, we can objectively order our perceptions through the idea that the first thing perceived is the logical condition of the second. In terms of Kant’s debate with Hume, I find that, though my objection undermines some of Hume’s own conclusions, it does allow Hume to avoid Kant’s argument against his causal skepticism


1998 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 117-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth F. Rogerson

In the third Critique Kant shifts the focus in his enquiry from the status of factual statements in the Critique of Pure Reason and the grounding of moral imperatives in the Critique of Practical Reason to investigating two methods of considering the world which go beyond the strictly verifiable. This is a move from evaluating the interplay of a ‘determinate’ set of facts and intellectual preconditions to forming what Kant calls ‘reflective’ judgements on these facts. There are two major questions which the Critique of Judgement tackles. On the one hand Kant ambitiously considers how we might properly interpret a set of facts as comprising a larger teleological system and, on the other hand, he is interested in the seemingly quite separate issue of the appreciation of objects as beautiful. It is this latter issue which shall concern us here. Consistent with the reflective stand in the third Critique, Kant argues from the very outset that beauty is not an empirical concept with which we might describe the world. Beauty is not objective in the sense that size, colour or weight might be. Objective properties of this kind belong to the world of scientific understanding. Instead, he holds that judgements of aesthetic merit should be based upon the subjective pleasure we take in experiencing works of art and natural objects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-134
Author(s):  
Héctor Luis Pacheco Acosta

Abstract: this paper discusses the use of certain terms associated to I. Kant’s account of inner experience. Inner experience is a subject matter relevant in Kant’s thought, which encompasses metaphysical and anthropological issues worthy of consideration. By examining the Critique of Pure Reason and the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, one can see the confused use of the terms: inner sense, empirical, pure, and transcendental apperception, discursive and intuitive self-consciousness, consciousness of oneself divided into reflection and apprehension, intellectual and empirical consciousness of one’s existence. Therefore, I focus on the philosophical meaning of the previous terms and their relation to the problem of inner experience, which depends upon the outer experience. Finally, I deal with the problem of the content of inner sense, suggesting that its content does not correspond to a single, simple thing, but rather to a flux of inner representations.


2019 ◽  
Vol 60 (142) ◽  
pp. 103-125
Author(s):  
Joel Thiago Klein

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the idea of a universal history is systematically legitimized in Kant’s transcendental system of philosophy by way of the concept of a need [Bedürfnis] for pure practical reason. In this sense, the idea of a universal history is a fundamental part of the moral image of the world that emerges from Kant’s whole philosophy, and it is crucial for understanding both the possibility of the system of pure reason, as well the full development of Kant’s moral philosophy, especially for political philosophy.


Author(s):  
Naveeda Khan

Actual, possible, and potential relations between Kant and anthropology in early-21st-century scholarship are worth exploring. Within the realm of actual relations, classical figures within anthropology took up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason to understand the nature of thinking and morality within so-called primitive societies. They sought to put society before mind within Kant’s architectonic of thought and to posit classification, or relational thinking, as equally important as cognition. Within possible relations, contemporary anthropologists engaged Kant’s anthropology or Kant as a possible anthropologist in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View or “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” or set apart their enterprise of studying ethics from his on morality. A very central question that Kant’s writings posed for them was whether the figure of the human was knowable, to which anthropology added its own nuance by asking whether we can assume it is the same human or reason across all contexts. Within potential relations, writings on the history and method of anthropology both critiqued and celebrated the inheritance of German romanticism, understood as an intellectual trend, a methodology, a sensibility, a mystical orientation, and a celebration of individual singularity and genius within anthropology. In contrast to this mode of inheriting romanticism, a more Kantian-inflected understanding of the romantic movement, mediated by different figures, suggested itself as a productive point of entry for anthropology to understand the philosophical underpinnings of its preferred methods (e.g., fieldwork), its engagement with philosophy beyond that of agonism and possible arrogation, and its re-engagement with the question of the human in relation to itself, other humans and nonhumans, and nature. The fragment, one of romanticism’s greatest creations and a complex response to Kant’s two world metaphysics, appears to anthropology through both trajectories and, in keeping with anthropology’s evolving relation to philosophy, anthropology provides its own spin on the importance of the fragment for inhabiting the world.


2005 ◽  
pp. 97-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Sharpe

This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly modern practice in the care of the self, governed by Kant's famous rubric of the 'primacy of practical reason'. In this way, too, Foucault's later interest in Kant - one which in fact takes up a line present in his work from his complementary thesis on Kant's Anthropology - is cast into distinct relief. Against Habermas and others, I propose that this interest does not represent any 'break' or 'turn' in Foucault's work. In line with Foucault's repeated denials that he was interested after 1976 in a 'return to the ancients', I argue that Foucault's writings on critique represent instead both a deepening theoretical self-consciousness, and part of his project to forge an ethics adequate to the historical present.


2019 ◽  
pp. 161-176

La potencia de la ficción en el pensamiento nietzscheano Resumen analítico.-El presente trabajo analiza las implicancias de la ficción sobre la posibilidad del conocimiento y la razón. Partiendo desde la obra de Nietzsche, se recorrerá las diferentes valencias de la ficción tanto en sus obras tempranas como tardías. En tanto el conocimiento, se partirá de la propedéutica realizada por Kant en La crítica de la razón pura haciendo al distinguir entre el mundo fenoménico y el mundo nouménico. Clarificando la metodología kantiana en la obra citada se puede observar cómo las ideas de la razón poseen una faceta ficcional. En el eje de la Razón como nuevo Dios, emerge la propuesta arkhica de un ordenamiento que es la raíz de la metafísica occidental. La mitologización de la razón, tal como lo menciona Adorno, es la creación de una nueva ficción que da sentido a la existencia. Por ello, la logicización del lenguaje, como lo detecta Cacciari, es la respuesta encontrada por Nietzsche en la propia razón para la formulación de un sentido aprehensible de mundo. Palabras claves: Ficción -Razón -Conocimiento -Mitologización –Arkhé The power of fiction in the nietzschean thought Abstract.-This paper analyzes the implications of fiction on the possibility of knowledge and reason. Starting from Nietzsche's work, the different valences of fiction will be traversed in both his early and late works. Concerning knowledge, it will be based on the propaedeutic realized by Kant in Critique of pure reason, distinguishing between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Clarifying the Kantian methodology in the cited work, one can see how the ideas of reason have a fictional facet. Being Reason the new God, the arkhica proposal of an order that is the root of western metaphysics emerges. The mythologization of reason, as Adorno mentions it, is the creation of a new fiction that gives meaning to existence. Therefore, the logicization of language, as Cacciari mentions, is the answer found by Nietzsche in his own reason for the formulation of an apprehensive sense of the world. Keywords: Fiction -Reason -Knowledge -Mythologization -Arkhé


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1557-1566
Author(s):  
Alexander Somek

My book claims that constitutionalism is about constraining the exercise of public power in a legal manner. What it studies are different renderings of this idea and how one can arrive move from one to the next. What is essential to the success of the enterprise is, first, elaborating the relevant ideal types; second, analyzing how the transitions are made from one to the other; and third, taking public law as a way of conceiving of human practice, namely as activity that is essentially amenable to normative guidance and constraint. The people working and thinking in the world of public law use language that betrays ontological commitments to conspicuous entities such as “powers,” “values,” or “conventions.”


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