The Nature and Ontological Status of Appearances

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-109
Author(s):  
Anja Jauernig
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Status ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Intentional Objects ◽  
Empirical Level ◽  
The World ◽  
Primary Difference ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
Material Conditions

It is shown that things in themselves and appearances are numerically distinct existents whose primary difference consists in that the former are mind-independent while the latter are mind-dependent, in a sense that is explicated in detail. On the proposed reading, the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, comprises several levels of reality, most importantly, a mind-independent, transcendental level, at which things in themselves exits, and a mind-dependent, empirical level, at which appearances exist. Appearances are identified to be intentional objects of experience. The nature and ontological status of appearances is further investigated by way of an examination of Kant’s account of perception and his theory of experience, including a detailed consideration of the formal and material conditions of experience and of the implications of the mathematical antinomies for the specific flavor of Kant’s idealism about appearances.

Concluding Postscript: The World According to Kant

2021 ◽  
pp. 355-356
Author(s):  
Anja Jauernig
Keyword(s):  
Human Mind ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Intentional Objects ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Empirical Level ◽  
The World ◽  
Thing In Itself ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
Ontological Position

This completes my account of Kant’s critical idealism, understood as an ontological position, as developed in the Critique and associated theoretical writings. According to Kant, the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, comprises several levels of reality, most importantly, the transcendental level and the empirical level. The transcendental level is a mind-independent level at which Kantian things in themselves exist; the empirical level is a mind-dependent level at which Kantian appearances exist. Things in themselves are mind-independent, appearances are fully mind-dependent. Things in themselves and appearances are numerically distinct and do not ontologically overlap in any way. Kantian outer appearances essentially are intentional objects of outer experience; Kantian inner appearances essentially are intentional objects of inner experience. Empirical objects are Kantian outer appearances, empirical space and time are constituted by the spatial and temporal determinations of outer appearances, pure space and time are (nothing but) forms of sensibility, and empirical selves, or empirical minds, are Kantian inner appearances. In contrast to other intentional objects, such as the intentional objects of fictions, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, and perceptions, Kantian appearances genuinely exist, that is, they exist from the point of view of fundamental ontology. This is due both to the special character of experience, in particular, the special character of outer experience and its conformity to Kant’s formal conditions of objectivity, and to the grounding of Kantian appearances in things themselves. Kantian things in themselves transcendentally affect sensibility and thereby bring about sensations, which provide the ‘matter’ for Kantian appearances and underwrite their existence. Kantian things in themselves are supersensible, non-spatial, and non-temporal, as well as distinct from God and thus finite. Each inner appearance is grounded in a unique Kantian thing in itself that is a human transcendental mind, and all outer appearances are grounded in Kantian things in themselves that are distinct from all human minds. What we commonly call ‘the external empirical world’ exists, including empirical space and time. Accordingly, there is also at least one Kantian thing in itself that is not a human mind. Moreover, there is at least one human being, that is, an entity whose ontologically basic parts include, minimally, a body (which is an empirical object), an empirical self (which is an empirical mind), and a transcendental self (which is a human transcendental mind). Since other intentional objects that are not Kantian appearances, although not genuine existents, are not nothing but have some reality and being, it is useful to conceive of Kantian reality as including yet another mind-dependent level to provide a home for these other fully mind-dependent entities—even if this conception goes beyond the direct textual evidence and may also go beyond Kant’s private, explicitly articulated thoughts on the matter. The ultimate basis for Kant’s case for transcendental idealism is the finitude of the human mind and, more specifically, its fundamentally uncreative nature in which this finitude manifests ...

The World According to Kant

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Jauernig
Keyword(s):  
Pure Reason ◽  
Critique Of Pure Reason ◽  
Intentional Objects ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Special Character ◽  
Empirical Level ◽  
The World ◽  
Levels Of Reality ◽  
Ontological Position ◽  
Empirical Realism

The World According to Kant offers an interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s critical idealism, as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason and associated texts. Critical idealism is understood as an ontological position, which comprises transcendental idealism, empirical realism, and a number of other basic ontological theses. According to Kant, the world, understood as the sum total of everything that has reality, comprises several levels of reality, most importantly, the transcendental level and the empirical level. The transcendental level is a mind-independent level at which things in themselves exist. The empirical level is a fully mind-dependent level at which appearances exist, which are intentional objects of experience. Empirical objects and empirical minds are appearances, and empirical space and time are constituted by the spatial and temporal determinations of appearances. On the proposed interpretation, Kant is thus a genuine idealist about empirical objects, empirical minds, and space and time. But in contrast to other intentional objects, appearances genuinely exist, which is due both to the special character of experience compared to other kinds of representations such as illusions and dreams, and to the grounding of appearances in things themselves. This is why, on the proposed interpretation, Kant is also a genuine realist about empirical objects, empirical minds, and empirical space and time. This book develops the indicated interpretation, spells out Kant’s case for critical idealism thus understood, pinpoints the differences between critical idealism and ‘ordinary’ idealism, such as Berkley’s, and clarifies the relation between Kant’s conception of things in themselves and the conception of things in themselves by other philosophers, in particular, Kant’s Leibniz-Wolffian predecessors.

scholarly journals Politico-theologic dispute on identity

2016 ◽  
pp. 267-275
Author(s):  
Nemanja Djukic
Keyword(s):  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Intentional Consciousness ◽  
First Case ◽  
The World ◽  
Levels Of Reality

The phenomenology of identity can distinguish identity as an ontological status and identity as a social-discursive construction. Identity as ontological status is based on the presence of transcendence. It is the result of grace, heritage, tradition. Identity as a social and discursive construction is based on the forgetting of transcendence. It is the result of self-eroticism and self-constituting intentional consciousness. In the first case, the identity is immersed in logos-order community (higher, wider and deeper levels of reality), which is why it is a catholic term of pre-intentional mindedness (polis as a paradigm of the world). In the second case, the identity is an expression of self-erotic intentionality that self reified as the beginning (positive datum ego-cogito), making it an expression of self-constituting awareness that denies any form of experience of otherness that precedes its act of self.

From compassion to distance: Hannah Höch’s ‘Mother’

2021 ◽  
pp. 135050682110289
Author(s):  
Andrea Pérez-Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Abortion Rights ◽  
Major Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the work of the German artist Hannah Höch in the light of the struggle for abortion rights in the Weimar Republic. I attempt to show how Höch’s uses of the technique of photomontage can be read as a way of introducing a distance between the work and the viewer that allows us to question the beliefs we use to make sense of the world. Specifically, I discuss her photomontage Mutter (‘Mother’), a version of a photograph taken by John Heartfield, and some of her writings and interviews. I also examine closely the material conditions and political debates in which Höch’s work – as a social practice – developed. After a brief introduction and a methodological outline, I present Höch in the context of Berlin Dada and summarise the main underlying arguments of my hypothesis. Namely, that the major interest of Höch’s photomontages lies in the complex articulation of activism and philosophy, and in the way in which they put mainstream categories into question by ‘distancing’ fragments of reality.

Feeling Film: Time, Space, and the Third Image

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.

‘The Beast within’: Race, Humanity, and Animality

10.1068/d229 ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Western Model ◽  
Specific Material ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Sydney Australia

Recent years have seen efforts to critique the dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in Western thought, and to demonstrate their coconstruction under specific material conditions. As yet, however, little work has uncovered the discourses of animality that lie buried within a social field whose ontological status until recently has been securely ‘human’. In this paper, I show how Western concepts of animality have circulated across the nature border and into a politics of social relations. Concepts of savagery and vulgarity can, in particular, be found within racialised representational systems with whose historicity, I will be suggesting, we can make fresh critical engagements. In much recent work on colonial power formations, ‘othering’ practices have been implicitly conceived within a psychoanalytic frame—one in which the white self's ‘interior beasts’ are anxiously displaced onto an externalised other. Whilst not refuting the efficacy of repression I wish to historicise the workings of a peculiar western model of the Human self, ‘split’ into physical ‘animal’ and cultural ‘human’. This is done both through an extended theoretical account, followed by a microstudy of geographies of savagery and civility in Sydney, Australia.

Can Animism Save the World? Reflections on Personhood and Complexity in the Ecological Crisis

Sociologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-92
Author(s):  
Guido Sprenger
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Moral Commitment ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
The World ◽  
Human World ◽  
Communicative Processes ◽  
Politics Of Life

The term “animism” is at once a fantasy internal to modernity and a semiotic conduit enabling a serious inquiry into non-modern phenomena that radically call into question the modern distinction of nature and culture. Therefore, I suggest that the labelling of people, practices or ideas as “animist” is a strategic one. I also raise the question if animism can help to solve the modern ecological crisis that allegedly stems from the nature-culture divide. In particular, animism makes it possible to recognize personhood in non-humans, thus creating moral relationships with the non-human world. A number of scholars and activists identify animism as respect for all living beings and as intimate relationships with nature and its spirits. However, this argument still presupposes the fixity of the ontological status of beings as alive or persons. A different view of animism highlights concepts of fluid and unstable persons that emerge from ongoing communicative processes. I argue that the kind of attentiveness that drives fluid personhood may be supportive of a politics of life that sees relationships with non-humans in terms of moral commitment.

scholarly journals The Reception of Egyptian Modernism in Indonesia: Harun Nasution on Theology of Muhammad Abduh

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
D. V. Mukhetdinov
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Human Race ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Entire Area ◽  
Intellectual Abilities ◽  
Divine Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Interpretive Model

In the present article we are going look at the interpretation of the theology of Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) undertaken by the Indonesian scholar Harun Nasution (1919–1998). Nasution compares Abduh’s position to neo- Mutazilism, relying on the treatise “Risālah al- Tawḥid”. Nasution carries out a step-by-step interpretation of the most popular “exoteric” work of the Egyptian thinker, proving the rationalist character of his theological system. From the point of view of Nasution, the division of the human race into the elect and commoners characteristic of Abduh is intended to confi rm the special ontological status of people endowed with high culture and advanced intellectual abilities. The elect are able to comprehend the entire area of intelligible being, which includes both God with his attributes and the created world. From this follows the limited, confi rmatory character of Revelation. It does not so much reveal to people a hitherto unfamiliar truth as confi rms (legitimizes) the knowledge already available to the Elect. Nasution believes that Abduh’s views on human freedom and divine justice are in confl ict with Asharism. Man is the source of his own actions, he is given the freedom to independently determine his own destiny. Allah Almighty rules the world through the eternal laws of nature, sunan, and prefers not to interfere in the aff airs of people directly, although he is interested in their welfare. The article concludes with critical remarks challenging the interpretive model proposed by Nasution and other neoMutazilite scholars of Abduh.

The nature of domains and the relationships between them in metaphorization

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksander Szwedek
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Metaphor Analysis ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Source Domain ◽  
The World ◽  
Ultimate Source ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Objective Being

In 2011 I proposed a new approach to metaphor analysis and typology, based on the strict distinction between the material and phenomenological worlds. I concluded that the ultimate source domain (experiential basis) is the world of physical objects. The present paper develops these ideas, presenting a more detailed analysis of each of the metaphor types. Thus, I claim that the concrete-to-concrete metaphors are based on metonymy and abstract-to-concrete on the OBJECT schema. Abstract-to-abstract metaphorization falls into two traditional types: structural and orientational metaphors. As to the former, I show that the vague expressions “more concrete domain” or “more abstract domain” can be made clearer by considering the ontological status of the component elements of the domain: the “more concrete” domain has more elements of physical ontology. Orientational metaphors have been found to be only superficially orientational, their true objective being valuation. I conclude that all these metaphor types eventually refer to the world of physical objects for their experiential basis.

Walter Burley on divine Ideas

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
Chiara Paladini
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Status ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Freedom ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Walter Burley ◽  
The Way

This paper focuses on the theory of divine ideas of Walter Burley (1275-1347). The medieval common theory of divine ideas, developed by Augustine, was intended to provide an answer to the question of the order and intelligibility of the world. The world is rationally organized since God created it according to the models existing eternally in his mind. Augustine's theory, however, left open problems such as reconciling the principle of God's unity with the plurality of ideas, the way in which ideas can or cannot be said to be eternal, their ontological status. Medieval authors discussed such questions until at least the late 14th century. By resorting to the semantic tool of connotation, Burley explains both in what way ‘idea' can signify the divine essence as much as the creatures (thereby reconciling the principle of God's unity with the multiplicity of ideas), and in what sense we can say that God has thought them from eternity, without slipping into a necessitarian view that undermines the principle of divine freedom. Moreover, by envisaging the objective mode of being as the only mode of being of ideas, he explains in what way they truly differ from one another on the basis of their different conceptual contents

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