scholarly journals Schiller after Kant: The “Unexpected Science” of theBriefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen

Kant-Studien ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-302
Author(s):  
Tim Mehigan

AbstractIn the Briefe über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, the focus of this article, Schiller’s ostensible aim – to complete Kant’s aesthetic theory – is progressively abandoned. The article examines the reasons for this abandonment. On the one hand, Schiller’s original purpose was overtaken by events in France. Schiller found that he could no longer sustain confidence in reason’s capacity to build a durable political republic. On the other hand, the alternative path he favours involves him in the expounding of an anthropology he did not set out to undertake. The Ästhetische Briefe, for this reason, finds itself adumbrating an “unexpected science” with little remaining reference to Kant – an account of the human being whose desirable future state, that of morality, can only be made secure by passage through the aesthetic state. A by-product of this argument, and perhaps its chief consequence, is that it finally settles the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns (in favour of the moderns).

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-394
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn

When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-71
Author(s):  
Raquel Borges Blázquez

Artificial intelligence has countless advantages in our lives. On the one hand, computer’s capacity to store and connect data is far superior to human capacity. On the other hand, its “intelligence” also involves deep ethical problems that the law must respond to. I say “intelligence” because nowadays machines are not intelligent. Machines only use the data that a human being has previously offered as true. The truth is relative and the data will have the same biases and prejudices as the human who programs the machine. In other words, machines will be racist, sexist and classist if their programmers are. Furthermore, we are facing a new problem: the difficulty to understand the algorithm of those who apply the law.This situation forces us to rethink the criminal process, including artificial intelligence and spinning very thinly indicating how, when, why and under what assumptions we can make use of artificial intelligence and, above all, who is going to program it. At the end of the day, as Silvia Barona indicates, perhaps the question should be: who is going to control global legal thinking?


Politeia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-260
Author(s):  
Franco Manni ◽  

From the ideas of Aristotle, De Saussure and Wittgenstein, philosopher Herbert McCabe elaborated an original anthropology. 'Meaning' means: the role played by a part towards the whole. Senses are bodily organs and sensations allow an animal to get fragments of the external world which become 'meaningful' for the behaviour of the whole animal Besides sensations, humans are ‘linguistic animals’ because through words they are able to 'communicate', that is, to share a peculiar kind of meanings: concepts. Whereas, sense-images are stored physically in our brain and cannot be shared, even though we can relate to sense-images by words (speech coincides with thought). However, concepts do not belong to the individual human being qua individual, but to an interpersonal entity: the language system. Therefore, on the one hand, to store images is a sense-power and an operation of the brain, whereas the brain (quite paradoxically!) is not in itself the organ of thought. On the other hand, concepts do not exist on their own.


After having briefly but exhaustively recalled the main lines of Freudian psychoanalytic thought, we have discussed a possible psychoanalytic theoretical model for human symbolic function mainly centred on the action of a set of primary psychic mechanisms rejoined around the negative, in its widest sense according to the works of André Green. A chief aspect of this pattern has turned out to be an underlying, irreducible dialecticity that reflects on the one hand, the typical feature of human symbolic function, and, on the other hand, the main outcome of the unavoidable presence of a basic dichotomy formalized the so-called phallic logic, that is, that primordial, ancestral and irreducible logical nucleus inevitably present in the deepest meanders of human psyche as an inborn structure phylogenetically preformed and ontogenetically re-established during the psychic evolution of any human being.


Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1127-1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
C Thi Nguyen

Abstract There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. Our attempts at aesthetic judgments aim at correctness. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than through deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. How can we resolve this tension? The best explanation, I suggest, is that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. When one defers to aesthetic testimony, then, one makes the same mistake as when one looks up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments.


1862 ◽  
Vol 7 (40) ◽  
pp. 461-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Maudsley

As it has ever been the custom of man to act as if he were eternal, and lavishly to scatter the limited force which he embodies as though the supply were inexhaustible, it produces no unaccustomed surprise to witness the useless expenditure of force which is so frequently made at the present time. It may even, perhaps, be deemed a token of some modesty, that the being, who since his first formation has been continually occupied in metaphysical regions with the investigation of the origin of all things, should be content for a while to amuse himself with physical theories concerning his own origin. That which is to be regretted in the new and comparatively praiseworthy occupation is the old evil of hasty theorizing on the one hand, and on the other hand, the evil, scarcely less ancient, of an impetuous eagerness to demolish any theory, however plausible, which comes athwart a favourite prejudice. What though the anatomist does discover a very close resemblance and very slight differences between the structure of a gorilla and the structure of a human being; there is no need, on that account, that mankind in a feeling of injured dignity should angrily rouse up and disclaim the undesired relationship. Whatever may be said or written, it is quite plain after all that a man is not a gorilla, and that a gorilla is not a man; it is furthermore manifest that gorillas do not breed men now-a-days, and that we have not the shadow of any evidence to guide us in forming; an opinion as to what they may have clone in times past. The negative testimony of Du Chaillu, who says that he searched in vain in the gorilla region for any intermediate race or link between it and man, scarcely adds anything to the conviction of the non-existence of any such link, which has long been universally entertained.*


Author(s):  
Zohreh Ramin ◽  
Alireza Shafinasab

When writing Macbeth, Shakespeare faced a moral and aesthetic challenge. On the one hand, he had drawn the story of Macbeth from Holinshed's Chronicles, in which Banquo is depicted as an accomplice in the murder of King Duncan. On the other hand Banquo was believed to be the ancestor of King James, Shakespeare’s patron. Shakespeare had to write a play that at once pleased King James, remained true to the spirit of history, and could be a popular hit in the commercial world of Jacobean theatre, all seemingly contradictory ends because of the problem with the character of Banquo. So Shakespeare characterizes him in a different manner from his sources. The new characterization served a number of purposes. The most important reason for the alternation was to please King James, the alleged descendant of Banquo. Other than that, there is the dramatic purpose of creating a foil character for Macbeth, who can highlight Macbeth's characteristics. The presence of a noble Banquo also shows that human being can resist evil, as does Banquo. These points have been emphasized in many writings on Macbeth, which mean that Shakespeare's Banquo is an innocent man, a seemingly deviation from history. The present paper, however, tries to examine Shakespeare's complex characterization of Banquo which must meet those seemingly contradicting ends, a characterization far more ambivalent and artful than simple political affiliations might suggest. It will be shown that Shakespeare's Banquo not only is not simply an innocent man he seems to be at the first reading, but he could be as murderous as Macbeth himself. The only difference between the two is that one acts sooner than the other.


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-342
Author(s):  
Caslav Koprivica

In this text, the work of Serbian writer Stanislav Krakov, between the two world wars, the famous, and later, due to ideological divisions, repressed and forgotten figure, is ovserverd through the lens of philosophy of existence and phenomenology. The ?philosophical? significance of Krakov?s autobiographical war prose, which in the aesthetic, especially formal-innovative aspect, represented the pinnacle of the genre of that time Serbian literature, is that it can be viewed as a first-class document of phenomenological introspection of a man in situation of mortal combat; and the ragne his prose of his prose is, in some respects, without exaggeration, comparable to war prose of Ernst J?nger. But besides his authentic documentality, Krakov?s writing is characterized by brilliant insights. So, on the one hand, Krakov can be viewed as a thinker of war and corporeality avant lettre, and, on the other hand, the interpretative contextualization of his prose within the aforementioned philosophical tradition helps us to better understand his literature.


2021 ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Claire Mercier

This paper considers the graphic work of the Chilean artist Claudio Romo from a post-human perspective. Romo's work realizes an opening of imaginaries, above all, new configurations of human being, in order to reconsider the boundaries of human nature and propose a new humanism in relation to a new understanding of modernity. After a theoretical tour of post-humanism, especially of Rosi Braidotti's philosophical nomadism, the paper will approach the post-human bestiary that elaborates Romo, on the one hand, as a questioning of access to empirical realities and, on the other hand, as a presentation of potential life forms. The paper will conclude on the presence, in Romo’s work, of a new affirmative humanism, that is, the experimentation of new modes of subjectivization, as well as the approach of new modes of knowledge.


2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Th. Frederiks

In the past Christians have used various models in relating to people of other faiths. Most are still in use. Four dominant models immediately come to mind: those of expansion, of diakonia, of presence, and of interreligious dialogue. This article discusses the pros and cons of these models and then proposes a fifth model: the model of kenosis. The model of kenosis calls for imitation of the self-emptying act of Jesus in his Incarnation in relation to people of other faiths, based on a shared humanity. Kenosis demands, on the one hand, a total openness for the other, as a fellow human being and a religious person, while, on the other hand, it offers the possibility to be authentically different from the other, in religion, culture, etc. Thus is seems to offer a model for interreligious living and relating, which honors religious differences, give guidelines for relating to each other, and is firmly based in a shared humanity.


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