scholarly journals Reflections on Kant’s View of the Imagination

2015 ◽  
Vol 64 (157) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Tugba Ayas Onol

<p>The paper elaborates the theory of imagination in Immanuel Kant’s <em>Critique of Pure Reason</em> and <em>Critique of Judgment</em>. From the first <em>Critique</em> to the third <em>Critique</em>, the imagination emerges under different titles such as reproductive, productive or transcendental imagination. The paper shall try to decide whether its <em>functions</em> suggested in the first <em>Critique</em> and its performance in the third <em>Critique</em> are <em>contradictory or developmental</em> with respect to Kant’s critical philosophy. Thus, it will examine of the power and the scope of the imagination in the first<em> Critique</em> and of its status and performance in the third <em>Critique. </em></p><p> </p>

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Matherne

AbstractIn theCritique of Pure Reason, Kant describes schematism as a ‘hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ (A141/B180–1). While most commentators treat this as Kant's metaphorical way of saying schematism is something too obscure to explain, I argue that we should follow up Kant's clue and treat schematism literally asKunst. By letting our interpretation of schematism be guided by Kant's theoretically exact ways of using the termKunstin theCritique of Judgmentwe gain valuable insight into the nature of schematism, as well as its connection to Kant's concerns in the thirdCritique.


Author(s):  
Karin Nisenbaum

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that human reason is inherently conflicted, because it demands a form of unconditioned knowledge that transcends its capacity; his solution to this conflict of reason relies on the idea that reason’s quest for the unconditioned can only be realized practically. This book proposes to view the conflict of reason, and Kant’s solution to this conflict, as the central problem shaping the contours of post-Kantian German Idealism. I contend that the rise and fall of German Idealism is to be told as a story about the different interpretations, appropriations, and radicalization of Kant’s prioritizing of the practical. The first part of the book explains why Kant’s critics and followers came to understand the aim of Kant’s critical philosophy in light of the conflict of reason. I argue that F. H. Jacobi and Salomon Maimon set the stage for the reception of Kant’s critical philosophy by conceiving its aim in terms of meeting reason’s demand for unconditioned knowledge, and by understanding the conflict of reason as a conflict between thinking and acting, or knowing and willing. The manner in which the post-Kantian German Idealists radicalized Kant’s prioritizing of the practical is the central topic of the second part of the book, which focuses on works by J. G. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling. The third part of the book clarifies why, in order to solve the conflict of reason, Schelling and Rosenzweig developed the view that human experience is grounded in three irreducible elements—God, the natural world, and human beings—which relate in three temporal dimensions: Creation, Revelation, and Redemption.


Author(s):  
Eckart Forster

Beck played a brief but important role in the development of post-Kantian philosophy. A former student of Kant, he published at his teacher’s instigation three volumes of ‘Explanatory Abstracts’ of Kant’s major writings. In the third volume Beck presented what he regarded as the ‘Only Possible Standpoint’ from which Critical Philosophy had to be judged if misunderstandings of Kant’s work were to be avoided. His ‘Doctrine of the Standpoint’ involved a ‘reversal’ of the method of the Critique of Pure Reason and the elimination of the ‘thing-in-itself’ from Kant’s theoretical philosophy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-126
Author(s):  
Michael Lewin

Transcendental philosophy was not born like Athena out of Zeus’s head, mature and in full armour from the very beginning. That is why in both prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason (1781 and 1787) Kant introduces the concept of transcendental philosophy as an “idea.” The idea understood architectonically develops slowly and only gradually acquires a definite form. As witnessed by the works of Kant himself and of his predecessors and followers, the idea of transcendental philosophy has undergone a series of changes and adjustments compared to the initial plan. In this context, my goal is not simply exegesis and historical investigation of transcendental philosophy, but also to look at it from a systematic and methodological perspective. I examine the concept of transcendental philosophy from the viewpoint of programmatic metaphilosophy. The first part discusses programmatics as a distinct subsection of metaphilosophy. I argue that Kant’s architectonic methodology and the methodology of Lakatos can be used to understand the inception, development and degradation of philosophical systems. In the second part I look at the project of transcendental philosophy and the stages of its development from the standpoint of architectonics. The third part shows that Lakatos’s methodology can provide a detailed insight into the elements of transcendental philosophy, a clear idea of its logic and identify the component parts that can be improved and developed. In spite of the different levels of detailing and epistemological prerequisites, the methodologies of Kant and Lakatos can be combined to achieve a metaphilosophically informed and progressive understanding of philosophical projects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
J. Colin McQuillan ◽  

This article argues that Immanuel Kant recreates in his critical philosophy one of the most distinctive features of Christian Wolff’s rationalism—the marriage of reason and experience (connubium rationis et experientiae). The article begins with an overview of Wolff’s connubium and then surveys the reasons some of his contemporaries opposed the marriage of reason and experience, paying special attention to the distinctions between phenomena and noumena, sensible and intellectual cognition, and empirical and pure cognition that Kant employs in his inaugural dissertation On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World (1770). The final section of the article argues that, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant rejects the anticonnubialist positions he defended in his inaugural dissertation and introduces a new account of the relation between reason and experience that recreates Wolff’s connubium within the context of his critical philosophy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Igor K. Kalinin

I proceed from the hypothesis that the difficulties in Kant’s presentation of his plan and, accordingly, the implicit reason for the critical attitude to this plan on the part of many contemporary philosophers stem from the fact that he had no theoretical link at his disposal which would offer a more solid scientific grounding for his entire system. I believe that Darwinism is such a link which bolsters the central but ungrounded thesis of the Critique of Pure Reason on the existence of a priori synthetic judgments. The synthesis of Darwinism and critical philosophy dictates, however, a substantial restructuring of the latter since some of its key elements prove to be weak in the light of modern studies and need to be revised or even reversed. The first reversal explored in this article determines the origin of the categories which are now revealed not “from the top down” where Kant sought them, i. e. not in logical functions in accordance with metaphysical deduction and not in self-consciousness as transcendental deduction claims, but “from the bottom up” if one considers things in the evolutionary dimension, i. e. in the instincts. The second reversal shifts the freedom of will which Kant placed in the same ontological basket with things in themselves at “the top,” to another level of the pyramid of ontologies, by changing dualism to pluralism because dualism is too narrow to accommodate all the autonomous components of critical philosophy. Thus spirit and freedom find a new place separate from the sphere of physical nature; the category of adaptation explains how different ontologies can coexist; while the problem of two interpretations of transcendental idealism (two-world vs. two-aspect interpretation) finds a solution through their reconciliation.


Author(s):  
Carlos Mendiola

The central thesis is that already in the Critique of Pure Reason does the need for the distinction between determining and reflecting uses of Judgment arise, although its nominal formulation appears only later in the second introduction to the Critique of Judgment. The interpretative importance of this thesis lies in that, contrary to most interpretations, which claim that the distinction lies in the nature of such judgments, the author thinks of it as differentiated exercises of an identical capacity of judgment, and even as a difference that must be appreciated in the products of such capacity. Thus, any judgment of objects may at once be determining and reflecting, according to the kind of application of the concepts involved in each case. In brief, although reflection does not properly belong in the conditions of possibility of objective judgment, it is indispensable to fix the conceptual place of the particular in judgment


Problemos ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 84 ◽  
pp. 153-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jūratė Baranova

Straipsnyje nagrinėjama Kanto nužymėtos ir Deleuze’o eksperimentiniame mąstyme rekonstruotos vaizduotės kaip vieno iš trijų proto gebėjimų raiškos lauko alternatyvos. Siekiama atsakyti į paties Deleuze’o išsikeltą kantišką klausimą: kokia yra giliausia paslaptis? Aptinkamos kelios atsakymo alternatyvos. Šiame tyrime paaiškėjo, kad Deleuze’o atsakymai į paties išsikeltą klausimą „kokia yra giliausia vaizduotės paslaptis?“ patiria metamorfozes, kurios apsuka ratą. Nuo pradinės pozicijos, kai vaizduotė veikia tik paklusdama intelektui ar protui, ji juda link laisvo trijų nepriklausomų sugebėjimų – intelekto, proto, vaizduotės atitikimo, paskui – link jų nedarnios dermės, jų kovos, kuri skatina kiekvienos naują atsiskleidimą, galiausiai – prie vaizduotės anihiliacijos, kuri leidžia užgimti naujai minčiai, taigi, ratas apsisuka ir grįžtama prie jų dermės naujame lygmenyje, moderuojant filosofiniam skoniui. Tačiau visas šias metaformorfozes jungia viena bendra Kanto suformuluota prielaida: vaizduotė niekada neišvengia triadinės priklausomybės, ji neveikia viena; ji galima tik santykyje su intelektu ir protu, t. y. kitais trimis jai paraleliais ir simultaniškais sugebėjimais.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: Kantas, Deleuze’as, vaizduotėKant and Deleuze: What is the Deepest Secret of Imagination? Jūratė Baranova Abstract The paper discusses the problem of possible philosophical understanding of imagination from the Kantian-Deleuzean point of view. At the begining of his philosophical carreer, one can say, “early Deleuze” in 1963 published the book „Kant’s Critical Philosophy“ (La philosophie critique de Kant). The same year he wrote an essay “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Esthetics”. In both texts returning to Kant’s book Critique of Pure Reason, Deleuze notices, that it is widely acknowledged that schematizing is an original and irreducible act of imagination: only imagination can and knows how to schematize. Nevertheless, the imagination does not schematize of its own accord, simply because it is free to do so. It schematizes only for a speculative purpose, in accordance with the determinate concepts of the understanding; when the understanding itself plays the role of legislator. This is why it would be misguided to search the mistery of schematizing for the last word on the imagination in its essence or in its free spontaneity. “Schematizing is indeed a secret, but not the deepest secret of imagination,” – writes Deleuze. Some questions arise at this point. The first one – who speaks here: Kant or Deleuze? The second one – what is this deepest secret of imagination, as an intrigue of this kantian-deleuzean voice? How many possible answers to this question one can discern passing from “early Deleuze” to “late Deleuze”? In this article the author discoved some possible metamorphosis or twists of imagination in the experimental reading of Deleuze. It starts from the submissive position being directed by Understanding or Reason, to the free accord of three independent faculties, towards their discord, even fight, even death of the imagination for the sake of the thought and at least – the whirl closes and comes to the same point but from a different point of view: imagination, together with understanding and reason participate as an integral part of philosophical taste in later Deleuze. But one point united all these different adventures of imagination. Imagination always acts only in relation to the understanding and reason, it never plays free. It could never be able to play alone. Keywords: Kant, Deleuze, imagination.


Philosophy ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 13 (49) ◽  
pp. 40-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. C. Ewing

Nobody interested in philosophy need be deterred by Kant's reputation for difficulty from familiarizing himself with his ethics. While the Critique of Pure Reason and his other non-ethical works are very hard to follow, the first two chapters of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals at least are clear and straightforward and presuppose little previous acquaintance with philosophy. The third chapter is not about ethics as such but about the metaphysical problem of freedom and should be omitted by anyone who is not familiar with Kant's general philosophy, but the first two


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Guyer

AbstractMarcus Willaschek’s new book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a penetrating analysis of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In his comments, the author first raises some questions concerning the structure of the Transcendental Dialectic (and Willaschek’s reconstruction of it) and then proposes that looking at the second Critique and continuing on into the third Critique will reveal more roles for the idea of God in Kant’s reconstruction of traditional metaphysics than Willaschek’s treatment suggests.


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