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.

Perception

Dialogue ◽  
1978 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Odegard
Keyword(s):  
Truth Condition ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Direct Knowledge ◽  
Important Sense

I Shall offer a realist theory of perception which in an important sense is neither direct nor representational nor causal.Let us say that we directly perceive something if perceiving it enables us to know of its existence without having evidence of its existence. In this sense, direct perception allows us to have “direct knowledge” of what we perceive. For example, I see after-images directly, since I can know of their existence without having visual evidence of their existence. I do not have to look at them with my eyes. Granted, I do need evidence in order to know that they are after-images; but not in order to know of their existence as colours or shapes. Also, I do have to see them in order to know that they exist. But this is not a condition of having evidence. It is only a condition of their existence, which in turn is a truth condition of my knowing.

scholarly journals Thoughts on the Decriminalisation of the Use or Possession of Cannabis Within Private Settings – Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development v Prince 2019 (1) SACR 14 (CC)

Obiter ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 988-1003
Author(s):  
Philip Stevens
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Drug Trafficking ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Current Discussion

The use or possession of drugs has been a phenomenon since time immemorial. In South Africa, the essential offences pertaining to drugs are provided for in the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act 140 of 1992 (the Act). The two most important crimes provided for in the Act are “dealing in drugs” and the “use or possession of drugs”. The Act divides drugs into three general categories – namely, dependence-producing substances; dangerous dependence-producing substances; and undesirable dependence-producing substances. The specific drugs resorting in each of these categories are listed in Schedule 2 of the Act. The punishment prescribed for the possession, use or dealing in dangerous dependence-producing substances and undesirable dependence-producing substances is harsher than that for possession, use or dealing in dependence-producing substances. It is interesting, and topical for purposes of the current discussion, that cannabis or dagga is classified in terms of Schedule 2 as an undesirable dependence-producing substance.The case under discussion (Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development v Prince 2019 (1) SACR 14 (CC)) is of particular importance as the use or possession of cannabis within private settings was addressed from a constitutional perspective and, more pertinently, on a question as to the constitutionality of the criminalisation thereof. Upon first glance, it seems as though the issues addressed in this case correspond with the disputes addressed in the earlier case of Prince v The President, Cape Law Society (2002 (2) SA 794 (CC) (Prince (2)). As is indicated in this contribution, the issues in these two judgments are distinct and differ in many instances.A critical analysis of the decision under discussion reveals that although the use or possession of cannabis within private settings has, by virtue of the case, been decriminalised against a constitutional backdrop, it also opens the door to critical debate pertaining to various substantive and procedural issues.

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.

PHILOSOPHICAL DAVOS AS A REASON FOR DIVORCE. M. FRIDMAN’S VERSION. PART 2

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-73
Author(s):  
Sergey Smirnov
Keyword(s):  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Difference ◽  
And Mathematics ◽  
The One ◽  
Main Ideas ◽  
Parting Of The Ways

This article is a continuation of the previous publication published under the same title (part 1). Both parts are devoted to the problem of understanding the split that once occurred in world philosophy and was embodied in the division of philosophy into two directions, continental and analytical philosophy. In the second part, the author continues to discuss the reasons for the split and the argumentation cited by various authors, proving the conceptual difference of directions. The article analyzes the main ideas of the authors of the Vienna Circle Manifesto and the argumentation of R. Carnap in his dispute with M. Heidegger, the subject of which is devoted to the so-called overcoming of metaphysics. The reason for writing both parts was the work of M. Fridman “Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer and Heidegger”, translated into Russian. The result of the second part is the conclusions formulated by the author of the article regarding the difference between the named directions. The author believes that it makes sense to discuss their differences not in the categories of truth and falsity of teachings and concepts, but in the categories of different orientations and attitudes, which do not deny but complement each other. On the one hand, analytical philosophy claims to be scientific orientation, clear and precise language, logic and mathematics. In contrast to it, continental philosophy does not pretend to be scientific, to a clear and precise language, but prefers innuendo, rejection of doctrinalism, and the exploratory nature of philosophizing.

Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Cornelius Castoriadis ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theological Thought

While Western moral, philosophical, and theological thought has historically privileged the good, this has been accompanied by profound, if subterranean, interest in evil. This book charts a history of evil as it has been thought within this tradition. Showing that the problem of evil, as a conceptual problem—that is, as a problem to be dealt with through rational means—came to the fore with the rise of monotheism, this book initially outlines the dynamics that led to it becoming the problem of Christianity, before tracing how subsequent thought, first within an explicitly theological framework, and subsequently from secular foundations, developed from this problematic. With chapters on figures in early and Medieval Christian philosophy, modern philosophy, German Idealism, Nietzsche, Arendt, post-structuralism, and contemporary analytical philosophy, it demonstrates the breadth and depth of thinking on evil within this tradition and includes discussions on thinkers not normally included in analyses of the topic, such as Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis. These reveal that, far from being something clear and obvious as common-sense, everyday intuition tends to hold, the meaning and nature of evil has been remarkably complex, differentiated, and contested.

scholarly journals Bakerian lecture.―On the statistical and thermodynamical relations of radiant energy

1909 ◽  
Vol 83 (560) ◽  
pp. 82-95 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Random Distribution ◽  
Small Deviation ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Radiant Energy ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Direct Knowledge ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Mean ◽  
The Individual

It was surmised by a prominent school of thought in ancient times, it become absorbed into the mechanical philosophy of Newton, and it was at length established by the experiments and reasonings of Dalton and his contemporaries, that matter is not divisible without limit, but is constituted of an aggregate of discrete entities, all alike for the same homogeneous substance, and naturally extremely minute compared with our powers of direct perception. The smallest portion of matter which we can manipulate (at any rate until very recently) consists of a vast assemblage of molecules, of independent self-existing systems which exert dynamical influences on each other. The direct knowledge of matter that mankind can acquire is a knowledge of the average behaviour and relations of the crowd of molecules. The sentient intelligence with perceptions of space and time minute enough to examine the individual molecules, each of them -would probably appear as a cosmos in itself, influencing and influenced by others,—not unlike stars in a firmament. The observed laws of nature are thus laws of averages—are statistical relations. Yet they are for practical purposes exact. To illustrate this in a way that will presently be of use let us imagine a row of urns whose apertures are of different areas, and let us consider how N objects will be distributed at random among them, assuming that the chance of an object getting into an urn is proportional to the area of its aperture, and is otherwise indifferent as regards them all. If the number of objects is not very large in comparison with the number of urns, no direct law of numbers emerges in this random distribution: though by the doctrine of probabilities we may calculate definitely the relative numbers of times that the various distributions will occur in a vast total number of cases, and this will represent the chances of recurrence of these distributions, the most likely arrangements are those ranging close around the equable distribution, in which the contents of the urns are proportional to their apertures. Those far removed therefrom are much less likely. "When the number N is very great, a relatively small deviation from the equable distribution has an almost negligible chance of occurring. Equable distribution then assumes the aspect of a rigid law; nevertheless occasionally in an soon it will he widely departed from. The abstract laws governing the extent and distribution of the various kinds of deviations from the mean distribution constitute an important part of the theory of statistics, first explored and developed by J. Bernoulli.

Bolzano, Bernard (1781–1848)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Kunne
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Theory Of Science ◽  
Creative Mathematician ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
Bernard Bolzano ◽  
Logical Semantics

Bernard Bolzano was a lone forerunner both of analytical philosophy and phenomenology. Born in Prague in the year when Kant’s first Critique appeared, he became one of the most acute critics both of Kant and of German Idealism. He died in Prague in the same year in which Frege was born; Frege is philosophically closer to him than any other thinker of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Bolzano was the only outstanding proponent of utilitarianism among German-speaking philosophers, and was a creative mathematician whose name is duly remembered in the annals of this discipline. His Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science) of 1837 makes him the greatest logician in the period between Leibniz and Frege. The book was sadly neglected by Bolzano’s contemporaries, but rediscovered by Brentano’s pupils: Its ontology of propositions and ideas provided Husserl with much of his ammunition in his fight against psychologism and in support of phenomenology, and through Twardowski it also had an impact on the development of logical semantics in the Lwów-Warsaw School.

Philosophy and Animal Studies: Calarco, Castricano, and Diamond

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Aaltola
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Review Paper ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
Animal Life ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Cora Diamond

AbstractRecently, animal studies has started to gain popularity. This interdisciplinary field investigates the human-animal relationship from different perspectives, including philosophy, cultural studies, and biology. In 2008, at least three books explored themes related to animal studies: Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal; Jodey Castricano (Ed.), Animal Subjects: An Ethics Reader in a Posthuman World; and Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, et al. (Eds.) Philosophy and Animal Life. Each volume approaches animal studies from a different viewpoint (Continental philosophy, interdisciplinary, and Wittgensteinian), but they also share many themes. This review paper discusses the differences and similarities between the volumes and highlights the directions in which animal studies is developing. It is argued that an emphasis on "direct" perception or experience of animality and heterogeneity, and an exploration of otherness, are elements that all these books share, and that are relevant to animal studies.

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.

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