Productive Misunderstanding

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-245
Author(s):  
German Melikhov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Practical Principle ◽  
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi ◽  
Independent Thinking

The article focuses on understanding some of the self-evident premises of the philosophy of the 17th–19th centuries that make up the horizon of the Enlightenment. One of these premises is Immanuel Kant’s idea of independent thinking. Based on the analysis of the polemics of Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi about the “extrasensible abilities” of the reason, the question is raised about the possibility of understanding someone else’s concept based on other existential preferences. Answering this question, we distinguish between the concept of the Enlightenment and the practical principle of the Enlightenment and show that the supporter of the ideology of the Enlightenment (Kant) and his critic (Jacobi) appear in the light of the principle of independent thinking as the spokesmen of the spirit, not the letter of the Enlightenment. A condition for understanding someone else’s concept is a productive misunderstanding, which is one of the aspects of the principle of independent thinking: the acceptance of the self-evident as incomprehensible, the shift of one’s attention to one’s own how-being and the perception of thought as a gift.

Saving the Self: Between the Enlightenment and the Deluge

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 657-660
Author(s):  
Mary Gergen
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Enlightenment

Maximus

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Byers
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The One

This concluding chapter charts the continuing significance of the early postwar moment in Olson’s later work, particularly The Maximus Poems. The philosophical and political concerns of the American avant-garde between 1946 and 1951 play out across The Maximus Poems just as they inform later American art practices. The search of the early postwar American independent left for a source of political action rooted in the embodied individual is seen, on the one hand, to have been personified in the figure of Maximus. At the same time, Maximus’s radical ‘practice of the self’ charts a sophisticated alternative to the Enlightenment humanist subject widely critiqued in the United States in the immediate postwar period.

Die Legitimität der Aufklärung

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Schick
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

This study defends the legitimacy of the Enlightenment project by way of its different realizations in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Today, Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with a global claim is often considered synonymous with Western chauvinism. The assertion of a universally binding reason is all too obviously inconsistent with the much-cited recognition of cultural differences. In contrast, it is the conviction brought forward in this book that an adequately understood Enlightenment is an unconditional right of every person taking an active interest in a self-determined way of life. Only the realization of this conception of Enlightenment can provide the required space for the reciprocal recognition of human differences to freely unfold.

scholarly journals Is Hume Attempting to Introduce a New, Pragmatic Conception of a Contradiction in his Treatise?

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 315
Author(s):  
Alan Kenneth Schwerin
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
The Self ◽  
Bundle Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Critical Exploration

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2016v20n3p315Hume’s Treatise, with its celebrated bundle theory of the self, is a significant contribution to the embryonic Newtonian experimental philosophy of the enlightenment. But the theory is inadequate as it stands, as the appendix to the Treatise makes clear. For this account of the self, apparently, rests on contradictory principles — propositions, fortunately, that can be reconciled, according to Hume. My paper is a critical exploration of Hume’s argument for this intriguing suggestion.

Historical Roots of Existentialism

2020 ◽  
pp. 56-71
Author(s):  
Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
Keyword(s):  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Critical Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Context Features ◽  
Freedom And Responsibility

This chapter shows the inheritance by existentialism of ideas from the philosophical tradition. Socrates serves for Kierkegaard and Marcel as a model for the authentic practice of philosophy and for initiating interior reflection of the self. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus debated Stoicism’s understanding of freedom from external circumstances. Husserl and Heidegger interpreted Augustine’s conception of time, while Heidegger along with Beauvoir adapted, in a secular context, features of his conception of religious conversion. Augustine, Shakespeare, and Montaigne explored inner reflection and the nature of the self which came to be critically echoed in existentialist conceptions. The Enlightenment generated a philosophy of human freedom, defending the rational autonomy of the individual. Critical engagement of these ideas is shown to have shaped existentialist conceptions of authenticity, subjectivity, inwardness, freedom, and responsibility.

The History of Science as European Self-Portraiture

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 523-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORRAINE DASTON
Keyword(s):  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
World History ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Image ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of

Since the Enlightenment, the history of science has been enlisted to show the unity and distinctiveness of Europe. This paper, written on the occasion of the award of the 2005 Erasmus Prize to historians of science Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, traces the intertwined narratives of the history of science and European modernity from the 18th century to the present. Whether understood as triumph or tragedy (and there have been eloquent proponents of both views), the Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as Europe's decisive break with tradition – the first such break in world history and the model for all subsequent epics of modernization in other cultures. The paper concludes with reflections on how a new history of science, exemplified in the work of Shapin and Schaffer, may transform the self-image of Europe and conceptions of truth itself.

scholarly journals Whose Enlightenment?

2017 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 111-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz L. Fillafer
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The Self ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Political Liberty ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment seems out of kilter. Until fairly recently, its trajectories were beguilingly simple and straightforward. Devised by Western metropolitan masterminds, the Enlightenment was piously appropriated by their latter-day apprentices in Central and Eastern Europe. This process of benign percolation made modern science, political liberty, and religious toleration trickle down to East-Central Europe. The self-orientalizing of nineteenth-century Central European intellectuals reinforced this impression, making concepts that were ostensibly authentic and pristine at their “Western” sources seem garbled and skewed once appropriated in their region.

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