METACRITICISM AS A LITERARY PROBLEM

The latest decades are associated with an active rethinking of the existing literary and philosophical achievements, which are reflected significantly in changes and refinements in contemporary literary terminology. Along with the already known concepts such as "literature", "postmodernism", "criticism", the concepts "metafiction", "metamodernism" and "metacriticism" exist and become popular. At the same time, one may notice that the widely used now prefix meta- lays claim to a greater depth and coverage of higher horizons. If criticism marks the analysis, comprehension, and interpretation of literary works, then metacriticism focuses on literary-critical, historical-literary, and methodological researches, thus showing "criticism of criticism". The article deals with a complex analysis of the concept of "metacriticism". On the one hand, both aesthetic and philosophical approaches to the understanding of the notion of criticism are taken into account – starting from the antique times to Karl Popper’s critical-rationalistic approach. On the other hand, it is found that metacriticism as a phenomenon dates back to the end of the XVIII century when the works of two famous German philosophers Johann Georg Hamann’s "Metacritique on Purism of Reason" and Johan Gottfried Herder’s "Metacriticism of Critique of Pure Reason" were published as a debate on Immanuel Kant’s ideas. Based on the available data, it is found that metacriticism is a rather convenient multilevel term that may qualitatively contain various interpretations, including the criticism of criticism, metascience concerning criticism, criticism of the highest level, short form of the term "metaphysical critique" as a critique of "metaphysical realism". At the same time, while taking into account the current trends of the digital age, metacriticism becomes a product of digital technology - popular platforms for writing reviews, making discussions, and even creating a virtual library, such as site Metacritic, the English-language portal Goodreads and its Russian equivalent Livelib. The article itself does not exhaust the problem of metacriticism as a multidimensional phenomenon, but it provides opportunities for further and deeper studies of the outlined issues, in particular within the context of theoretical and literary discourse.

Das Verhältnis von Subjektivität und Zeit bei Kant und Schopenhauer

This paper focuses on Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s models of self-consciousness and their specific relation to time. It aims to show that genuine philosophical theories can explain the idiosyncratic relation between ourselves and the world without relying on pure metaphysical speculations or strictly empirical and phenomenally oriented conceptions, as many contemporary proponents of analytic philosophy entail. The first groundbreaking doctrine in this regard is Kant’s transcendental theory of apperception, which unfolds a new theoretical dimension of thinking, grounding the logical unity of thought in the pure, originally synthetic unity of the subject itself. In order to constitute a structural order within the appearing phenomenal world, Kant conceptualizes a theory of self-affection in the second edition of the Critique of pure reason, positing a dynamic relation between the spontaneously acting intellect and the purely receptive inner sense of time as a result of productive transcendental imagination. The problematic relation between self-reliance and empirical consciousness that Kant did not resolve completely led to various subsequent transformations of Kant’s transcendental principles, one of which boasts Schopenhauer as a prominent but rarely considered representative. Schopenhauer’s systematic approach consists in a modified version of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which ties the Kantian subject of logical and transcendental unity to an intuitive corporeal individual that can only conceptualize itself as an original, willing subject. The Schopenhauerian subject unfolds its empirical character in accordance with its own inner impulses and motivations, which manifest themselves in time but can only be interpreted as a phenomenal representation of a higher, metaphysical unity, which Schopenhauer calls the will as a thing in itself. Schopenhauer reaches his final metaphysical conclusion via a problematic analogy, positing another perspective on the corporeal nature of the individual which, by means of abstraction, can be extended to the whole phenomenal world. Therefore, Schopenhauer interprets the underlying (intelligible) character of the subject and the phenomenal world as a whole as a timeless, omnipresent will to live which can be temporally experienced within the nature of our own subjectivity.

Three Kantian Routes to the Synthetic A Priori

Kant influentially distinguished analytic from synthetic a priori propositions, and he took certain propositions in the latter category to be of immense philosophical importance. His distinction between the analytic and the synthetic has been accepted by many and attacked by others; but despite its importance, a number of discussions of it since at least W. V. Quine’s have paid insufficient attention to some of the passages in which Kant draws the distinction. This paper seeks to clarify what appear to be three distinct conceptions of the analytic (and implicitly of the synthetic) that are presented in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and in some other Kantian texts. The conceptions are important in themselves, and their differences are significant even if they are extensionally equivalent. The paper is also aimed at showing how the proposed understanding of these conceptions—and especially the one that has received insufficient attention from philosophers—may bear on how we should conceive the synthetic a priori, in and beyond Kant’s own writings.

Mendelssohn und Kant über den ontologischen Gottesbeweis

This essay develops a new interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s ontological argument in the Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence. At the beginning, Immanuel Kant’s famous criticism of the ontological proof of God’s existence in the Critique of Pure Reason is presented. Then I offer an in-depth analysis of Mendelssohn’s original ontological argument in the Morning Hours. It is shown that with Mendelssohn’s new proof of God, Kant’s objections are answered. Finally, it is explained why Mendelssohn does not succeed in completely refuting Kant’s objections.

Deleuze’s reading of the Critique of Pure Reason

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason such as it appears in his 1963 monographic work La Philosophie critique de Kant. We will show that the originality of Deleuze’s reading lies in reading the critical project in retrospect, taking the sensus communis problem from the Critique of the Power of Judgment and applying it to the first Critique. In so doing, he points out the survival of a pre-established harmony, now interiorized, both between heterogeneous faculties and between the matter of phenomena and the Ideas of reason. This implies a reinterpretation of the critical project that has passed unnoticed within Kantian studies and that places the Third Critique as the ground of the previous ones, unveiling common sense as a condition of possibility of knowledge.