The Humble Reason. On Education in Kant and Fichte

In this paper I will focus on education as the core function of reason in Kant and Fichte. The notion of reason carries an intrinsic tendency to universality, which is difficult to be reconciled with its local (cultural, historical, anthropological) background and actualisation. I believe that the stress on the importance of learning, which can be seen in the works of both Kant and Fichte, might provide useful clues to approaching the relation between universality and particularity. I will start by focusing on Kant’s narration on the genealogy of human reason in the Conjectural Beginning of Human History, and then move on to the critical writings and selected lectures in order to focus on the role of human dignity and ethical education for the moral appraisal and the practice of virtue. Later, I will consider Fichte’s lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar, the Vocation of Man and The Characteristics of the Present Age, which are crucial to understanding the social, ethical and political role of the scholar. For Fichte, education is the best instrument to eradicate selfishness, regarded as a historical phenomenon which can lead a nation to ruin. I will then provide some conclusions concerning the two accounts and their implications.

Enfolding the Hand, Entrancing the Eye: Erica Baum’s Dog Ear

This essay will situate Erica Baum’s Dog Ear within broader discussions of appropriation, remediation, and queer phenomenology.  In her ongoing series, begun over a decade ago, Baum makes the quotidian act of folding the corner of a book’s page into a sculptural intervention, allowing her to “reauthor” the newly concealed and revealed juxtaposition of text.  These digital photographs, initially displayed in art galleries, were selectively sequenced by Baum to become Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011, reprinted 2016).  Both the accompanying critical writings and subsequent reviews of the book emphasized continuities between Baum’s project and traditions of found and concrete poetry, alongside modernist precursors like Malevich and Albers who informed her visual lexicon.  While acknowledging these legacies, my essay focuses on the evident limitations of attempts to render Baum’s works using standard and modified modes of lineation (offered by Kenneth Goldsmith and Amaranth Borsuk, respectively) which consistently evacuate what is most compelling about them.  Instead, I propose and demonstrate a method of gestalt poetics, one which lets their circuitous, open-ended dimensions register more fully by emphasizing evocative recombination, adjacency, and the interrelation of these remediated pages as they return back to and contort the codex.  Textual figures get produced, as Sara Ahmed has argued “by acts of relegation” and their queerness, in Baum’s work, depends on perpetually destabilizing the bifurcation between reading and looking in order to shift our sense of foreground and background into an extended matrix of partial legibilities. 

Calling the Taniwha: Mana Wahine Maori and the Poetry of Roma Potiki

<p>This thesis aims to explore the implications of reading the poetry of Roma Potiki with some of the critical writing about Mana Wahine Maori. At the intersections between the creative and the critical writings, I produce a grouping of literature that I name 'Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English'. Specifically, I contend that combining the kaupapa of Mana Wahine Maori scholarship with the poetry of Roma Potiki, and other Maori women poets, results in new readings of all the texts involved that are rich in complexities and multiplicities. In Chapter One I explain the choice of Roma Potiki's poetry as poutokomanawa for this thesis and briefly introduce some of the issues surrounding genre, canon-making and naming for Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English. Chapter Two illustrates the whakapapa of Mana Wahine Maori critical writings and explores the implications of the 'Mana' in Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English. Chapter Three considers the 'Wahine Maori' of Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English, both by examination of 'Wahine' in its New Zealand context, and by reference to a selection of Black American, Native American and First Nations, Australian Aboriginal and feminist literary critical writings. Chapter Four supports the pluralist nature of Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English by specific reference to Iwi/Hapu/Whanau contexts, urban wahine Maori contexts and wahine takatapui contexts. Finally, Chapter Five examines whether Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English is still a productive grouping when reading the works of not only other wahine Maori poets, but other wahine Maori writers generally, and I use the writings of Keri Hulme to investigate this. Therefore, I argue that naming this diverse collection of writing 'Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English' enables new kinds of readings that admit and debate the multiplicities inherent in all of these works.</p>

Calling the Taniwha: Mana Wahine Maori and the Poetry of Roma Potiki

<p>This thesis aims to explore the implications of reading the poetry of Roma Potiki with some of the critical writing about Mana Wahine Maori. At the intersections between the creative and the critical writings, I produce a grouping of literature that I name 'Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English'. Specifically, I contend that combining the kaupapa of Mana Wahine Maori scholarship with the poetry of Roma Potiki, and other Maori women poets, results in new readings of all the texts involved that are rich in complexities and multiplicities. In Chapter One I explain the choice of Roma Potiki's poetry as poutokomanawa for this thesis and briefly introduce some of the issues surrounding genre, canon-making and naming for Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English. Chapter Two illustrates the whakapapa of Mana Wahine Maori critical writings and explores the implications of the 'Mana' in Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English. Chapter Three considers the 'Wahine Maori' of Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English, both by examination of 'Wahine' in its New Zealand context, and by reference to a selection of Black American, Native American and First Nations, Australian Aboriginal and feminist literary critical writings. Chapter Four supports the pluralist nature of Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English by specific reference to Iwi/Hapu/Whanau contexts, urban wahine Maori contexts and wahine takatapui contexts. Finally, Chapter Five examines whether Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English is still a productive grouping when reading the works of not only other wahine Maori poets, but other wahine Maori writers generally, and I use the writings of Keri Hulme to investigate this. Therefore, I argue that naming this diverse collection of writing 'Mana Wahine Maori poetry in English' enables new kinds of readings that admit and debate the multiplicities inherent in all of these works.</p>

„Praca widma w epoce mechanicznej reprodukcji”. China Miéville: koncepcje „haute weird” i „abcanny”

The aim of the paper is presentation and discussion of China Miéville’s theoretic approach to the issue of horror’s subgenres, including classical Victorian ghost story and Lovecraftian weird fiction. “The abcanny” — in a way a subversive, theoretical category, that Miéville coins in his critical writings — is crucial for both his own speculations and the problems considered here. As it is decisively opposite to Freudian “uncanny” and Kristevian “abject”, it constitutes a relatively new approach to the question of distinction among the aforementioned horror literary genres. The Victorian ghost story, as Miéville sees it, is deeply rooted in the experience of the uncanny, and so it presupposes the “return of the repressed” from the individual or collective/cultural unconsciousness. Hence ghost stories are — just for example — susceptible to hauntological interpretations. Weird fiction — on the contrary — implies the experience of something radically new, something so far non-existent and therefore unacceptable and dreadful. If a classical ghost story can be perceived as an expression of the nineteenth–century fear of the irrationality returning from the past preceding the revolution of the Enlightenment, haute weird narrative embodies modernistic anxiety of the upcoming future, its uncertain nature, cognitive and moral relativism, and — what is most important here — the dubious status of man facing a boundless chasm of time and space.

“Metaphysics about Metaphysics.” Kant on Theoretical, Practical and Practico-Theoretical Metaphysics

The essay investigates the relation between metaphysics and practical philosophy in Kant by reconstructing Kant‘s systematic typology of metaphysics as developed in his critical writings. Section 1 deals with Kant’s rigorous reduction of philosophy to metaphysics. The focus here is on the epistemological turn effectuated by Kant with regard to metaphysics (theoretical metaphysics). Section 2 is concerned with Kant’s reconceptualization of (pure) practical philosophy as a metaphysics sui generis. At the center stands here Kant’s supplementation of the metaphysics of nature through a metaphysics of morals based on moral freedom (practical metaphysics). Section 3 addresses the merging of theoretical and practical metaphysics in Kant. The focus here lies on Kant’s introduction of a novel, practically validated form of (quasi-)theoretical metaphysics (practico-theoretical metaphysics). Throughout the essay combines an analytic interest in the forms and functions of metaphysics in Kant with a systematic interest in the practical and practico-theoretical transformation of previously theoretical metaphysics in Kant, which morphs from a doctrine of the objects of nature through a doctrine of the laws of freedom to a doctrine of wisdom regarding the supersensible.

The Social Gospel Movement. An Overview

"The Social Gospel movement developed in a time of intense urbanization and industrialization. The social context, generated by economic and political mishandlings, generated social pressure, poverty, and abuse, mainly on the poor and working classes. The Social Gospel movement tried to address the issues by applying Christian principles to social structures, as a result of political and economic changes. The promoters of the movement aligned their view of the ideal society with the eschatological perspective of premillennialism. They argued that a society that eliminates social evil is the Kingdom of God fulfilled. The movement managed to draw attention to social injustice, and it even managed to offer several productive means of alleviating the social evils it fought against. Despite its positive effects, the movement was criticized for failing to address issues such as race and gender. In this paper, the aim is to offer an introductory description of the Social Gospel movement, as it was described in various critical writings. Keywords: Social Gospel, race, gender, social evil, Kingdom of God "

Hermeneutical Trajectories from the Third World: Aijaz Ahmad on Edward Said

Aijaz Ahmad has made serious critical interventions in Marxist and Postcolonialist readings of literature and culture. His book, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) has made significant contribution to the postcolonial critical debates. It is a collection of critical articles with deliberations on postcolonial theory from different perspectives. In this book, one article on Edward Said discusses Said’s contribution to postcolonial discourse in the paradigm of Western influence on Eastern cultural narratives. Ahmad argues that Said’s critical writings on orientalism suffer from inconsistencies, overgeneralizations and selective applications. These methodological aberrations, Ahmad asserts, have shaped the trajectories of Said’s critical oeuvre. He criticizes Said for adopting western theoretical models for the cultural analysis and interpretations which are deeply immersed in the capitalist power structures. Ahmad accuses him of appropriating the western knowledge-structures for theorizing the Orient. His analysis of Said goes beyond the limits of critical debates as he questions Said’s vocation and space. He, in effect, considers Said an inauthentic critical voice. According to Ahmad, Said’s successful career in the West has rendered him incapable of a genuine engagement with the Orient. In this paper, I have attempted a critical re-reading of Ahmad’s arguments to suggest that Ahmad’s criticism of Said is intentionally provocative, seeking attention without engaging with Said’s theoretical perspectives in a comprehensive manner.

Empirical and Rational Psychology

This chapter examines the conceptions of rational and empirical psychology developed in the writings of Kant’s predecessors and in his own pre-critical writings. The views of the following figures are examined in detail: Wolff, Gottsched, Baumgarten, Meier, and the Kant of the ‘L1’ metaphysics lectures. Once this background has been surveyed, the chapter goes on to explore: Kant’s conception of a distinctively pure rational psychology; his science of self-consciousness; and his two contrasting understandings of how rational psychology might be pursued. The chapter argues that Kant’s target in the Paralogisms chapter is an idealized ‘pure’ rational psychology, an aspiring a priori ‘science’ of the soul, whose closest antecedents in the tradition are the views of Baumgarten, on the one hand, and his own views in the ‘L1’ metaphysics lectures, on the other.