Spontaneities and Singularities: Kant’s Hypothetical Approach to the Supersensible and the Re-Foundation of Metaphysics

The hypothetical approach to the supersensible developed by Kant in his three Critiques, exemplified by his analysis of the aesthetic and reflective judgment in his third Critique, with their principle fortuitous purposiveness, can be considered as the basis for a new foundation of metaphysics. According to Kant’s limitation of cognition to the realm of sense intuition, theoretical knowledge of God, the subject, things-in-themselves, transcendental ideas is impossible. This leads to a kind of “negative theology” of the highest principle and the supersensible as a whole. The reasons are rooted in the character of propositional thought, which can only circumscribe a singular, supersensible reality by means of predicative sentences and discursive thought. Taking Kant’s lead, but in contrast to his terminology, I call really existent singularities, including the thinking, knowing, desiring, feeling unique individuals we know as human beings, spontaneities, in order to distinguish them from descriptive characteristics attributed to them by predicative thought. Kant’s “practico-dogmatic” account of the postulates of God and immortality of the soul, based on the “fact of freedom” and its connection to the moral imperative, ensure the possibility of the “highest good” as final aim of moral behaviour — but cannot satisfy our need for knowledge of the supersensible. To “lay the groundwork” for experience of our own self-conscious reality, the reality of others like ourselves, of things which transcend the boundaries of sense intuition, and of true reciprocity, a different method is needed, one which leads us “beyond being and thought” to the unconditional beginning of conditional reality.

Theoretical Underpinnings of Wiredu’s Empiricalism

Wiredu uses the term ‘empiricalism’ to characterise a mode of thinking that is essentially empirical in orientation but admits non-transcendental metaphysical categories and existents into its systems of thought. Wiredu finds evidence of this mode of thinking in the Akan language, characterising the main linguistic community in Ghana, West Africa. The central question addressed in this essay is this: is empiricalism a plausible system in the sense that it carries universal validity and intelligibility? I argue that the plausibility and universality of empiricalism is evident in Wiredu’s logical syntactic and semantic principles which he recruits to investigate the contrast between basic categories of discursive thought such as signification and reference, concept and object, and the notion of ‘existence’. These analyses underpin the central theses of his empiricalism. Such detailed investigations demonstrate that the attractiveness of empiricalism is dependent upon theoretical principles other than, and in addition to, the linguistic evidence that Akan everyday usage provides. Thus the essay demonstrates a basic contrast between Wiredu’s philosophical investigation of language versus many standard works of African philosophy that constitute essentially in-depth studies in sociolinguistics.

Affective value and the significance of understanding disabled youth’s intensification of affects

This paper aims to bring to the forefront the mutual affective negotiations one young man with autism makes when navigating various social contexts having previously attended public school in Nova Scotia, Canada. In particular, I make use of Sara Ahmed’s specificities of affect (i.e. hate, fear, shame, disgust and happiness) as her work lends to accessing his sentient and emotive becomings. This is important as there is unfamiliarity on disabled youth’s emergent, affective exchanges with others. I argue that paying attention to bodily affects and how they materialise on the surface of the skin offers a productive space to understand better disability narratives. It is the intensification of affects that ensue for disabled youth that profoundly inform their discursive thought and future life trajectories.

Necessarily Dissimilar

In the centuries following al-Kindī, Muslim philosophers developed a coherent family of apophatic theological positions on the divine essence and its accessibility. The recurring aspects of this philosophical apophaticism were (1) a negative theology of divine attributes that reads them as negations, (2) the unknowability of the divine essence, closely connected with an Aristotelian version of the Neoplatonic distinction between discursive thought [dianoia] and non-discursive intellection [noēsis], (3) the necessary dissimilarity of God as the first cause of everything else, and (4) a philosophical hermeneutics that protects divine oneness and dissimilarity. Most of these aspects were established in conversation with the Muʿtazilites. As early as al-Kindī, Muslim philosophers adopted such a philosophical apophaticism of the divine nature, which later would take diverse forms, while preserving strategic resemblances.

Eternity and Time

This chapter discusses the notion of eternity in Ennead III.7, where, against the Pythagorean interpretation of eternity as intelligible substance, Plotinus argues that it primarily characterizes being as the intellect, which is the paradigm of all things. The intellect is marked by simplicity, which, however, presupposes a differentiation between the thinkable and thinking. Yet the intellect is also life, which is the life of thinking that turns toward the one, the source of the intellect—of its being, thinking, and life. This allows the intellect to think its objects as determinate in an act that surpasses discursive thought, thus defying and suspending temporality. Against the Pythagoreans, then, eternity is the everlasting non-discursive and self-identical life of the intellect.

John of the Cross, the Dark Night of the Soul, and the Jh?nas and the Ar?pa States

This paper examines function and structure within the religious paths advocated by John of the Cross (1542–1591), and the Buddha, with particular reference to the jh?nas and the ar?pa states, as represented in selected suttas within the P?li texts. First, John of the Cross and the jh?na and ar?pa states are contextualised. The teaching in The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night (John of the Cross), and the S?maññaphala Sutta, the Niv?pa Sutta and the Anupada Sutta (Sutta Pi?aka) is then summarised. The two are then brought into conversation with each other to examine the extent to which the religious paths described move within the same landscape of spiritual practice. Differences in context and metaphysical underpinning are recognised. The paper argues, nevertheless, that similarities are more than evident, particularly with reference to attachment to sensory objects, discursive thought, and the idea of the self or the ‘I’. The paper demonstrates that the two speak of mystical paths, which share many of the same practices and fruits, although couched in different metaphors.

From Intermediates through Eidetic Numbers: Plato on the Limits of Counting

Many have argued that Plato’s intermediates are not independent entities. Rather, they exemplify the incapacity of discursive thought (διάνοια) to cognizing Forms. But just what does this incapacity consist in? Any successful answer will require going beyond the intermediates themselves to another aspect of Plato’s mathematical thought - his attribution of a quasi-numerical structure to Forms (the ‘eidetic numbers’). For our purposes, the most penetrating account of eidetic numbers is Jacob Klein’s, who saw clearly that eidetic numbers are part of Plato’s inquiry into the ontological basis for all counting: the existence of a plurality of formal elements, distinct yet combinable into internally articulate unities. However, Klein’s study of the Sophist reveals such articulate unities as imperfectly countable and therefore opaque to διάνοια. And only this opacity, I argue, successfully explains the relationship of intermediates to Forms.

Thought as Internal Speech in Plato and Aristotle

Scholars often assert that Plato and Aristotle share the view that discursive thought (dianoia) is internal speech (TIS). However, there has been little work to clarify or substantiate this reading. In this paper I show Plato and Aristotle share some core commitments about the relationship of thought and speech, but cash out TIS in different ways. Plato and Aristotle both hold that discursive thinking is a process that moves from a set of doxastic states to a final doxastic state. The resulting judgments (doxai) can be true or false. Norms govern these final judgments and, in virtue of that, they govern the process that arrives at those judgments. The principal norm is consistency. However, the philosophers differ on the source of this norm. For Plato, persuasiveness and accuracy ground non-contradiction because internal speech is dialogical. For Aristotle, the Principle of Non-Contradiction grounds a Doxastic Thesis (DT) that no judgment can contradict itself. For Aristotle, metaphysics grounds non-contradiction because internal speech is monological.

Non enim ab hiis que sensus est iudicare sensum.Sensation and Thought in Theaetetus, Plotinus and Proclus

I examine the relation between sensation and discursive thought (dianoia) in Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus. InTheaetetus, a soul whose highest faculty was sensation would have no unified experience of the sensible world, lacking universal ideas to give order to the sensible flux. It is implied that such universals are grasped by the soul’s thinking. In Plotinus the soul is not passive when it senses the world, but as thelogosof all things it thinks the world through its own forms.Proclus argues against the derivation of universallogoifrom the senses, which alone can’t make the sensible world comprehensible. At most they give a record of the original sense-impression in its particularity. The soul’s own projected logoi give the sensible world stability. For Proclus, bare sensation does not depend on thought, but a unified experience of the sense-world depends on its paradigmaticlogoiin our souls.