Siyaves Azeri (2020) quite well shows that arithmetical thinking emerges on the basis of specific social practices and material engagement (clay tokens for economic exchange practices beget number concepts, e.g.). But his discussion here is relegated mostly to Neolithic and Bronze Age practices. While surely such practices produced revolutions in the cognitive abilities of many humans, much of the cognitive architecture that allows normative conceptual thought was already in place long before this time. This response, then, is an attempt to (...) sketch the deep prehistory of human cognition in order to show the inter-social bases of normative thought in general. To do this, I will look first to the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev, two often neglected psychologists whose combined efforts culminate in a developmental account of human cognitive origins. Then, I will review some key insights from the contemporary comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello—whose project is admittedly a Vygotskian one—in order to further shed light on the social-practical basis of abstract thought, of which mathematical cognition is surely a part. (shrink)

Gödel's remarks concerning the ideality of time are examined. In the literature, some of these remarks have been somewhat neglected while others have been heavily criticized. In this note, we propose a clear and defensible sense in which Gödel's work bears on the question of whether there is an objective lapse of time in our world.

Ferreira outlines Bradley’s account of judgment and perception, and then, towards the end of his essay, indicates the sort of reason that Bradley takes to be an argument in favour of his views. I want to look at that argument, but will first summarize Ferreira’s account of Bradley’s views. This account seems to me to make a very important point about the role of feeling in Bradley’s philosophy, specifically that feeling in Bradley’s ontology/epistemology has a very different status and role (...) from that of the feeling=sensation of the empiricists. The latter is indeed “mere” feeling, from Bradley’s point of view, but that feeling which plays a central role in his own philosophy is anything but mere. (shrink)

The purpose of my paper is to interpret kant 's transcendental idealism by looking at his claim that space is "nothing but" ideal. My position is that if we grant to kant the thesis that space is an "a priori" condition for knowing objects, Then it follows that our notion of space can only refer to the character of our experience, Not to properties of things as they may be "in themselves." and this, I argue, Yields a sense of the (...) ideality of space. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to sketch a dialectical approach on scientific representations and their role in scientific cognition. In my understanding, scientific representations can be construed as ‘tools’ mediating scientific cognition. These ‘tools’ are products of our cognitive activity, by which we signify which features of certain objects or states of affairs should be embodied in abstractive representations of them. In such a context, I explore the merits of bringing some ideas of thinkers whose work is underestimated in the (...) relevant discussion nowadays (such as K. Marx, E.V. Ilyenkov, L.S. Vygotsky, M. Wartofsky) in dialogue with currently discussed approaches. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant famously makes the following startling claim, which we can call the transcendental ideality thesis concerning the nature of space, or, for ease of reference in what follows, simply “TI”: Der Raum stellt gar keine Eigenschaft irgend einiger Dinge an sich, oder sie in ihrem Verhältniß auf einander vor, d.i. keine Bestimmung derselben, die an Gegenständen selbst haftete, und welche bliebe, wenn man auch von allen subjectiven Bedingungen der Anschauung abstrahirte.

Both of the books under review offer a challenge to the dominant jurisprudential tradition of legal positivism. Underlying this superficial similarity in aims is a sharp divergence in philosophical outlook. Whereas Dworkin's arguments operate within a body of background assumptions that he shares with his opponents, and which he has done much to shape, Simmonds sees his task as challenging those assumptions. This is particularly evident in the moral philosophies at the heart of each book: Dworkin can be seen as (...) offering a Protestant-voluntarist-atheist philosophy; whereas Simmonds resembles a Catholic-conservative-Aristotelian. (shrink)

Husserl’s concept of an “historical apriori” is marked by a tension: It simultaneously departs from, and develops his long-standing commitment to philosophy as transcendental phenomenology. This paper looks at some reasons for this tension in the context of Husserl’s attempt to determine philosophy as a “tradition” in The Origin of Geometry. Husserl is convinced that philosophy is a scientific tradition, and the historical apriori serves in the analysis of the conditions that define a distinctively scientific “handing down.” The key here (...) is a kind of writing—mathematics—thanks to which the participants in the tradition can be certain that they are in essential connection with the “original” idealities of that tradition. But Husserl’s discovery about the individual philosopher’s relation to the philosophical tradition—namely, that it is always mediated by a kind of “poetic invention”—undermines his conviction that philosophy can be a scientific tradition. This is Husserl’s “existentialism.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article engages Frater Taciturnus’s ‘Letter to the Reader’ to argue for a religious aesthetics in Kierkegaard. This religious aesthetics is designed to purify the passions and help the believer ‘see’ the religious ideal, but also to confront the aesthetic spectator with the religious reality of her own situation. My claim for this revised reading of religious poetics in Kierkegaard derives from Taciturnus’s view of a superior form of religious ideality that comes ‘after actuality’. This ideality is (...) not an envisioned ideal that is untested by actuality and thus ‘illusory’ but an ideal that is graspable only after the self has acknowledged the actuality of their sinful condition, rather than any specific actual sin. To appreciate this form of ideality, Frater Taciturnus repeatedly resorts to visual metaphors and the power of imagination, suggesting that the religious ideal must be ‘seen’ with a sort of synoptic vision capable of looking past both comedy and tragedy and resulting in the purification of our typical affective responses to aesthetic objects. Seeing in this way, the individual imaginatively engages in religious aesthetics and grasps the religious ideality by affirming the actuality of their own sinfulness and receiving forgiveness for that sinfulness. (shrink)

Eigentlich ist es offenkundig, dass Hegel keine Ethik hat. Es ist allgemein bekannt, dass die Individualitat der Person, die vom Person abhangige Aspekte der moralischen Wahl bei Hegel in der menschlichen Gattung--im allgemeinobjektiven Wertcharakter deren--aufgehoben werden. Ebensowohl ist es wahr, dass eine moderne Sozialontologie und ontologisch fundierte Ethik ohne Hegel nicht moglich ist. Die Philosophie Hegels bringt im Rahmen der Geschichte der Philosophie eine ontologische Wendung zustande, als er in den Mittelpunkt der gesellschaftsphilosophischen Untersuchung die menschliche gegenstandliche Tatigkeit stellt.(edited).

Between 1942 and 1943 the editor of the journal «Domus» invited the most important Italian architects to design their ideal houses: fifteen projects designed by seventeen architects were published. They are most instructive to try to understand, firstly, what the philosophical notion of ideal means and, secondly, why mathematical and geometric tools are extensively used to work on ideality, namely, to design ideal houses. The first part of the article focuses on the philosophical foundations of ideality and, after (...) an overview of the fifteen projects, on the use of the golden ratio in two particularly meaningful cases. The second part of the article focuses on the cases in which there is a hidden use of the golden ratio, on the use of the modulus and on the use of the number 2. (shrink)

Kants Argument zugunsten der Idealität und Subjektivität des Raumes stellt eine Erklärung dar für die Möglichkeit, Geometrie für die Kenntnis der Natur anzuwenden. Gemäß dem transzendentalen Idealismus können geometrische Sätze, die notwendig und a priori sind, auf empirische Objekte angewendet werden, weil der Raum auf das Subjekt zurückgeht. Kant entwickelte seine Konzeption des synthetischen Charakters der Geometrie im Gegensatz zu Leibniz' analytischer Auffassung, aber der Verfasser argumentiert, dass die Einführung nichteuklidischer geometrischer Strukturen eher Leibniz' als Kants geometrischer Konzeption entspricht. Der (...) Verfasser behauptet weiter, dass Kants Theorie nach Einführung des Begriffs des physikalischen Feldes und der Anwendung nicht-euklidischer Raumstrukturen in der Relativitätstheorie vollkommen unhaltbar wird. Gegenwärtig kann nicht behauptet werden, dass ein euklidischer Raum, von dem wir sicherlich tin a priori Wissen haben, gleichzeitig die Struktur eines physikalischen Raumes bietet. Zudem widerlegt diese Schlussfolgerung Kants Theorie des Raumes als eine a priori Form menschlicher Anschauung. (shrink)

Virtual objects, such as online shops, the elements that go to make up virtual life in computer games, virtual maps, e-books, avatars, cryptocurrencies, chatbots, holograms, etc., are a phenomenon we now encounter at every turn: they have become a part of our life and our world. Philosophers—and ontologists in particular—have sought to answer the question of what, exactly, they are. They fall into two camps: some, pointing to the chimerical character of virtuality, hold that virtual objects are like dreams, illusions (...) and fictions, while others, citing the real impact of virtuality on our world, take them to be real—an actual part of the real world, just like other real objects. In this article, we defend the thesis that both sides are wrong. Using Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological ontology, we advocate a position according to which a virtual object is a computationally grounded intentional object that has its existential foundation in computational processes, which are compliant with a certain model of computation. We point out that virtuality is framed by some kind of ideal mathematical objects: i.e., mathematical models of computation, which in turn fall, each of them, under their respective ideas. We also refer to the idea of natural computation, which in conjunction with the ontological analysis carried out leads to the thesis that an object can be more or less virtual. (shrink)

With great sympathy for Roman Ingarden and his work, Edith Stein edited his book project The Literary Work Of Art. In the letters she exchanges with him shereflects on relationship between reality and ideality: she writes that those who do not see the world as a reality must be fools. The political events in the 1930s had an impact on phenomenology. While Edmund Husserl dissociates himself from his protégé Martin Heidegger with regard to the content of his philosophy as (...) well as with regard to his ideology, Edith Stein distances herself more and more from the phenomenological method, seeing it as removed from reality, and she eventually become a Carmelite nun. Roman Ingarden, on the other hand, reconsiders interpreting phenomenology as aesthetic theory. Literature and film are being re-analysed in terms of phenomenological mediality and as factors of human communication. (shrink)

: To say that a work of fine art is beautiful because it has been produced by a genius introduces a determinate concept precluding a judgment of the work’s beauty by way of a pure judgment of taste. What Kant in fact proposes is that we judge a work to be the product of genius as a consequence of our judgment of its beauty. As Kant explains in KU §58, when we judge the beautiful in fine art it is the (...) indeterminacy of the mode of mental activity in which aesthetic ideas arise which permits us to interpret idealistically the purposiveness in the work, on which account we regard it as the product of genius. This article examines in particular KU §50 concerning the combination of genius and taste, and the puzzling assertion in KU §51 that all beauty is the expression of aesthetic ideas. (shrink)

As Friedman has argued, Kant's argument for the ideality of space turns on the nondeductive character of geometrical reasoning in Euclid's system. Since geometry can be axiomatized, this argument fails. But ("pace" Russell) Leibniz's argument based on the unreality of constitutive relations is not thereby answered as well. I argue that what is needed in response to Leibniz is a properly post-Kantian conception of concepts as inferentially articulated. This conception, I suggest, is based on the same fundamental insight that (...) underlies the axiomatization of geometry. (shrink)

Are mathematical objects affected by their historicity? Do they simply lose their identity and their validity in the course of history? If not, how can they always be accessible in their ideality regardless of their transmission in the course of time? Husserl and Foucault have raised this question and offered accounts, both of which, albeit different in their originality, are equally provocative. Both acknowledge that a scientific object like a geometrical theorem or a chemical equation has a history because (...) it is only constituted in and transmitted through history. But they see that history as a part of its ideality, so that, although historical, a scientific object retains its identity as one and the same object. (shrink)

There is a second way in which the question is capable of a twofold interpretation. One might begin with a priori concepts which have no empirical reference and ask how they can apply to objects. Or, one might deny the dichotomy between the a priori and experience and inquire how synthetic a priori judgments about experience can be accounted for. Initially Kant regarded the problem of schematism in the former way as that of bringing together two divorced realms. From this (...) standpoint it is assumed: a) that a priori concepts are generated by mind independently of experience, and b) that objects are given in intuition However, Kant came to see that if the problem is stated in this way it is insoluble. Only a pre-established harmony would guarantee that a priori concepts apply to objects. He attempted to break down this dualism between intuition and thought, between objects and concepts by showing that the knowledge of objects requires both intuition and thought. Unfortunately the original statement of the problem recurs alongside of the revised formulation at many places in the Critique. A close study of the development of Kant's thought makes it sufficiently clear that it is the latter statement of the problem which alone represents his mature insight and is consonant with his transcendental method of proof. (shrink)

In Newtonian physics, all phenomena take place in absolute space, which is a fixed scenario, and are referred to absolute time, which rules all processes. Motion is governed by a set of basic differential equations, and it is possible, at least in principle, to deduce future events from present initial conditions.

This book shows how idealism is a consequence of the intuitionist method.

When McTaggart puts Spinoza on his short list of philosophers who considered time unreal, he is falling in line with a reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of time advanced by contemporaneous British Idealists and by Hegel. The idealists understood that there is much at stake concerning the ontological status of Spinozistic time. If time is essential to motion then temporal idealism entails that nearly everything—apart from God conceived sub specie aeternitatis—is imaginary. I argue that although time is indeed ‘imaginary’—in a sense (...) ‘no one doubts’ as Spinoza says—there is no good reason to infer that bodies, the infinite modes, and conatus are imaginary in the same sense. To avoid this conflation, we need to follow Spinoza in carefully distinguishing between tempus and duratio. Duration is not only real; it has all the structure needed to ground Spinozistic motion, bodies and conatus. (shrink)

The Cartesian concept of nature, which has determined modern thinking until the present time, has become obsolete. It shall be shown that Hegel's objective-idealistic conception of nature discloses, in comparison to that of Descartes, new perspectives for the comprehension of nature and that this, in turn, results in possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature. If the argumentation concerning philosophy of nature is intended to catch up with the concrete Being-of-nature and to meet it in its concretion, then this is (...) impossible for the finite spirit in a strictly a priori sense – this is the thesis supported here which is not at all close to Hegel. As the argumentation rather has to consider the conditions of realization concerning the Being-of-nature, too, it is compelled to take up empirical elements – concerning the organism, for instance, system-theoretical aspects, physical and chemical features of the nervous system, etc. With that, on the one hand, empirical-scientific premises are assumed (e.g. the lawlikeness of nature), which on the other hand become (now close to Hegel) possibly able to be founded in the frame of a Hegelian-idealistic conception. In this sense, a double strategy of empirical-scientific concretization and objective-idealistic foundation is followed up, which represents the methodical basic principle of the developed considerations. In the course of the undertaking, the main aspects of the whole Hegelian design concerning the philosophy of nature are considered – space and time, mass and motion, force and law of nature, the organism, the pro-blem of evolution, psychic being – as well as Hegel's basic thesis concerning the philosophy of nature, that therein a tendency toward coherence and idealization manifests itself in the sense of a (categorically) gradually rising succession of nature: from the separateness of space to the ideality of sensation. In the sense of the double strategy of concretization and foundation it is shown that on the one hand possibilities of philosophical penetration concerning actual empirical-scientific results are opened, and on the other hand – in turn – a re-interpretation of Hegel's theorem on the basis of physical, evolution-theoretical and system-theoretical argumentation also becomes possible. In this mutual crossing-over and elucidation of empirical and Hegelian argumentation not only do perspectives of a new comprehension of nature become visible, but also, at the same time – as an essential consequence of this methodical principle – thoughts on the possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature. (shrink)

This article deals with how moral freedom relates to historicity and contingency by comparing Kierkegaard's theory of the anthropological synthesis to Kant's concept of moral character. The comparison indicates that there are more Kantian elements in Kierkegaard's anthropology than shown by earlier scholarship. More specifically, both Kant and Kierkegaard see a true change in the way one lives as involving not only a revolution in the way one thinks, but also that one takes over—and tries to reform—both oneself and human (...) society. Also, Kierkegaard relies on the ideality of ethics and the doctrines of moral rigorism and radical evil. However, Kierkegaard can be seen as trying to find amore systematic role for historicity and contingency than Kant by developing the concept of facticity and by analyzing the so-called “despair of possibility.”. (shrink)

What distinctive philosophical position unites Whitehead, Heidegger, Carnap, J. L. Austin, Quine, van Fraassen, and Derrida, among many others? According to David Weissman, they all assert or presuppose intuitionism, as he calls it, or the view that "everything real should be present or presentable, in its entirety, to the mind." An implausible set of bedfellows, perhaps, yet Weissman argues persuasively that they are indeed intuitionists, and that "we as philosophers have lost sight of this most fundamental truth about our history (...) and procedures." We have lost sight of it because we combine "disinterest in the history of philosophy... with the assumption that our method is neutral." Thus, "we renounce [intuitionism] even as we practice it," just as, one might add, many renounce Cartesianism even as they remain profoundly influenced by Descartes. (shrink)