Arvin Vos has produced a thorough examination of how Protestant writers have diverged from and misunderstood the reflections of Thomas Aquinas on faith and reason, the role of rational theology, and nature and grace. It merits the kind words of Ralph McInerny in the Foreword and may improve understanding between Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians. I shall sketch a couple of points at which Protestant critics have objected to the work of Schoolmen and of Aquinas, and shall conclude with a (...) few words about investigations into Western intellectual history which ought to be pursued, and about the limited range and depth of the problems concerning religious belief to which this study contributes. (shrink)

Hegel is most famous for his view that conflicts between contrary positions are necessarily resolved. Whereas this optimism, inherent in modernity as such, has been challenged from Kierkegaard onward, many critics have misconstrued Hegel's own intentions. Focusing on the Science of Logic, this transformative reading of Hegel on the one hand exposes the immense force of Hegel's conception of tragedy, logic, nature, history, time, language, spirit, politics, and philosophy itself. Drawing out the implications of Hegel's insight into tragic conflicts, on (...) the other hand, De Boer brings into play a form of negativity that allows us to understand why the entanglement of complementary positions always tends to turn into their conflict, but not necessarily into its resolution. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION In the first part of this study I will deal with the publications of Husserl's first period, ie Ueber den Begriff der Zahl (his "Habilita- ...

Science is highly dependent on the technologies needed to observe scientific objects. In How Scientific Instruments Speak, Bas de Boer develops a philosophical account of instruments in scientific practice, focusing on the cognitive neurosciences. He argues for an understanding of scientific instruments as mediating technology.

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the (...) Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light. (shrink)

in a late note, dated 1797, Kant refers to the schematism of the pure understanding as one of the most difficult as well as one of the most important issues treated in the Critique of Pure Reason.1 His treatment of this theme is indeed notorious for its obscurity.2 As I see it, part of the problem is caused by the fact that Kant frames his discussion in terms that he could expect his readers to be familiar with, while he gradually (...) develops ideas that breach any traditional account of cognition. This holds for his references to the power of judgment and the related view that cognition is a matter of subsuming intuitions under concepts3 as well as for the suggestion that there is an initial gap between categories... (shrink)

A central issue in postphenomenology is how to explain the multistability of technologies: how can it be that specific technologies can be used for a wide variety of purposes (the “multi”), while not for all purposes (the “stability”)? For example, a table can be used for the purpose of sleeping, having dinner at, or even for staging a fencing match, but not for baking a cake. One explanation offered in the literature is that the (material) design of a technology puts (...) constraints on the purposes for which technologies can be used. In this paper, I argue that such an explanation—while partly correct—fails to address the role of the environment in which human beings operate in putting constraints on technology use. I suggest that James Gibson’s affordance theory helps highlighting how stabilities in technology use arise in the interaction between human being and environment. Building on more recent approaches in affordance theory, I suggest that the environment can be conceptualized as a “rich landscape of affordances” that solicits certain actions, which are not just cued by the environment’s material structure, but also by the normativity present in the form of life in which a human being participates. I briefly contrast the approach to affordances developed in this paper with how Klenk (2020) and Tollon (2021) have conceptualized the “affordance character” of technological artifacts, and highlight how a focus on the situated nature of affordances augments these earlier conceptualizations. (shrink)

In current phenomenology of medicine, health is often understood as a state of transparency in which our body refrains from being an object of explicit attention. In this paper, I argue that such an understanding of health unnecessarily presupposes an overly harmonious alignment between subjective and objective body, resulting in the idea that our health remains phenomenologically inaccessible. Alternatively, I suggest that there are many occasions in which one’s body in health does become an object of attention, and that technologies (...) mediate how a relation with one’s body is formed. First, I show prominent accounts in current phenomenology of medicine understand health in terms of a harmonious alignment between objective and subjective body. Second, I argue that there are many occasions in which there is a disharmony between objective and subjective body, and suggest that also in health, we cannot escape being an object that we often relate to. Then, I draw on postphenomenology to show how technologies such as digital self-tracking applications and digital twins can be understood as mediating the relationship with one’s own body in a specific way. In conclusion, I argue that both technologies make present the objective body as a site for hermeneutic inquiry such that it can be interacted with in terms of health parameters. Furthermore, I point to some relevant differences in how different technologies make aspects of our own body phenomenologically present. (shrink)

This essay re-examines Hegel's account of Greek culture in the section of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ devoted to “ethical action”. The thrust of this section cannot be adequately grasped, it is argued, by focusing on Hegel's references to either Sophocles' _Antigone_ or Greek tragedy as a whole. Taking into account Hegel's complex use of literary sources, the essay shows in particular that Hegel draws on Aristophanes' comedies to comprehend the collapse of Greek culture, a collapse he considered to result from (...) the tragic conflict constitutive of Greek culture as a whole. The essay thus aims to shed light on Hegel's abstruse remarks on womanhood and, more generally, to demonstrate that Hegel's peculiar employment of literary sources constitutes an essential element of the method he employs throughout the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. (shrink)

English summary: In this volume, Jan-Hendryk de Boer investigates the upheaval in the world of scholars in the Roman-German Empire at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. He shows how during this time hegemonic humanism developed as a new discursive formation. This re-organised the humanistic movement as well as its relationship to scholasticism and ultimately the place of humanism in the scholarly world as a whole. After humanistic ideas were initially taken on board as (...) being relatively unproblematic, the representatives of hegemonic humanism, such as poets, grammarians and philologists, claimed that they alone were in possession of useful skills and relevant knowledge. In a cultural transfer of the corresponding developments in Italy, a scholastic-humanist antagonism was generated that is still reflected in today's research. German description: Jan-Hendryk de Boer untersucht in dieser Studie den Umbruch in der Gelehrtenwelt des romisch-deutschen Reichs am Ende des 15. und zu Beginn des 16. Jahrhunderts. Er zeigt, wie sich in diesem Zeitraum der hegemoniale Humanismus als eine neue diskursive Formation ausbildete. Diese organisierte die humanistische Bewegung wie auch deren Verhaltnis zur Scholastik und schliesslich den Ort des Humanismus in der Gelehrtenwelt insgesamt um. Nachdem humanistische Ideen zunachst relativ problemlos Aufnahme gefunden hatten, beanspruchten die Vertreter des hegemonialen Humanismus als Dichter, Grammatiker und Philologen fur sich allein, uber nutzliche Fertigkeiten und relevantes Wissen zu verfugen. In einem Kulturtransfer der entsprechenden italienischen Entwicklungen wurde so ein scholastisch-humanistischer Antagonismus erzeugt, der bis in die heutige Forschung nachwirkt. (shrink)

By drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of ontological relationality, this article explores what it means to be a ‘we’ in breast cancer. What are the characteristics—the extent and diversity—of couples’ relationally lived experiences of bodily changes in breast cancer? Through analyzing duo interviews with diagnosed women and their partners, four ways of sharing an embodied life are identified. (1) While ‘being different together’, partners have different, albeit connected kinds of experiences of breast cancer. (2) While ‘being there for you’, partners (...) take care of each other in mutually dependent ways. (3) While ‘being reconnected to you’, partners (re-)relate to each other through intimacy and sexuality. (4) While ‘being like you’, partners synchronize their embodied daily lives to one another, sometimes up to the point that the self cannot be distinguished from the other anymore. These ways reveal that being a ‘we’ involves complex affective, bodily encounters in which the many fault lines that both separate partners into individual selves and join them together as a unity are continuously reshaped and negotiated. Being a ‘we’ may be understood as something we have to do. Therefore, in being true to the legacy of Nancy, we argue at the end of this article for a sensible praxis of sharing a life and body, particularly in breast cancer. (shrink)

This article challenges the prevailing interpretations of Hegel's account of the concept "contradiction" in the Science of Logic by arguing that it is concerned with the principle of Hegel's method rather than with the classical law of non-contradiction. I first consider Hegel's Doctrine of Essence in view of Kant's discussion of the concepts of reflection in the first Critique. On this basis, I examine Hegel's account of the logical principles based on the concepts "identity," "opposition," and "contradiction." Finally, I point (...) out how the principle Hegel derives from the concept of contradiction actually informs his own method. (shrink)

Women intimately interact with various medical technologies and prosthetic artifacts in the context of breast cancer. While extensive work has been done on the agency of technological artifacts and how they affect users’ perceptions and experiences, the agency of users is largely taken for granted hitherto. In this article, we explore the agency of four women who engage with breast cancer technologies and artifacts by analyzing their narrative accounts of such engagements. This empirical discussion is framed within the tradition of (...) science and technology studies, philosophy of technological mediation and phenomenology of embodied agency as ‘I can/not’. This approach leads to the conclusions that women’s technologically mediated agencies range from being restricted to extended, take place on different bodily levels, within complex temporal structures, and are determined by certain socio-cultural contexts. Furthermore, it reveals that such agency shaping does not imply a one-way conditioning relationship between technologies and users, but rather involves a reciprocal relationship in which both subject and object are co-constituted. We therefore suggest that the ‘material turn’ in philosophy of technology also needs to take into account technologically mediated, material human beings in order to gain a better understanding of human existence. (shrink)

Numerous studies in the fields of Science and Technology Studies and philosophy of technology have repeatedly stressed that scientific practices are collective practices that crucially depend on the presence of scientific technologies. Postphenomenology is one of the movements that aims to draw philosophical conclusions from these observations through an analysis of human–technology interactions in scientific practice. Two other attempts that try to integrate these insights into philosophy of science are Ronald Giere’s Scientific Perspectivism and Davis Baird’s Thing Knowledge. In this (...) paper, these two approaches will be critically discussed from the perspective of postphenomenology. We will argue that Giere and Baird problematically assume that scientific instruments have a determined function, and that all human members of a scientific collective have immediate access to this function. However, these assumptions also allow them to offer a clear answer to the question how scientists can collectively relate to scientific phenomena. Such an answer is not yet formulated within the postphenomenological perspective. By adding a postphenomenological touch to the semiotic approach in Actor-Network Theory, we offer an account of how different individual human–technology relations are integrated into larger scientific collectives. We do so by showing that scientific instruments not only help constitute scientific phenomena, but also the intersubjectivity within such collectives. (shrink)

During the Corona pandemic, it became clear that people are vulnerable to potentially harmful nonhuman agents, as well as that our own biological existence potentially poses a threat to others, and vice versa. This suggests a certain reciprocity in our relations with both humans and nonhumans. In his The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of the flesh to capture this reciprocity. Building on this idea, he proposes to understand our relationships with other humans, as well as those (...) with nonhuman beings as having a chiasmic structure: to sense, or perceive another entity in a particular way simultaneously implies to be sensed or perceived in a particular way by this other entity. In this paper, we show how a postphenomenological perspective expands on Merleau-Ponty: first, it more radically interprets Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh by not only considering it to be a medium that is the condition of possibility for vision but as pointing to the constitution of an intercorporeal field in which entities—both human and nonhuman—mutually sense one another. Second, it augments Merleau-Ponty’s thought by drawing attention to how technologies mediate chiasmic relations. This is clarified through the example of the facemask, which reveals the chiasmic structure of our relation with nonhuman entities, and shows that technologies co-constitute interpersonal relationships by making humans present to one another in a particular way. We suggest that these aspects are not unique to the facemask, but point to a general technologically mediated chiasmic structure of human-world relations. (shrink)

Aristotle's highly influential work on the soul, entitled De anima, formed part of the core curriculum of medieval universities and was discussed intensively. It covers a range of topics in philosophical psychology, such as the relationship between mind and body and the nature of abstract thought. However, there is a key difference in scope between the so-called "science of the soul," based on Aristotle, and modern philosophical psychology. This book starts from a basic premise accepted by all medieval commentators, namely (...) that the science of the soul studies not just human beings but all living beings. As such, its methodology and approach must also apply to plants and animals. The Science of the Soul discusses how philosophers from Thomas Aquinas to Pierre d'Ailly dealt with the difficult task of giving a unified account of life and traces the various stages in the transformation of the science of the soul between 1260 and 1360. The emerging picture is that of a gradual disruption of the unified approach to the soul, which will ultimately lead to the emergence of psychology as a separate discipline. (shrink)

While we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s (...) Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not... (shrink)

Abstract: This article contends that the relation of early logical empiricism to Kant was more complex than is often assumed. It argues that Reichenbach's early work on Kant and Einstein, entitled The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920) aimed to transform rather than to oppose Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One the one hand, I argue that Reichenbach's conception of coordinating principles, derived from Kant's conception of synthetic a priori principles, offers a valuable way of accounting for the (...) historicity of scientific paradigms. On the other hand, I show that even Reichenbach, in line with Neo-Kantianism, associated Kant's view of synthetic a priori principles too closely with Newtonian physics and, consequently, overestimated the difference between Kant's philosophy and his own. This is even more so, I point out, in the retrospective account logical empiricism presented of its own history. Whereas contemporary reconstructions of this history, including Michael Friedman's, tend to endorse this account, I offer an interpretation of Kant's conception of a priori principles that contrasts with the one put forward by both Neo-Kantianism and logical empiricism. On this basis, I re-examine the early Reichenbach's effort to accommodate these principles to the paradigm forged by Einstein. (shrink)

This article examines Gerald Odonis' view on the nature of place as found in his commentary on the Sentences (Sent. II, d. 2, qq. 3-5) and in an anonymous question (Utrum locus sit ultima superficies corporis ambientis immobile primum) extant in manuscript Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, 4229. Both texts defend a thoroughly un-Aristotelian conception of place as three-dimensional space. Odonis not only deviates from Aristotle's definition of place as the inner surface of a surrounding body, but also from the positions of (...) his contemporaries, including fellow Franciscans. Despite some remarkable doctrinal similarities between Odonis' view and that of Renaissance innovators like Francesco Patrizi and Bernardino Telesio, it seems unlikely that Gerald played a role in the rise of new conceptions of place in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. An edition of the anonymous Quaestio de loco is given in an appendix. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a particular method which is used in contemporary empirical happiness studies, namely measuring people’s happiness by scoring their emotions (Kahneman is a prominent scholar). I examine the presupposition in this field that emotion scores can be added or subtracted, that throughout affective space runs a straight axis that plots hedonic tone or pleasure.

Focusing on the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that the method Hegel employs in this work does not capture the full significance of the French Revolution. I claim that Hegel’s method is reformist rather than revolutionary: Hegel deliberately restricts his analyses to transformations that occur within the element of thought and presents the changes that occur within this element as logically ensuing from one another. This approach, I argue, is at odds with (...) the very concept of a revolution. Seen in this way, efforts to frame Hegel’s philosophy as revolutionary are misguided. (shrink)

My response to Gabriele Gava’s Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics (2023) focuses on Kant’s conception of the role of critique in the Critique of Pure Reason. On my account, Gava’s emphasis on the constructive elements of the Critique downplays the critique of former metaphysics elaborated in all three parts of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements. After some comments on Kant’s conception of the Critique as a doctrine of method, I support this view by discussing the (...) relation between transcendental philosophy and transcendental critique, Kant’s analysis of the faculties, and his transcendental deduction of space. (shrink)

Many disabled people face some form of exclusion or discrimination. One of the most damaging, yet pervasive, types of exclusion is sexual exclusion. Various factors hinder sexual opportunities for disabled persons, such as social attitudes around body image, gender, and sexuality. In this paper, I engage with Sheila Jeffreys's paper, “ Disability and the Male Sex Right,” wherein she argues that discourse around sexual rights for disabled people is a veiled way of promoting male dominance over women. Though Jeffreys raises (...) many pertinent issues, she assumes that when a disabled man seeks commercial sex, he does so as an act of domination or violence. I argue that when a disabled man seeks commercial sex, he is seeking the goods of sex, such as connection, intimacy, and pleasure. (shrink)

Since its inception, phenomenological philosophy has engaged with empirical data of lived experiences. Recently, phenomenological philosophy itself has branched out into performing systematic qualitative research, resulting in a heterogeneous field of qualitative phenomenological philosophy. By introducing and outlining the research approach of ‘Qualitative Critical Phenomenology’ (QCP), this paper shows how one may conduct systemic qualitative research to lived experiences with an explicit phenomenological philosophical aim. In building on insights from various approaches within critical phenomenology, we not only give a stepwise (...) explication of how to do QCP, we also discuss how we reflectively engage with lived experience as a research object and how key phenomenological themes – i.e. varieties of pre-/reflectivity and the phenomenological reduction – matter for designing and conducting a QCP inquiry. As such, we contribute to discussions on critical phenomenology – i.e. why it matters – but also to debates on how qualitative critical phenomenology may provide a critical lens to prevailing socio-cultural norms and their constitutive force in co-shaping perception and experience. (shrink)

While Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason maintains that things in themselves cannot be known, he also seems to assert that they affect our senses and produce representations. Following Jacobi, many commentators have considered these claims to be contradictory. Instead of adding another artificial solution to the existing literature on this subject, I maintain that Kant’s use of terms such as thing-in-itself, noumenon, and transcendental object becomes perfectly consistent if we take them to acquire a different meaning in the (...) various parts of the work. Challenging the opposed interpretations of Allison and Langton, I argue that Kant’s account of things in themselves is primarily relevant to the second-order reflection on the possibility and limits of a scientific metaphysics that the Critique undertakes. (shrink)

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Machine generated contents note: 1. An Ethical Transcendental Philosophy 1 -- 2. Beyond Being. Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas 33 -- 3. The Rationality of the Philosophy of Levinas 56 -- 4. Levinas on Substitution 83 -- 5. Judaism and Hellenism in the Philosophy of Levinas and Heidegger 101 -- 6. Ontological Difference (Heidegger) and Ontological Separation (Levinas) 115 -- 7. Enmity, Friendship, Corporeality 133 -- 8. The Rationality of Transcendence 147 -- 9. Levinas on Theology (...) and the Philosophy of Religion 169. (shrink)

In his early Jena System Drafts, Hegel elaborates a conception of time which is no longer thematized in later works such as the Encychpaedia. Hegel's early philosophy of nature bears not only on time insofar as it constitutes — together with space — the basic framework of the sciences, but also on the interiorization of time which occurs in the animal. This interiorization marks a decisive moment in the transition from nature to human consciousness, for it is here, in Hegel's (...) view, that time begins to enact itself as pure form of intuition. In this article I reconstruct Hegel's conception of this transition by sketching out the movement in which the pure concept unfolds itself in the element of exteriority and, within the limits imposed by that element, increasingly overcomes its self-externalization. According to Hegel's Jena texts, the concept initially determines itself as ether, space and time, reaches its turning point in the interiorization of time that occurs in the animal, and culminates in the distinction between the pure I and time which allows human consciousness to increasingly overcome its dependence on impressions caused by outward objects. I argue that this construction of the genesis of human consciousness sheds new light on Hegel's understanding of the relation between the pure concept and time, and hence on his philosophy as such. (shrink)

Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1901.

In this article I aim to clarify the nature of Kant’s transformation of rationalist metaphysics into a science by focusing on his conception of transcendental reflection. The aim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued, consists primarily in liberating the productive strand of former general metaphysics – its reflection on the a priori elements of all knowledge – from the uncritical application of these elements to all things (within general metaphysics itself) and to things that can only be (...) thought (in special metaphysics). After considering Kant’s conception of metaphysics and his various uses of the term ‘transcendental’ I closely examine his account of logical and transcendental reflection in the section entitled ‘On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’. Whereas commentators generally attribute the activity called transcendental reflection to Kant alone, I contend, first, that Kant regarded philosophy as such to rely on a mode of transcendental reflection and, second, that the critical mode of transcendental reflection enacted in the Critique itself yields insight into the reason why our a priori knowledge is limited to the realm of possible objects. This is illustrated by outlining the difference between Kant’s and Leibniz’ employment of the concepts of reflection. (shrink)