This dissertation engages critically with the metaphysical implications of the respective transcendentalisms of Husserl, Deleuze, and Kant in an attempt to disclose their largely untapped resources for a renewed consideration of the ability of science to grasp reality as it is in-itself. Chapter 1 examines the metaphysical implications of Husserl’s critique of natural scientific objectivity in his later transcendental philosophy in connection to his early formulations of phenomenological objectivity around the axis of the distinction between metaphysics as the science (...) of real Being and formal ontology as the science of Being in the most universal sense. I argue that Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics constitutes a framework in which the ideal Being of the transcendental dimension of experience operates as the condition for the possibility of natural scientific objectivity. Chapter 2 scrutinizes Deleuze’s characterization of intensity as a transcendental concept rather than a scientific one against the background of his metaphysics of difference and his critique of the shortcomings of Kant’s transcendental idealism for addressing the transcendental conditions for the genesis of real experience. Through a reading of Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference and intensity in connection to his confinement of the creative productivity of scientific thought to a plane of reference, I argue that the creativity apropos to the scientific engagement with material reality necessitates that such creativity is conditioned by the same transcendental considerations operative in a metaphysics of difference at a broad scale. Against the backdrop of Husserl’s and Deleuze’s respective criticisms of the inadequacy of Kant’s transcendental idealism for articulating the material component of experience, Chapter 3 studies Kant’s later iv conception of ether as the simultaneously empirical and transcendental condition for the possibility and unity of experience. Through an examination of Kant’s renewed understanding of materiality as the necessary and sufficient condition for scientific objectivity in connection with the problematic objectivity of the transcendental ideas created by pure reason in Kant’s Critical philosophy, I suggest that Kant’s later articulation of materiality on transcendental grounds simultaneously addresses the objectivity and the creativity pertinent to the encounter of scientific Thought with material/physical reality. (shrink)

Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é, considerar o quarto paralogismo e a crítica kantiana a ele na versão da primeira edição da Crítica da razão pura, destacando o contexto do quarto paralogismo, a saber, o propósito e a estrutura dos paralogismos em geral. Procurarei mostrar que, ao contrário do que parece à primeira vista, o quarto paralogismo na sua primeira edição partilha da mesma estrutura dos demais e é equivalente à sua formulação na segunda edição da Crítica da razão pura. (...) Procurarei também mostrar que, ao levarmos em conta esse propósito e estrutura geral dos paralogismos partilhada pelo quarto paralogismo, podemos perceber que a crítica ao quarto paralogismo na primeira edição não é propriamente uma tentativa de prova da existência de objetos externos com base no caráter transcendentalmente interno dos objetos do sentido externo.Abstract:The aim of this paper is to examine Kant's criticism of the forth paralogism in the first edition of the Critique of pure reason, trying to highlight its context, i.e., the purpose and structure of the paralogisms in general. I intent to show that, contrary to what may seem on the face of it, the forth paralogism in the A edition shares the same structure of the first three and is equivalent to its new version on the B edition. I will also indicate that, taking into account these shared purpose and structure, we can see that Kant's criticism to the forth paralogism in the A edition is not exactly and attempt to prove the existence of outer objects based on his statement that empirically outer objects are transcendentally inner. (shrink)

In this chapter, I show that there is at least one crucial, non-short, argument, which does not involve arguments about spatiotemporality, why Kant’s subjectivism about the possibility of knowledge, argued in the Transcendental Deduction, must lead to idealism. This has to do with the fact that given the implications of the discursivity thesis, namely, that the domain of possible determination of objects is characterised by limitation, judgements of experience can never reach the completely determined individual, i.e. the thing in (...) itself or the unlimited real, but only objects as objects of possible experience. As such, it can be shown by reference to a key argument from Kant, that Hegel’s famous criticism that Kant is not licensed, on the basis of his core arguments concerning the original-synthetic unity of apperception, to restrict our knowledge to appearances, is mistaken on purely systematic grounds. More specifically, I argue that idealism follows already from the constraints that the use of the categories, in particular the categories of quality, places on the very conceivability of things in themselves. My claim is that, although it is not only possible but also necessary to think things in themselves, it does not follow that by merely thinking them we have a full grasp of the nature of things in themselves, as some important commentators claim we have. We must therefore distinguish between two kinds of conceiving of things in themselves: conceiving in the standard sense of ‘forming the notion of’, and conceiving in the narrow sense of ‘having a determinate intellectual grasp’. So although we must be able notionally to think things in themselves, as the grounds of their appearances, we cannot even conceive, through pure concepts, of how they are in themselves in any determinate, even if merely intellectual, sense. To put it differently, we cannot have a positive conception of things in themselves (this is in line with Kant’s distinction between noumena in the negative and positive senses; cf. B307–9). For support, I resort to a much overlooked chapter in the Critique, concerning the transcendental Ideal, where Kant discusses what it is for a thing to be a thing in itself proper, namely, something that is thoroughly determined. This concerns the real ontological conditions of things, which are not satisfied by the modal categories alone, namely, their existence conditions. I claim that the chief reason why, given Kant’s view of determinative judgement, we cannot determine a thing in itself is because of two connected reasons: (1) a thing in itself is already fully determined and therefore not further determinable and (2) we cannot possibly determine all of the thing’s possible determinations. In this context, I also discuss the notion of material (not: empirical) synthesis—of which Kant speaks in the chapter on the transcendental Ideal—which must be presupposed as the ground of the formal a priori synthesis that grounds possible experience. This material synthesis, which is an idea of reason that defines a thing as thoroughly determined with regard to all of its possible predicates and has mere regulative status, can by implication not be determined by the forms of the understanding, which synthesise only a limited set of predicates. As a result, given this definition of ‘thing in itself’, any object (appearance) as at best44 a limited set of determinations of the thing can never be numerically identical to the thing in itself as thoroughly determined individual. This undercuts a standard assumption about the identity relation between appearances and things in themselves in many contemporary interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism. (shrink)

Lucy Allais argues that we can better understand Kant's transcendental idealism by taking seriously the analogy of appearances to secondary qualities that Kant offers in theProlegomena. A proper appreciation of this analogy, Allais claims, yields a reading of transcendental idealism according to which all properties that can appear to us in experience are mind-dependent relational properties that inhere in mind-independent objects. In section 1 of my paper, I articulate Allais's position and its benefits, not least of which is (...) its elegant explanation of how the features of objects that appear to us are transcendentally ideal while still being ‘empirically’ real. In section 2, I contend that there are elements of Allais's account that are problematic, yet also inessential, to what I view to be the core contribution of her analysis. These elements are the views that the properties that appear to human beings are not really distinct from properties that things have ‘in themselves’ and that Kant embraced a relational account of perception. In section 3, I return to the core of Allais's reading and argue that, despite its multiple virtues, it cannot make sense of key features of Kant's idealism. (shrink)

The whole of our human experience is determined by certain material conditions which cannot themselves be a part of that experience. In particular there exist objects, inaccessible to our senses, which nevertheless interact with ourselves to produce that experience. But the selves which are so affected by these objects outside our experience, and the internal mechanisms which somehow construct that experience, are also just such material conditions of, and not parts of, that experience. We might describe this appeal (...) to material conditions of experience in Kant's technical terms as the ‘intelligible’ or even ‘transcendental’ background to our empirical experience. In its attempt to provide some explanation, in terms of things in themselves, of empirical objects it forms a central part of what Adickes called Kant's ‘double affection’ theory. (shrink)

The paper argues that in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant develops two anti-sceptical strategies. In the Fourth Paralogism (CPR A) he believes himself able to refute the sceptic by demonstrating that external perception is immediate. This strategy is rather unconvincing. In the Refutation of Idealism (CPR B) Kant promotes the material dependence of inner sense on outer sense. I show that Kant’s argument for material dependence has been widely overlooked, even though it is the strongest argument against (...) external world scepticism he develops, since it anticipates mental content externalism while preserving transcendental idealism and empirical realism. (shrink)

This paper is a novel attempt at reconstructing Kant’s account of self-consciousness in the first Critique by making evident its gradual expository progression, and at identifying the epistemic status of the two modes of self-consciousness: pure and empirical. I trace the gradual exposition of theoretical self-consciousness across three crucial parts of the book: the Transcendental Deduction, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. In doing so, I show that the account of theoretical self-consciousness is (...) not presented to us all at once, but is progressively expanded and filled in. I also emphasize the importance of the distinction between the subject’s awareness of its existence, “Dasein”, and of its existence, “Existenz”. I conclude by discussing Kant’s preliminary remarks about practical self-consciousness in the Paralogisms, which bear an important relation to theoretical self-consciousness. (shrink)

Most students of philosophy, at one time or another, have worked through Descartes' Meditations and witnessed this reduction of the world to the res cogitans and consequent attempt to recover the real, or extra-mental, world through proofs for God's existence and divine veracity. Whatever our final assessment of the validity and soundness of these proofs may be, there can be no doubt that the judgment of history is that they fail, leaving Descartes' conception of the self forever confined to the (...) horizons of thought. Without the proofs for God's existence, Descartes becomes an idealist. Indeed, Kant labels him a "problematic idealist" for whom "there is only one empirical assertion that is indubitably certain, namely that 'I am'", suggesting that, as far as Kant is concerned, Descartes' attempt to prove the real existence of anything outside of his mind, including God, does not work. And Schopenhauer, just before claiming that "true philosophy must at all costs be idealistic," praises Descartes for finding the "only correct starting point... of all philosophy". Husserl is so taken by this starting point that he will title one of his introductions to pure phenomenology, Cartesian Meditations, thus inviting his reader to repeat Descartes' Meditations, this time, without the proofs for God's existence and divine veracity. Due to the tradition in which he has been passed down to us, Descartes may be called not only the "father of modern philosophy," but also "the grandfather of transcendental phenomenology." Oddly enough, evidence for this claim is seen in the fact that, at least within contemporary continental circles, Heidegger's reworking of the Husserlian project gets conceived as a simultaneous reworking of the Cartesian project. (shrink)

This essay argues that the key to understanding Kant's transcendental idealism is to understand the transcendental realism with which he contrasts it. It maintains that the latter is not to be identified with a particular metaphysical thesis, but with the assumption that the proper objects of human cognitions are “objects in general” or “as such,” that is, objects considered simply qua objects of some understanding. Since this appears to conflict with Kant's own characterization of transcendental realism as (...) the view that (mistakenly) regards appearances as if they were things in themselves, the essay explicates the connection between the concepts of an object (or thing) considered as such and a thing considered as it is in itself. In light of this, it maintains that Kant's transcendental idealism is compatible with a robust empirical realism and that many of its critics are tacitly committed to a misguided transcendental realism. (shrink)

Henry Allison over the years has produced important work on Kant's transcendental idealism of the objects of our empirical knowledge as well as on Kant's conception and defence of the freedom of rational agency. He has done so both in two major books and in a string of articles. Most recently, his continuing refinements of a number of interrelated themes prominent in his two books, together with discussions of some other issues, have provided the material for the (...) publication of a collection of papers, Idealism and Freedom) Ten of the twelve essays included in this collection have already appeared elsewhere, but it is gratifying to have them, together with two additions, all available in their present form. Allison's debates, both with himself and with his critics, help increase our understanding of his views and hence of Kant's as well. (shrink)

This thesis is an interrogation of the viability of transitive production, which I associate with the Aristotelian term hylomorphic. The central axiom of hylomorphic production that will be targeted for critique is that the agent of production must be distinguished absolutely from the product. The thesis follows the thought of production primarily-but not exclusively-in its characteristically modem instantiation in the Kantian transcendental. The argument seeks to demonstrate that the productive aspect of the operator of transitive production is incompatible with (...) the transcendental element, and that Kant was himself increasingly aware of this problem. The Third Critique, under the rubric of an aesthetics, it will be argued, manifests this awareness in its problematic of a manifold of empirical laws. That this constitutes a difficulty for transcendent idealism means that the transcendental operators of the First Critique have failed to constitute experience in a relevant and important way. Furthermore, it is possible to see in some of the famous slogans of the Third Critique, an indication of another mode of production which is immune to the difficulties of the axiom of transitive production. In conclusion I suggest that the consequences of this new mode of intransitive production, associated with materiality, is destructive of the thought of the axiomatic otherworldliness of production operators. Production is not operated at all. Some suggestions are then made as to the explanation of the error embodied in the axiom of transitivity. (shrink)

According to the ‘One Object’ reading of Kant's transcendental idealism, the distinction between the appearance and the thing in itself is not a distinction between two objects, but between two ways of considering one and the same object. On the ‘Metaphysical’ version of the One Object reading, it is a distinction between two kinds of properties possessed by one and the same object. Consequently, the Metaphysical One Object view holds that a given appearance, an empirical object, is numerically (...) identical to the thing in itself that appears as that object. I raise various indiscernibility arguments against that view; because an appearance has different spatiotemporal and modal properties than a thing in itself, no appearance can be identical to a thing in itself. I point out that these arguments are similar to arguments against Monism, the view that material objects are numerically identical to the matter of which they are made. I outline some strategies Monists have developed to respond to these indiscernibility arguments and then develop parallel responses on behalf of the Metaphysical One Object view. However, I then raise another indiscernibility argument, to which, I argue, the Metaphysical One Object view cannot respond, even using the resources I have developed thus far. I develop a modified version of the Metaphysical One Object view that can respond to this new indiscernibility argument, but, I argue, this modified version of the One Object view is only a terminological variant of the Two Object view. When the Metaphysical One Object view is fully thought through it becomes the Two Object view. I conclude that Kantian appearances are not numerically identical to the things in themselves that appear to us. (shrink)

Since the initial reception of theCritique of Pure Reasontranscendental idealism has been perceived and criticized as a form of subjective idealism regarding space, time, and the objects within them, despite Kant's protestations to the contrary. In recent years, some commentators have attempted to counter this interpretation by presenting transcendental idealism as a primarily epistemological doctrine rather than a metaphysical one. Others have insisted on the metaphysical character of transcendental idealism. Within these debates, Kant's rejection ofontology(of the kind exemplified (...) by Wolff and Baumgarten) has received comparatively little treatment, although it is often acknowledged. The present essay seeks to contribute to the secondary literature on Kant by offering an analysis of this claim and elaborating its consequences for transcendental idealism. This will take the form of a critical examination of transcendental idealism's supposedontological agnosticism—that is, its disavowal of any ontological claims. The overall conclusion is that Kant's rejection of ontology is deeply problematic, and to such an extent that it may be necessary to reconsider the possibilities of defending transcendental idealism as a purely epistemological, non-ontological doctrine. (shrink)

In recent work, William Blattner claims that Heidegger is an empirical realist, but not a transcendental idealist. Blattner argues that, unlike Kant, Heidegger holds that thinking beyond human life warrants no judgment about nature's existence. This poses two problems. One is interpretive: Blattner misreads Kant's conception of the beyond-life as yielding the judgment that nature does not exist, for Kant shares Heidegger's view that such a judgment must lack sense. Another is programmatic: Blattner overstates the gap between Kant's (...) and Heidegger's positions, for both are ontological, not ontic. I solve these problems by showing that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein contains the core of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism: the apriority of space and time. I conclude that Heidegger exemplifies Kant's view that empirical realism just is transcendental idealism. (shrink)

It is often claimed that anti-realism is a form of transcendental idealism or that Kant is an anti-realist. It is also often claimed that anti-realists are committed to some form of knowability principle and that such principles have problematic consequences. It is therefore natural to ask whether Kant is so committed, and if he is, whether this leads him into difficulties. I argue that a standard reading of Kant does indeed have him committed to the claim that all (...) empirical truths are knowable and that this claim entails that there is no empirical truth that is never known. I extend the result to a priori truths and draw some general philosophical lessons from this extension. However, I then propose a re-examination of Kant’s notion of experience according to which he carefully eschews any commitment to empirical knowability. Finally I respond to a remaining problem that stems from a weaker, justified believability principle. (shrink)

One of Kant’s central central claims in the Critique of Pure Reason is that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. This claim has been regarded as problematic in a number of ways: whether Kant is entitled to assert both that there are things in themselves and that we cannot have knowledge of them, and, more generally, what Kant’s commitment to things in themselves amounts to. A number of commentators deny that Kant is committed to (...) there actually being an aspect of reality which we cannot cognise; they argue that he is committed merely to the idea that we cannot avoid the concept of things as they are in themselves. I will argue in this paper that while transcendental idealism is partly an epistemological position, it is also partly a metaphysical position, and in specific, that Kant is committed to the claim that the things we cognise have, in addition to the way they appear to us, a nature that is independent of us, which we cannot cognise. (shrink)

The reality of the thinking subject -- The paralogisms and transcendental idealism -- The first paralogism -- The second paralogism -- Transcendental self-consciousness -- Other interpretations of the paralogisms -- Empirical apperception -- Pure apperception -- The person as subject -- Apperception and inner sense -- The third paralogism and Kant's conception of a person -- The embodied subject -- The fourth paralogism.

The transcendental turn, when defined methodologically as a determination of the necessary structures of experience, can be distinguished from transcendental idealism when the latter is understood as a metaphysical thesis about the non-unconditioned status of the forms of experience. It is tempting to resist holding to this kind of distinction and to reduce Kant’s transcendental idealism to his transcendental turn in order to escape the allegedly absurd consequences of a metaphysical reading of his idealism. This chapter (...) argues that such consequences can be avoided with a moderate metaphysical interpretation of Kant’s idealism. On this interpretation, the assertion of an in itself level of reality does not imply a demoting of empirical reality to an illusion. Arguments are offered that this interpretation can make sense of Kantian texts that can seem to be ’absurd doubletalk’ even to generally sympathetic readers. (shrink)

Well known is the fact that Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and phenomenological Philosophy I, published in 1913, made a strong disappointment in the phenomenological circle around Husserl, and started a reinterpretation of the husserlian phenomenology. The problem of the constitution was a real dilemma for the studentship of Munich — Göttingen. More of Husserl’s students from his Göttingen years reflected in the 1930th on the transcendental idealism, which they originated from the Ideas and found fulfilled in (...) Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and Formal and transzendental Logic. The remarkable similarity between these papers is the questioning on being incorporated in the problematic of the method in the husserlian phenomenology. But this parallelism in the problem reveals the origin of the religious phenomenon in the husserlian phenomenology as well. Adolf Reinach’s religious terms as gratitude, charity, etc. in his religious Notes, Heidegger’s notion of being as finiteness in Being and Time, Edith Stein’s concept about the finite and eternal being in Finite and Eternal Being are originating in the problem of constitution in the transcendental phenomenology on the one hand, but these phenomenon point at the constitution theologically. In my paper I would like to show the relationship between the critique on the husserlian transcendental idealism and the roots of the experience of religious life by the phenomenological problem of being especially at Edith Stein. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new reading of transcendental idealism. For a start, I endorse Allison’s rejection of the traditional so-called two-world view and, hence, of Guyer and Van Cleve’s ontological phenomenalism. But following Allais, I also reject Allison’s metaphysical deflacionism: transcendental idealism is metaphysically committed to the existence of things in themselves, noumena in the negative sense. Nevertheless, in opposition to Allais, I take Kant’s claim that appearances are “mere representations” inside our minds seriously. In the (...) empirical sense, appearances are the undetermined object of our sensible intuition. Yet, in the transcendental sense, appearances are nothing but the mind-dependent way that noumena manifest inside our minds and, hence, our mind-dependent way of knowing the mind-independent reality in itself (epistemological phenomenalism). (shrink)

French phenomenology focused on “the body” to avoid the supposed transcendental idealism of Husserl’s phenomenology, and to provide an “existential” or “empirical” account of the origin of meaning, as Ricoeur put it. In practice, however, this has implicitly presupposed a Cartesian problematic of the relation between body and mind or “subject.” This is the source of the ultimate frustration of this effort, as well as the persistence of a “mystery” of meaning (to cite Merleau-Ponty and Henry). This (...) essay offers an alternative, considering the embodiment of any meaningful experience, suggesting finally that embodiment must be accounted for in terms of subjection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant und das Problem des metaphysischen Idealismusby Dietmar H. HeidemannKonstantin PollokDietmar H. Heidemann. Kant und das Problem des metaphysischen Idealismus. Kantstudien Ergänzungshefte 131, Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. Pp. 268. Cloth, DM 158.00.Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy was controversial from the very beginning. His refutations of idealism played an important part in these debates. Dietmar H. Heidemann’s book on the problem of idealism is an attempt to (...) evaluate Kant’s arguments against metaphysical idealism. Yet Heidemann never takes a position on whether Kant eventually succeeded or failed in refuting idealism. On the one hand, he thinks it is possible “to consider the proof of the existence of the external world as ultimately unsatisfactory” (238). On the other hand he ambiguously talks of Kant’s “solution of the problem of metaphysical idealism, which is, though not satisfactory in all parts, still quite convincing and even plausible” (238). This indecisiveness constitutes a fundamental shortcoming in an otherwise interesting discussion of a central Kantian problem. The book is distinguished by its close reading of the relevant Kantian texts between 1781 and 1800 and its scrupulous rendering of the respective steps of Kant’s argumentation.Heidemann’s well written investigation consists of an introduction, dealing with the pre-Kantian discussion of that problem, followed by three chapters that present Kant’s criticism of “metaphysical idealism” (3). The author lumps together the theories of Descartes’s ‘skeptical’ or ‘problematic’ idealism and Berkeley’s ‘dogmatic’ idealism with this non-Kantian term. The three chapters correspond to different chronological stages in Kant’s attempts at refuting idealism. First, Heidemann analyzes the structure of the Fourth Paralogism of the Critique of Pure Reason, which was directed against Descartes. This argument was intended to prove that our knowledge of the external world is [End Page 175]immediate. Kant appeals to a radical difference between transcendental and empirical idealism on the one hand and transcendental and empirical realism on the other, and he claims that doubts about the external world that are based on discursive argumentscan be dismissed as illegitimate in principle. Heidemann criticizes Kant’s argumentation. In particular, he thinks that the immediacy of our perceptions alone cannot prove the necessity of outer objects, which could instead be imaginations of immediate objects.In the second chapter, which is unquestionably the center of Heidemann’s study, he analyzes the Refutation of Idealismin the second edition of the Critique. Beginning from its external occasion—the ‘Göttingen review’ by Garve, edited by Feder— Heidemann tries to show that Kant’s refutation of idealism is compelling. He sees Kant’s arguments as implicitly or explicitly informed by the postulate of actuality and the consciousness of one’s existence in time. It is this consciousness that makes necessary the presupposition of something permanent in intuition and thus of substance as matter. In supporting Kant’s sometimes elliptical argumentation with other passages from the Critique, Heidemann tries to improve on Kant’s text. Yet, he is doubtful as to whether the argument succeeds. He thinks that the refutation of idealism would remain insufficient, unless the “theory of self-affection ( Selbstaffektion)” (127), added in 1787, is taken into consideration. In other words, the refutation depends on Kant’s revision of the relationship between the inner and the outer sense in the B-Deduction.The third chapter examines Kant’s occupation with the refutation of idealism after 1787. Heidemann finds that Kant continues to be preoccupied with this subject because of Eberhard’s articles in his Philosophisches Magazin, G. E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus, and D. Tiedemann’s Theaetet. Using Kant’s Reflexionsbetween 1788 and 1800, Heidemann argues that Kant’s new approach is characterised mainly by a decreasing importance of the permanent in the determination of time and a new emphasis of the coexistence argument. But this is questionable for Kant relies on the synthetic connection between the categories of coexistence and substance in the Critique. Heidemann pays a great deal of attention to Kant’s Reflexion “On inner sense” because of its explicit consideration of the relationship between the inner and the outer sense. Heidemann views this passage as “Kant’s... (shrink)

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 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. (shrink)

The article highlights the conceptual issues related to Kant’s analysis of the soul, a concept of utmost importance for the metaphysics and psychology of German academic philosophy (Schulphilosophie) of the Enlightenment was significantly dependent on the developed and systematically presented philosophical and scientific ideas and concepts of Christian Wolff. Kantian philosophy, its themes, and conceptual language were formed in the crucible of Wolfean discourse, and from the early 1770s in the struggle against it, which led to the emergence of a (...) new, critical philosophy – transcendental idealism, in which the problem of the soul, consciousness, and self-awareness became fundamental. It is this issue that was thoroughly covered in the «Critique of Pure Reason» and other works that were published later, after the first Critique. The article draws attention to Kant’s Lectures, which, on the one hand, demonstrate his critical attitude towards the so-called Wolfians, their metaphysics, and psychology, and, on the other hand, the lecture materials illustrate Kant's new conceptual position, and, what is important, develop, supplement and clarify it. The sources of Kant’s lectures are highlighted, taking into account the fact that we have at our disposal lecture notes, the authors of which are either unknown or, if known, their authorship is still somewhat doubtful, since they are notes that different people have rewritten. The article analyses lecture notes on psychology, the authors of which are more or less well-known, and experts recognize these notes as quite valid. The conceptual content of these lectures allows us to look at Kant’s understanding of the problem of the soul in a somewhat broader context compared to the «Critique of Pure Reason», where this problem is analyzed in connection with the paralogisms of reason and the transcendental deduction of categories. In his lectures on psychology, Kant draws attention to the problem of the interaction of the soul with the human body, the «location of the soul», linking it not so much to the organs of the human body (for example, the head) as to the location of a person as a bodily being in the world makes all acts of consciousness, self-awareness, and sense perception possible. Kant emphasizes the basic importance of such a spatial location of a person for the soul, as something that belongs to a person with a certain integrity, and not a separate organ, to act properly, to perform its cognitive functions. The article analyses the problem of existence, which is important for critical philosophy, its various modalities, and predication, with a special emphasis on the problem of the existence of metaphysical objects - the soul, God, and the world as a whole. (shrink)

A pervasive interpretation among Husserl scholars is that his transcendental idealism inevitably leads to some form of solipsism. The aim of this dissertation is to defend Husserl against this charge. First, I argue that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is not a metaphysical theory. Transcendental phenomenology brackets all metaphysical presuppositions and argues from experience to the conditions of the possibility of experience. Husserl’s transcendental idealism should therefore be interpreted as a transcendental theory of knowledge. Second, it follows (...) from the above characterization of Husserl’s transcendental idealism that the responses Husserl gives to the problem of solipsism are in no way meant to prove the existence in-itself of an external world or the existence in-themselves of other transcendental egos. The purpose of Husserl’s engagement with the problem of solipsism is to explain how it is that transcendental phenomenology can account for the constitution of both the Objectivity of the world of experience and other psycho-physical subjects. The result is a set of transcendental arguments that explain the necessary conditions of the cognition of a shared external world and of other persons. I conclude with Husserl that the solipsism is a transcendental illusion, and that Husserl’s transcendental idealism does not lead to a problematic solipsism. Through a careful study of Husserl’s Nachlass, with particular attention paid to Ideas I, Formal and Transcendental Logic, and Cartesian Meditations, I lay the framework for a transcendental-epistemological interpretation of Husserl’s idealism. Applying this interpretive strategy to Husserl’s discussions of the problem of solipsism and intersubjective monadology, I argue that, for Husserl, empathy is the condition of the experience of other subjects, but that it does not allow us to experience the mental-lives of other transcendental egos. (shrink)

El idealismo moderno de la estética plantea una distinción entre símbolo y alegoría. A partir de esta distinción, Schelling y Hegel caracterizan la alegoría como un suplementario o un mecanismo degradado de representación. Consecuentemente, sus lecturas de Calderón de la Barca están informadas por la preminencia del símbolo y el supuesto de la idealidad del significado, es decir, su univocidad y transparencia frente al carácter secundario de la encarnación o inscripción alegórica. De este modo, afirmar que en el símbolo no (...) hay diferencia entre el símbolo y lo simbolizado no es sino una apuesta que subsume la materialidad en lo absoluto y conjura la inscripción. Dicho de otro modo, al rechazar la figuración alegórica porque el sentido estaría escindido y mal representado, se oculta la pregunta acerca de las condiciones materiales que complican cualquier clasificación fija. En este registro, y a partir de Walter Benjamin, se propone que el procedimiento barroco en Calderón pone en cuestión este supuesto de la anterioridad del sentido. Calderón, entonces, temática y performativamente, levanta y entabla la pregunta por las condiciones materiales de la producción del sentido, y con ello pone en escena que el sentido no puede permanecer simplemente intocado. La teatralidad, pues, consiste en hacer aparecer esta relación contaminante. El Gran teatro del tundo de Calderón aparece, así, como una radical crítica del idealismo trascendental: instala la pregunta por la teatralidad que desajusta la posición de la idealidad, desmonta el ordenamiento a partir del cual se afirmaba la idealidad en desmedro de la singularidad empírica de la encarnación alegórica, al mismo tiempo que desestabiliza las condiciones de la soberanía. Modern idealism of aesthetics poses a distinction between symbol and allegory. From this difference, Schelling and Hegel characterize the allegory as a supplementary or degraded mechanism of representation. Consequently, his readings of Calderón de la Barca are informed by the preeminence of the symbol and the presupposition of the ideality of the meaning, that is, its univocity and transparency in the face of the secondary character of the incarnation or allegorical inscription. In this way, to affirm that in symbol there is no difference between the symbol and the symbolized is nothing more than a bet that subsumes the materiality in the absolute and conjures up the inscription. In other words, by rejecting the allegorical figuration because the meaning would be divided and misrepresented, the question about the material conditions that complicate any fixed classification is hidden. In this register, and following Walter Benjamin, this paper proposes that the baroque procedure in Calderón put in question this assumption of the anteriority of meaning. Then, Calderón, thematically and performatively, raises and poses the question of the material conditions of the production of meaning, and with this, he puts on stage that meaning cannot simply remain untouched. Theatricality, then, consists of making this contaminating relationship appear. El Gran Teatro del Mundo, thus, appears as a radical critique of transcendental idealism: it installs the question of theatricality that dismantles the position of ideality, it disassembles the order from which ideality was affirmed to the detriment the empirical singularity of the allegorical incarnation, and, at the same time, it destabilizes the conditions of sovereignty. (shrink)

Kant calls himself a realist, qualifying this label with the adjective ‘empirical’. It is fair to say that most critics take this qualification as somehow implying that his idealism, itself qualified as ‘transcendental’, is primary. It is often assumed that the realism is merely a concession Kant makes from within an epistemological framework that is basically and in the final analysis an idealist one. There is an interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism that supposes that there is a (...) sense in which it is true to say that “mind makes nature”. Typically, metaphors used to describe the relationship between the mind and the world are ones that suggest the imposition of form on a material in itself shapeless. This article pursues the question which of the rival interpretations of Kant’s realism should be adopted. (shrink)

My dissertation proposes a novel interpretation of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism as presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. I aim to give a consensus interpretation by overcoming past errors in interpreting this doctrine. I support my interpretation through a textual exegesis of the Critique of Pure Reason with a special focus on the direct and indirect proofs of transcendental idealism. Transcendental idealism is the doctrine that objects of our experience, space, and time, when taken as (...) they would be outside our possible experience, are nothing but mere representations. However, this does not make them into illusions. This is because Kant takes objects of our experience, space, and time to be empirically real. Empirical realism is the doctrine that objects of our experience, space, and time, when taken within our possible experience, exist independently of us. Yet, their empirical reality is not grounded in things in themselves, about whose existence Kant is agnostic. Instead, the reality of objects of our experience, space, and time depend on a standard of empirical reality that differs from the standard of transcendental reality. This separate standard of empirical reality allows Kant to hold transcendental idealism and empirical realism at the same time. Finally, while not strictly part of the doctrine of transcendental idealism, I answer the question of the relation of appearances and things in themselves. The distinction between appearances and things in themselves is a metaphysical distinction between two different ways of being, i.e., objectivity, properties, existence, reality. Yet, this is a metaphysical distinction within the same concept of an object. Thus, appearances and things in themselves are the same object conceptually that is determined metaphysically in two different ways. (shrink)

The article compares views of C.G. Jung and N.O. Lossky on the nature of time, including in the context of contemporary to them physical theories - quantum mechanics by W. Pauli and relativistic physics by A. Einstein. In particular, the author points to the similarity of ideas of both thinkers that the psyche relativizes time not only subjectively, but also objectively. Jung and Lossky provide this statement with a similar empirical basis, for example, the researches of T. Flournoy, as (...) well as similar theoretical arguments by postulating a fundamental acausal principle of the connection of all things, which is better suited for describing psychic and some physical phenomena than the classical causal explanation. In analytical psychology, such a principle is synchronicity, in hierarchical personalism - gnoseological coordination. Both concepts are genetically related to the G.W. Leibniz idea of pre-established harmony, which was reinterpreted by Jung and Lossky through different worldview foundations. Jung in his reasoning relied on the transcendental idealism of I. Kant, the principle of complementarity and the discoveries of quantum mechanics, Lossky - on intuitivism, the principle of subordination and on his own interpretation of Einsteins theories. Jung comes to the conclusion that the psyche has a timeless character, and Lossky comes to the conclusion that it has a super-temporal character. Jungs timelessness indicates the transcendental nature of psyche and the strive to get away from the classical causal explanation, saving it according to the principle of complementarity only to consider the phenomenal side of being and mainly physical processes. One of the pioneers of quantum mechanics Pauli was of the same opinion in general. Because of there is nothing transcendent in hierarchical personalism, Losskys super-temporality is of a strive to find a deeper basis for occurring in time processes, and, according to the principle of subordination, to include time in the hierarchical structure of the universe, prescribing for it a role of one of the two key forms of psychic and psycho-material processes characteristic of a certain stage of being. (shrink)

Idealism is an ontological view, a view about what sorts of things there are in the universe. Idealism holds that what there is depends on our own mental structure and activity. Berkeley of course held that everything was mental; Kant held the more complex view that there was an important distinction between the mental and the physical, but that the structure of the empirical world depended on the activities of minds. Despite radical differences, idealists like Berkeley and Kant share (...) what Ralph Barton Perry called "the cardinal principle of idealism," namely, the principle that "being is dependent on the knowing of it."1 I believe that Hilary Putnam intends his "internal realism" to be a version of idealism in this broad sense; although many of his arguments concern semantic notions like truth and reference, he takes these semantic arguments to have ontological consequences. This is strongly suggested, for instance, by his claim that "'objects' themselves are as much made as discovered, as much products of our conceptual invention as of the 'objective' factor in experience."2 Or again there is this rather Kantian metaphor: "the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world."3 But just what is Putnam's ontology? (shrink)

Scholars who consider that the Transcendental Analytic contains the core of what Kant calls ‘transcendental idealism’ are mistaken. Indeed, Kant’s transcendental idealism of space, time and spatiotemporal objects is sufficiently proved in the Transcendental Aesthetic and does not depend on complementary claims made later on in the Critique. This does not mean, however, that we are allowed to subscribe to the so-called separability-thesis, which states that we can endorse Kant's views in the Transcendental Logic without (...) endorsing the results of the expositions and arguments laid out in the Aesthetic. Nor does it mean that the Aesthetic contains the only proof for transcendental idealism. Indeed, as Kant himself explicitly recognizes, the antinomies provide the premise for an indirect or mediate proof of his position with respect to the nature of space and time. First, I analyze Kant’s argument for the claim that the production of transcendental illusion is inherent to the function of human reasoning, and therefore inevitable. I then follow the presuppositions and the argumentation of the mediate proof of transcendental idealism and argue that it has a more general validity than could be assumed on the basis of Kant’s text, because it is in its essence independent from the particular determinations of the cosmological idea in the form of the four antinomies. Indeed, as I argue, the nature of reason itself and the content of the general cosmological idea suffice as elements for a mediate proof. Thus, I claim that transcendental idealism can be mediately established on the basis of the general antinomical relation between transcendental realism and material idealism, without any requirement to refer to the particular realisations of this antagonism as they are presented in the four antinomies. If the argument is correct, it shows that the mediate proof of transcendental idealism does not depend on a sympathetic account of the antinomies and is not automatically invalidated if the proofs of thesis and antithesis are considered unconvincing. (shrink)

Husserl’s phenomenology opens itself with a critique of positive sciences. Husserl problematizes the hardcore presupposition of positivism that the world is a definite sort of an existential totality of objects and thus it is exhaustible with empirical data and deductive-conceptual abstraction on the basis of causalspatio-temoprality. Criticizing the wholesome reduction of nature into a physical reality and the instrumentalizing of theoretical reason, he proposes transcendental phenomenology, as an ideal form of science. Self-entitled as the genuine science, the science (...) of origin, the science of all sciences, etc., it concerns itself with the matter of validity. Claiming that validating objectivity as such and the meaning of scientific objectification is something of which onlyphenomenological reflection on pure consciousness is capable and that the positivistic objectivity is and must be founded on transcendental subjectivity, Husserl radically idealistically revised the whole positivistic concept of evidence and givenness of a fact and substituted it with the phenomenological notion of apriori self-evidence and originary givenness of primordial intentional consciousness. Nevertheless, it is noticed that the absolute universal validity of positivistic objectivity was never rejected or questioned; objectivity is still in and of itself an absolute criterion of scientificity in Husserl. This paper will argue that the idealistic turn toward subjectivity takes place through factualization of transcendentality and this, by bestowing apriori apodicticity with facticity, even enhances more the supreme epistemological function of positivity. It will discuss such positivistic drive, directly bequeathed from the very cultural ethos at which phenomenological criticism targeted, as an important locomotive for Husserl’s program and point out an antinomical consequence with which it is to be faced as a consequence. (shrink)

This article considers an apparent Achilles heel for Kant’s transcendental idealism, concerning his account of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. The problem is that while Kant’s distinctive attempt to explain synthetic a priori knowledge lies at the heart of his transcendental idealism, this explanation appears to face a dilemma: either the explanation generates a problematic regress, or the explanation it offers gives us no reason to favour transcendental idealism over transcendental realism. In the (...) article, I consider G. E. Moore’s version of the problem, which I argue has not yet received an adequate response. Instead, I offer a way out of this dilemma by focusing on the normativity rather than the metaphysics of the mind. (shrink)

The thesis that Kant's “Rechtslehre” is entirely independent of his transcendental idealism is simply not correct. In fact: the material contents of the “Rechtslehre” follow analytically from the logical explication of the empirical concept of external freedom, whereas the absolute practical validity (“Verbindlichkeit”) of the imperative and of the imperatives of right is based exclusively on the categorical imperative and therefore ultimately on transcendental idealism.

The thesis of the dissertation is that Husserl's phenomenological analyses of the human body are important in assessing the claim that phenomenology provides the basis for a "transcendental idealism". The central role of these analyses is to reconcile the sense of consciousness as a world-creating transcendental synthesis and as an empirical self: if successful, Husserl's idealism could boast a sensitivity to the empirical that would significantly augment its plausibility. ;The argument begins by setting up the problem (...) vis-a-vis the experience of the other person. The issue at hand is how the body of the other person expresses the presence of a consciousness. Yet the question that guides the analysis is: if "consciousness" means a world-creating, transcendental synthesis , then in what sense can we speak of an empirical consciousness that belongs to the world, thus of a person standing before us ? Part of the answer, it is asserted, lies in the expressive nature of a person's body: that is, the human body is a concrete thing in the world that yet expresses the sense of consciousness as world-creating, thereby providing for it a "worldly", empirical manifestation. ;The main part of the dissertation is a presentation of Husserl's analyses of the human body, which is described as a threefold unity of extension, materiality, and time. An understanding of each of these dimensions provides a piece of the puzzle as to how the body of the other is expressive of consciousness. ;The study ends with the problem of phenomenology as a transcendental idealism. The conclusion is that, for Husserl, consciousness is the condition for the manifestation of the "world" only as an empirical, bodily consciousness. I believe the tenability of this position can be demonstrated through Husserl's phenomenology of the human body, where the body is understood as a special mode of the expression of consciousness. For these analyses, taken as a whole, lend to his idealism a subtlety that significantly boosts both its plausibility and the force of its presentation. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has drawn parallels between his "internal", "pragmatic", "natural" or "common-sense" realism and Kant's transcendental idealism. Putnam reads Kant as rejecting the then current metaphysical picture with its in-built assumptions of a unique, mind-independent world, and truth understood as correspondence between the mind and that ready-made world. Putnam reads Kant as overcoming the false dichotomies inherent in that picture and even finds some glimmerings of conceptual relativity in Kant's proposed solution. Furthermore, Putnam reads Kant as overcoming (...) the pernicious scientific realist distinction between primary and secondary qualities, between things that really exist and their projections, a distinction that haunts modern philosophy. Putnam's revitalisation of Kant is not just of historical interest, but challenges contemporary versions of scientific realism. Furthermore, Putnam has highlighted themes which have not received the attention they deserve in Kantian exegesis, namely, the problematic role of primary and secondary qualities in Kant's empirical realism, and the extent of Kant's commitment to conceptual pluralism.However, I argue that Putnam's qualified allegiance to Kant exposes him to some of the same metaphysical problems that affected Kant, namely, the familiar problem of postulating an absolute reality (Ding an sich), while at the same time disavowing the meaningfulness of so doing. In conclusion I suggest that Putnam might consider Hegel's attempts to solve this problem in Kant as a way of furthering his own natural realism. (shrink)

This book provides an account of the unity of Immanuel Kant’s early metaphysics, including the moment he invents transcendental idealism. Matthew Rukgaber argues that a division between “two worlds”—the world of matter, force, and space on the one hand, and the world of metaphysical substances with inner states and principles preserved by God on the other—is what guides Kant’s thought. Until 1770 Kant consistently held a conception of space as a force-based material product of monads that are only (...) virtually present in nature. As Rukgaber explains, transcendental idealism emerges as a constructivist metaphysics, a view in which space and time are real relations outside of the mind, but those relations are metaphysically dependent on the subject. The subject creates the simple “now” and “here,” thus introducing into the intrinsically indeterminate and infinitely divisible continua of nature a metric with transformation rules that make possible all individuation and measurement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 97 supposed by actual idealism is above all moral and involves what Gentile describes as an aspect of divinity or infinity,as well as a concrete, historical aspect. The following chapter treats of the philosophy of "actual" idealism and compares the views of Kant and Gentile on relations between moral conscience and freedom. According to Yalentini, Gentile's idealism is essentially an ethical view. This chapter concludes with noting (...) that Gentile 's solution to the problem of historical knowledge differs profoundly from that of Hegel and Croce. For "reason" is not, for Gentile, a particular interpretation of historical process, but is rather the "reason" of consciousness in activity. In Chapter In, Valentini discusses Gentile's views on art and religion. The section on art concludes with a comparison between Gentile on feeling and Kant on the transcendental unity of apperception. Whereas art is supposed to be one abstract moment of spirit, religion is the other abstract moment. Valentini suggests that Gentile and Feuerbach hold similar religious views on the attributes of divinity, which are nothing other than the loftiest qualities which man feels to possess in his essence. The history of religion is then the history of the progressive humanization of God. Gentile's religion represents a sort of modem Catholicism in that it understands revelation as a fact of conscience, church as a historical institution, dogma as having a negative character and God as a member of the dialogue between God and man. Moreover, Gentile's Catholicism has a national character; it is the religion of the Italian people. Chapter Iv treats of the relations between individual and state. For, according to Gentile, an individual is inconceivableapart from the social relations which lie within him. Here Valentini distinguishes in detail the differences and similarities between the views of Hegel and Gentile on the relations between state and individual. The differences between the views of these two philosophers are due to the differences between their methods. The method of Hegel is empirical and historical, and examines the state (which remains historical) from an external point of view. According to an idealistic method, however, thought is not to be the spectator of a process, but in every instance, an actor, and philosophizing does not result from an analysis of historical reality, but from the negation of this reality in the name of an ideal, which philosophy is to draw from it (reality). The Appendix includes a critical evaluation of the theory of the dialectic. Here Valentini hopes to distinguish between the imaginary and the real or historical applications of the dialectic. He begins his evaluation by asking: Does the doctrine of the dialectic, like the philosophy of idealism, possess negative connotations, which cannot be separated from it? Valentini suggests that in order to answer this question, we must determine the extent to which the dialectical scheme is constitutive of every concept or truth in general. For this is the way in which Hegel intended that the dialectic be understood and evaluated. Some views in Hegel's philosophy of nature are then criticized according to empirical criteria. In conclusion, Valentini attempts to answer both "internal" and "external" criticisms of Marx's view of the dialectic, and shows that there are problems involved in its application, which still have to be resolved. Mv~ M. MILBURN 9 ~an Jos~ ~ate College Husserl und Kant: eine Untersuchung ~ber Husserls Verh~iltni~ zu Kant und zum Neubantianismus. By Iso Kern. (The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.Pp. xxiii q- 448.) This is a very important book. In fact, it is indispensable for a study of Husserl and is, at the same time, almost as valuable for a study of Kant, for it deals with the kind of searching questions that must be asked when one deals with transcendental idealism in any one of its forms. But two reasons in particular, make this book significant. One is the fact that Iso Kern was able to make extensive use of hitherto unpublished materials (manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, etc.), available only in the Husserl Archives and here quoted for the first time--and 98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY quoted in great numbers. The other is Kern's philosophical competence... (shrink)

In my work on Kant’s Transcendental epistemology, I criticize his three Critiques and show that none of them can solve the problems that Kant endeavored to solve; and he even, in a way, admitted it. In the first Critique, Kant attempts to solve the difficulties of the Cartesian Idealism and Humean Empirism, in combining them mechanically in his own Transcendental formalism and Sensual matter without being able to bridge the gap between them. In the second Critique, Kant endeavored (...) to make his Practical Reason of the a priori pure fact of formal morality into free moral conduct to materialize his ideal commonwealth of ends, but he could not bridge this gap. In his third Critique, Kant attempted to make the aesthetic reflective judgment of beauty objective, including of artworks, but failed to do so. The Peircean pragmaticist method can save the theory of knowledge both from the dogmatism of the metaphysical realists and from the inconsistency of the phenomenalists and holists. Peirce developed his epistemological realism in response to the difficulties of Kant’s transcendental epistemology, especially that of his three Critiques. It seems that in his late research Kant tries to follow Spinoza in the distinction between the causality in nature and the human inner causality as one’s Moral freedom and yet for Kant they operate in different domains to keep human freedom absolute, while the Spinozist conception of human freedom is in Nature and relative to human knowledge of reality and one’s relative power in Nature. Kant’sAnthropology from a Pragmatic Point of Viewis a continuation of his Transcendental critical philosophy, but also his intended empirical epistemology by which to develop a practical deviation from his Copernican Revolution in the direction of the Peircean contra-revolution in Pragmaticist epistemology. (shrink)

In a review of the book “Manifest Reality. Kant's Idealism and his Realism” I present Lucy Allais's moderate metaphysical interpretation of Kant's transcendental idealism. An overview of the structure of the book acquaints the reader with the author's argumentation strategy. Allais criticizes the dominant interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism and reveals their contradictions. Further, she develops her own interpretation of Kant's position, combining realism and idealism, metaphysical and epistemological judgments. Intuition plays a central role in the elicited epistemological (...) contrast between intuition and concepts, and between intuition and sensation. (shrink)

The article reassesses Schelling’s philosophy of art in the System of Transcendental Idealism, focusing on its practical philosophy and the concept of the artefact. Often unexplored, this perspective offers a new account of Schelling’s early aesthetics, linking aesthetic experience to historical becoming. The discussion begins with an analysis of Schelling’s theory of intentional action, followed by a reconstruction of his understanding of artefact. It argues that Schelling integrates both social and material dimensions into his concept of artefacts. The (...) paper then examines Schelling’s comparison between artefacts in general and works of art, asserting that aesthetic experience in the context of the System exemplifies ‘hermeneutic obstinacy’. This characteristic, typical of works of art, correlates with the open nature of historical reality. (shrink)

Badiou claims Deleuze’s thinking is pre-critical metaphysics that cannot be understood in relation to Kant. I argue that Deleuze is indeed a metaphysical thinker, but precisely because he is a kind of Kantian. Badiou is right that Deleuze rejects the overwhelmingly epistemic problematics of critical thought in its classical sense, but he is wrong to claim that Deleuze completely rejects Kant. Instead, Deleuze is interested in developing a metaphysics that prolongs Kant’s conception of a productive synthesis irreducible to empirical (...) causation. Where Badiou’s criticism might tell however is in the risk that Deleuze’s strategy runs of contaminating his new metaphysics with a new kind of transcendental idealism. This reading has recently been developed by Ray Brassier and I explore and evaluate it, concluding that in Difference and Repetition this accusation may be correct, but that by the time of Anti-Œdipus, Deleuze (now with Guattari) has the intellectual resources to resist it. (shrink)