The rationality of history and the history of rationality: Menachem Fisch on the analytic idealist predicament

Paul Franks

doi:10.1515/opphil-2020-0141

Abstract

AbstractTwo essential Kantian insights are the significance for rationality of the capacity for criticism and the limits of cognition, discovered when criticism is pursued methodically, that are due to the perspectival character of the human standpoint. After a period of disparagement, these Kantian insights have been sympathetically construed and are now discussed within contemporary analytic philosophy. However, if Kant’s assumption of a single, immutable, human framework is jettisoned, then the rationality of historical succession is called into question. Moreover, if the revolutionary character of framework transitions is acknowledged, then reason is historicized and even its character as reason is threatened. I argue that Menachem Fisch’s approach to criticism and rationality offers an escape from this post-Kantian predicament that acknowledges revolutionary framework transitions and that draws upon the dialogical traditions of Jewish thought, and I also argue that Fisch’s approach should be seen as thematizing, to use the terms of Kant’s aesthetics and of Fichte’s account of natural right, the reflecting rather than determining status of critical judgement, which involves second-personal address.

Highlights

What I find so inspiring about the work of Menachem Fisch is the way in which he lives his own philosophy
Since I want to bring Fisch’s work to bear on what I call the analytic idealist predicament, a few words about analytic idealism are in order
Analytic idealism involves a correction of the impoverished selfunderstanding, dominant during the middle third of the twentieth century, according to which analytic philosophy began in rebellion against idealism, in Frege’s rebellion against neo-Kantianism and in the rebellion of Russell and Moore – one might add the American New Realists2 – against neoHegelianism

Summary

Introduction

What I find so inspiring about the work of Menachem Fisch is the way in which he lives his own philosophy He does this, first, by holding himself open to revision and, second, by allowing his interests in three apparently disparate areas to interact with mutually productive effects. First, by holding himself open to revision and, second, by allowing his interests in three apparently disparate areas to interact with mutually productive effects These areas are analytic philosophy of science since Kuhn; the history of science, in particular the history of Cambridge mathematics in the nineteenth century and the philosophy of rabbinic Judaism.[1]. I will argue that, in his notion of critical address, Fisch has in effect thematized a new variety of what Kant calls reflecting judgement, a variety best understood in light of Fichte’s modification of Kantianism and as exemplified by what Fisch calls the anti-traditionalist or confrontationalist strand of rabbinic Judaism

Two Kantian insights

Fisch’s contribution

Conclusion