Critical Philosophy Research Articles

Die Raum- und Zeitlehre Alois Riehlsim Kontext realistischer Interpretationen von Kants transzendentalem Idealismus

AbstractInThe Philosophical Criticism, Alois Riehl developed a realistic interpretation of Kant’s transcendental idealism based on his theory of space and time. In doing so, more than 100 years ago, he formulated an interpretation of the relation between the thing in itself and appearances that is discussed in current research as the metaphysical „dual aspect“ interpretation, although it is rarely attributed to Riehl. To reconstruct Riehl’s position, the research results of comparative studies on Moritz Schlick are systematically extended and applied to the current debate on Kant’s transcendental idealism.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins

Reviewed by: Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor Susan Watkins. Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ix +219 pp. Several days after September 11, 2001, Guardian critic James Wood commented on contemporary novels' attempts to contain the uncontainable through encyclopedic proportion. Wood proposed that hysterical realism overtook literary fiction at the turn of century, conjuring a picture of an emasculated generation of (male and female) storytellers, with a couple exceptions (such as Don Delillo), who just don't have it in them to respond adequately to the times. Wood took to task the then-first-time author Zadie Smith for falling into a characteristic evasiveness and lack of authentic feeling. In a [End Page 586] wry response entitled "This Is How It Feels to Me," Smith conceded that the millennial literary landscape is shadowed by fear and the realization that the center is not, in fact, holding. But after all, she averred, is it so irrational and weak-minded of a writer, particularly right after the apocalyptic event in New York, to feel (like everybody else) disoriented or untethered, fearful—even terrified? If the self-proliferating stylistics of her and others' novels targeted by Wood are some form of psycho-social defense, thanks to a general sense of approaching doom, what makes such self-conscious defensiveness inauthentic, or lacking in writerly craft and moral seriousness? Twenty years on, as Susan Watkins's Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction notes, the question of adequate response to the manifold anxieties attending the collapse of one world and the emergence of another remains. She cites Ursula Heise's observation that the prevalence of contemporary dystopias indicates a desire to "unsettle the status quo, but by failing to outline a persuasive alternative, they end up reconfirming it" (10). The suggestion of inauthenticity appears again: "survivalists [are] hard to tell apart from hipsters, their portrayals of apocalypse [recycling] well-known motifs" (Heise qtd. in Watkins 10). Watkins concurs to an extent but warns against extending critical skepticism onto today's postapocalyptic fiction, which comprises critical dystopian and utopian modes. An increasing number of women authors, less committed to the legacy of the heroic narrative and its sense of an ending, are leading the way. As Watkins states at the opening of her study, "conventional apocalyptic fiction (usually male-authored) tends toward conservatism" (1), toward a nostalgia for the time before, and/or a restoration of the world, centered around the nuclear family. Woman-authored novels in this genre, Watkins argues, go a different way—and they must: "My argument is not that women are bound to write end-of-world fiction in a particular way because they are intrinsically different from men . . . Rather, I claim that women writers' fictional engagement with apocalyptic ideas and forms is inevitably related to their specific subject positions in the contemporary moment" (2). In short, we are talking about a feminist standpoint. Feminist critical intervention has meant writing against the end, argues Watkins, "focus[ing] on analysing the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision. Rather than nostalgia and restoration . . . they successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse" (1). Feminist attention to situatedness and embodiment, gender and sexuality, crucially distinguishes women's [End Page 587] postapocalyptic fiction from men's, the author claims, and Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction lucidly articulates how women writers since Mary Shelley (especially her The Last Man [1826]) have interrogated apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative as symbolic form. Imbricated in this study of (un)anticipated endings and belated beginnings is the urgency of women's agency, not in driving the rebirth of mankind but rather in generating radical forms of difference that open up possibility or hope. A rich introductory chapter ("Rewriting and Transforming Traditions") gathers the threads of feminist literary and philosophical critiques by Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Heise, Melanie Klein, Adrienne Rich, and others who have remarked on the absence of intersectional analysis that feminist and postcolonial writers and scholars bring to bear. Watkins also situates her monograph...

Twenty-Five Years of Charles Mills’s Racial Contract in Sociology

How have sociologists engaged the late philosopher Charles Mills’ landmark The Racial Contract (1997) in the twenty-five years since its publication? I first synthesize and periodize the corpus of sociological research citing The Racial Contract into two chronological and epistemological waves. The first wave (1997-2009) is distinguished by the scholarship of a vanguard who drew on the text, and direct engagement with Mills himself, in a paradigmatic shift away from the sociological study of race relations to the study of racism. The second wave (2010-present) is characterized by a fivefold increase in the text’s citation, tied to a resurgence of Du Boisian sociology and the early-career projects of a new generation of sociologists, as the text diffused from the sociology of race into other subfields of the discipline. I then go on to describe the influence of The Racial Contract on theory, data, and method in my own scholarship on racialization, first during my graduate studies in the United States, and later, as Sociology faculty in Canada at the University of Toronto, Mills’ alma mater. I end the essay with proposals for how a third wave of sociological engagement with The Racial Contract can more rigorously engage the text’s originating relationship to feminist political theory, as well as more actively be in dialogue with a new generation of critical philosophers who are already speaking back to us by centrally drawing on the work of sociologists.

The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism

Anja Jauernig here addresses with great scholarship and philosophical insight a central issue in the interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘The project of this book is to develop a comprehensive account of Kant's theoretical views in his theoretical critical philosophy or, perhaps more accurately, of the ontological implications of his theoretical critical philosophy. More specifically, my aim will be to sort out Kant's views on the nature of appearances, the nature of things in themselves, and the relation between them as presented and hinted in the Critique of Pure Reason…and associated writings’ (p. 1). This project, she thinks, is of more than historical interest, as Kant's ontological position, ‘critical idealism’, has great philosophical merit and may very well be in its main lines true (a thesis she does not claim to demonstrate in this book, though a sequel to it is planned). In taking this stance, she sharply dissents from the view, most closely associated in Anglo-American analytic philosophy with Peter Strawson, that Kant's transcendental idealism must either be rendered innocuous or disregarded altogether. ‘…Strawson's two-world reading of transcendental idealism, and his claim that Kant's more valuable philosophical insights can, fortunately, be “disentangled” from the doctrine of transcendental idealism, inspired legions of Kant scholars to either follow him in setting transcendental idealism to one side—or engage in the business of saving Kant from his bad reputation by devising readings that do not present him as a two-world theorist after all…’ (p. 24).

The last of his kind? Gottfried Ploucquet’s occasionalism and the grounding of sense-perception

ABSTRACT Sufficiently grounding the origin of sense-perceptions in the mind is an issue that has concerned philosophers for a long time, and remains an issue even today. In eighteenth-century Germany prior to the publication of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the two main competing theories to causally ground sense-perceptions were pre-established harmony and physical influx, the latter of which ultimately carried the day. A third option had been around in the seventeenth century: occasionalism. However, historians of philosophy believe this option to have entirely disappeared in the eighteenth century. I will show that this is not the case. In this paper, I focus on one influential German occasionalist: Gottfried Ploucquet (1716–90). Ploucquet not only criticizes Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony for providing an ultimately ungrounded, subjective, and arbitrary account of the origin of sense-perceptions, but also presents his own daring alternative: a representationalist-occasionalist theory that locates the objective ground of sense-perceptions in the divine mind.

POESIA ROMÂNTICA E O SISTEMA DE ARTE

ABSTRACT This paper is an attempt at connecting the emergence of second order observation in critical philosophy with the theory of aesthetic autonomy as developed by Early German Romanticism. In outlining the genesis of an autonomous art system from the reception of critical philosophy, my intention is to show how those apparently overly hermeneutical philosophical developments relate to the birth of a system of production and reproduction of artworks, which – as I will argue – are the very materialization of the system’s code.

Conatus and Feeling of Life: A Genetic Shift in Kant’s Faculty Doctrine?

In his reconstruction of Kant’s critical philosophy as a whole, Deleuze argues that the cognitive and practical faculties are genetically grounded in the affective, enlivening dynamics of the reflecting power of judgment. In this paper I propose to take Kant’s account of self-organisation as model for understanding this genesis of the faculties in terms of a circular causality that is purposively animated from within by a self-productive and self-maintaining tendency. The key argument I develop is that this generative tendency may be understood as a conatus that is inherent to the power of judgment and comes to the fore in the subject’s feeling of life.

Einbildungskraft Kavramının Türkçe Felsefe Sözlüklerindeki Yolculuğu ve Kant’ın I. Kritiği’nden Hareketle Muhayyile Melekesi Üzerine Düşünmek

Bu çalışma, Einbildungskraft teriminin Türkçe felsefe sözlüklerindeki Fransızca karşılığından hareketle imagination terimi üzerinden bir soruşturma gerçekleştirir. Kant’ın eleştirel felsefesi içerisinde terimin kullanım alanlarına işaret etmeyi amaçlar. Bu yönde, felsefenin yapıtaşı sayılan kavramlar ve bunların zihnî bir geleneğin sürdürülebilmesi adına taşıdığı anlamları bir arada tutan felsefe sözlüklerinden bazıları çalışmaya konu edilmektedir. Felsefenin kavramlarıyla teşekkül eden kültürel hafızanın aktarımı ve terimsel ihyâ faaliyetinin önemi üzerinde durulmaktadır. Bu çalışma ile geçmişten günümüze felsefe ıstılâhına hâkim olmanın, Kant’ın eleştirel felsefesindeki kavramların Türkçede yeniden inşa edilmesin-deki önemine işaret edilmektedir. Böylelikle, Einbildungskraft terimi üzerinden, Kant’ın verdiği manalar ve Türkçeye çevrimde tercih edilen kelimeler üzerinde durulmaktadır. Dilde ıslâh faaliyetinin değeri ve düşünce geleneğine bağlanma ihtiyacının önemi vurgulanmaktadır. Bu manada Kant’ın, kendi eserlerindeki terimsel tutumu ve kavram seçimleri ele alınmaktadır. Kant’ın, kavram inşasına dair eleştirel felsefesi içerisindeki değinilerine yer verilmektedir. Diğer yandan felsefî bir kavramın taşıdığı anlam yükünü en iyi karşılayacak terimin seçimi hususunun önemi üzerinde durulur. Kant’ın Einbildungskraft teriminin Türkçedeki karşılıkları ve bu kelimelerin, kavramın karşılığı olarak yeterliliklerine işaret edilmiştir. Kavramın kendi içerisinde taşıdığı nüansların ayırt edilmesi adına eleştiri öncesi dönem ve eleştirel dönemdeki kullanımları üzerinde durulmuştur.

O colapso do cognitivo no social: Kant à luz de Benjamin, Adorno e Horkheimer

This article intends to identify how the cognitive procedure of Kant’s critical philosophy is related to the enlightened principle of expanding the world. My hypothesis is that the task of the critical philosophy on knowing “how is it possible the synthetic a priori judgements?” takes to the enlargement of the faculty of judgment and the possession of objects by the intellect. Notions such as Copernican Revolution, Experience, and Space-Time are forms which cannot be seen as bare principles for knowing objects but also as elements that allow to have the world through judgments; this expresses a model of modernization as well. That was noted by the young Benjamin and the elders Adorno & Horkheimer, which, despite to have different views on Kant’s philosophy, realized its strength in a way that these principles could still be observed at the social domain in the first half of 20th century.

The Ideas of Fairness in Philosophy Grygorii Skovoroda in the Context of Western Philosophical Tradition of Interpretation of the Concept of Justice (To the 300th Anniversary of the Philosopher)

The article examines the specifics of philosophical criticism in the period of the “late” UkrSSR Western concepts of philosophy, psychology, and arts using Larysa Levchuk’s books “Art in the Struggle of Ideologies” and her “Psychoanalysis: From the Unconscious to ‘Fatigue of Consciousness’”. Annotation. The article is dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Savych Skovoroda.Each epoch has its own view of an outstanding person and their creative work, in particular when it comes to philosophical heritage. Along with the image of the philosopher evolves and understanding of his fundamental ideas and teachings. Their reading and mastering acquire consonance with the problems of the modern time, or lose relevance in it.The article examines one of the cross-cutting ideas of Skovoroda's philosophy – the idea of justice. A comparative analysis of the Ukrainian philosopher's interpretation of fairness with the Western European tradition of considering this idea for many centuries of human history has been made – from the works of the Aristotle, the biblical texts and to the contemporaries of the Ukrainian traveling philosopher, with whose works he was familiar due to the journey to Europe of the time and teaching at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.The special importance of fairness in the mentality of Ukrainians is pointed out. Special attention is paid to the concept of justice in connection with the events of the Revolution of Dignity and the war of Ukraine against the Russian fascists and the neo-totalitarian Putin regime.The conclusions state that celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda in this turbulent year in the history of modern Ukraine in 2022, particular emphasis should be placed on the Ukrainian nation's assertion of its ideas of fairness, freedom and human dignity in practice.

Filosofía de la religión como crítica breve ensayo sobre las tareas fundamentales de la filosofía de la religión

This article uses the tension between the unconditioned and the conditioned that Kant detects in the human being and that he presents in the Critique of Pure Reason in order to account for the internal dynamics of the philosophy of religion. In this sense, the work presents the way in which Kant leaves behind dogmatic metaphysics to give way to another, which is the result of the "constriction of reason". Next, the ways in which an attempt is made to condition the unconditioned are presented, both in the case of freedom, in that of thought and in that of spiritual life. The solution to the problem that Kant detects is offered in the abandonment of rational theology and the passage to the resources of critical philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism or critical theory.

Bir Devvânî Muhalifi: Ebû İshak en-Neyrîzî ve Risâle fî tahkīki hakīkati’l-ilm Adlı Eseri

This article investigates the life and works of the itinerant philosopher Abū Isḥāq al-Nayrīzī (died after 895/1489). It offers a critical edition and analysis of his Risāla fī taḥqīq ḥaqīqat al-ʿilm, which he presented to Sultan Mehmet II. Nayrīzī’s work documents his travels to acquire knowledge, which took him from Shiraz to Istanbul, Istanbul to Tabriz, and Tabriz to Karabakh between 877/1472 and 895/1489. Throughout his travels, Nayrīzī studied in the most important political and scholarly centers of his age. Nayrīzī, however, is best known for his opposition to the famous theologian and philosopher Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawwānī (d. 908/1503). The analysis of this dispute not only uncovers new information about Nayrīzī’s life, but also elucidates his scholarship. The disagreement between Nayrīzī and Dawwānī started with Dawwānī’s reply to Nayrīzī’s al-Risāla al-ḥarfiyya in Shiraz in 1472, written upon the request of Sultan Khalīl. After arriving in Istanbul from Shiraz, Nayrīzī presented at least two treatises to Sultan Mehmet II, in which he criticized famous scholars of the period, including Mollā Khusraw (d. 885/1480), Sinān Pasha (d. 891/1486), Hocazāde (d. 893/1488), Khaṭībzāde (d. 901/1495), and ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al-Fanārī (d. circa 903/1497). Nayrīzī’s second dispute with Dawwānī took place in the presence of Sultan Yaʿqūb, when Nayrīzī returned to Tabriz from Istanbul. Nayrīzī was defeated in the debate and left to Karabakh. His third dispute with Dawwānī took place over Nayrīzī’s al-Risāla al-qalamiyya, written in 1489 in Karabakh and dedicated to Sultan Bāyazīd II, which provides a personal and scholarly portrait of Dawwānī with a pen-oriented literary narrative. In response, Dawwānī portrays Nayrīzī in a similar way. In qalamiyya works, there are both bitter and sweet criticisms that go beyond philosophical critiques to include personal ones. Therefore, the double-layered literary and biographical content of the qalamiyya treatises provide new information regarding the scholarly atmosphere of the period.

Identity crisis and social dissociation in control societies

The article is devoted to the problem of the naming crisis of modern society. The sequences by which the social and cultural history of the West is ordered, represented by the evolution of economics, technology, religion, forms of capital and wealth, communications, following the technological acceleration of time, coexist with each other, compete for primacy, creating a society of atomized subjects who have ceased to understand their place in the history of society. This situation is described in the article as an identity crisis. The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the gaps that have been discovered in attempts to identify society, which are the object of criticism. The article refers to the tradition of explanatory modeling of social interactions in terms of psychopathology and psychiatry. The crisis of the identity of society is illustrated through the images of madness in modern art culture. The article hypothesizes that there is an unspoken ban on naming a society associated with the crisis of capitalism in the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies. Culture's interest in insanity serves as an indicator of a social crisis. The evolution of cultural interest in the figure of a madman from a frightening "outcast" to an attractive "rebel" is shown. The article suggests the tasks of critical philosophy that coincide with the tasks of caring for social health. The idea of the need for the deprivation of mental illness is expressed. Mental health care is considered as a social task.

Principles of V.S. Solovyov's Positive Aesthetics in I.B. Rodnyanskaya's Literary criticism

In the most complete collection of I.B. Rodnyanskaya's works, The Movement of Literature, the name of V.S. Solovyov appears more than 50 times in different contexts. The influence of the founder of philosophical criticism on the strengthening of this direction in Rodnyanskaya's works is provided both by theoretical and methodological works ("Beauty in Nature", "The General Meaning of Art", "The First Step to Positive Aesthetics", etc.) and by private literary and critical observations ("The Fate of Pushkin", "Poetry of F.I. Tyutchev", "Buddhist mood in Poetry", etc.). The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze those principles of positive aesthetics that have most influenced Rodnyanskaya's critical method. The absence of a holistic teaching about aesthetics in Solovyov did not prevent the fact that the basic principles were used by Rodnyanskaya in private literary and critical observations. The main conclusions of the study are the data that allow us to talk about the rapprochement of Rodnyanskaya and Solovyov not only at the level of methodology, but also in the aspect of the poetics of literary and critical utterance. Common to Solovyov and Rodnyanskaya should be considered the plot, which consists in solving a problem related to the sphere of spirituality or, in a narrow sense, with the study of the artist's soul. The works of representatives of the philosophical direction of criticism are distinguished by the presence of two time layers.

ڈیوڈ بیناتر کے دلائل کا فلسفیانہ جواب A Philosophical Answer to the Arguments of David Benatar

Declaring life to be the worst and consequently abandoning comforts and giving preference to non-existence over human existence is an ancient concept. The earliest traces of which were found in ancient Greek civilization. A glimpse of this concept is found in Christianity in the form of monasticism and in Buddhism in the method of attaining Nirvana. In modern times the term "Antinatalism" is used for this concept. The basic premise of this theory is that humanity must be eliminated from the world and that it is the responsibility of the people to abandon Procreation. Many contemporary Western Thinkers have tried to revive this ideology by presenting it in a modern way. One of the leading thinkers is David Benatar, who in his book “Better Never to Have Been, The Harm of Coming into Existence” presented Hedonistic Theory, Desire Fulfillment Theory, and Objective List Theory to declare worldly life worse. Also, by comparing the advantages and disadvantages of existence and non-existence, it is claimed that every human being is harmed by being created and all forms of life are worse. The purpose of this research paper is to provide a philosophical review and answer to these views. As a result of philosophical critique, this research leads to the conclusion that his arguments are flawed and weak, due to which non-existence has no superiority over human existence.

Kolakowski: How’s the Ontology of Literature? The Tragic Meaning of "Fairy Tales"

As a philosopher and thinker, Kolakowski's literary creation practice in the 1960s had a profound meaning of exploration. He hoped to achieve two goals in the Lailonia world he created: one is to show the modern alienation and the absurdity of the world in his vision, and the second is to seek the resolutions of human spiritual liberation: not only philosophical criticism but also laughter and humor are important elements of it.

Police and the public: Two scenes from theory

The article poses the task of developing a notion of police in critical philosophy or theory. This task involves grasping police beyond the concrete state apparatus, so the starting hypothesis places police in an immanent connection to the realm of the public.

Monstrosity in P. B. Shelley'sThe Triumph of Lifethrough Akkerman’sCitadel‐to‐Gardentrajectory

AbstractThrough its impossible and grotesque form, the monstrous expresses an original sense of the Dionysian philosophical critique of rationality. Challenging the epistemological authority of form, structure, and identity, the monster guides the mind toward a new understanding about the nature of things. Presenting Rousseau and the rider of the chariot of life as a deformed monster, Shelley'sThe Triumph of Lifechallenges the poet's previous identity as an alienated self and paves the way for a new understanding and a restoration of his communal self that provides the basis for the New Jerusalem as the opposite of the Tower of Babel, that is, the biblical prototype of the Citadel. Using the concept of monster and applying Abraham Akkerman's myths of the Garden and the Citadel, this article will attempt to explore the modality of the transition from the Tower of Babel (the Citadel) to the New Jerusalem (the Garden) in Shelley'sThe Triumph.

Determining and Grounding: The Twofold Function of the Transcendental Dialectic

Abstract For a long time, the transcendental dialectic was not at the center of Kant scholarship but was often treated simply as Kant’s reckoning with contemporary metaphysics. Accordingly, the main interest was in the transcendental analytic, especially the transcendental deduction. It is all the more gratifying that in recent times a rethinking seems to be taking place on this issue. In the following, I shall attempt to show why the transcendental dialectic is something more than an addendum to the core business of the Critique of Pure Reason. Rather, it forms the culmination of the work, demanding our full attention. Indeed, it provides the key to the entire critical philosophy by exhibiting reason itself as the ultimate founding principle in the form of its Idea.

Kant on Reason as the Capacity for Comprehension

ABSTRACT This essay develops an interpretation of Kant’s conception of the faculty of reason as the capacity for what he calls ‘comprehension’ (Begreifen). In doing so, it first discusses Kant's characterizations of reason in relation to what he describes as the two highest grades of cognition—insight and comprehension. Then it discusses how the resulting conception of reason relates to more familiar characterizations as the faculty for inference and the faculty of principles. In doing so, it focuses on how the idea of reason as aiming at comprehension expresses the modesty about reason that is essential to Kant’s critical philosophy. It concludes by showing how this grounds an elegant account of the unity of theoretical and practical reason—one that does justice both to the ‘primacy’ that Kant assigns to practical reason and the fact that this ‘primacy’ is grounded in a more basic unity.