Dogmatic Metaphysics Research Articles

The Dissatisfied Skeptic in Kant’s Discipline of Pure Reason

Abstract Why does Kant say that a “skeptical satisfaction of pure reason” is “impossible” (A758/B786)? I answer this question by giving a reading of “The Discipline of Pure Reason in Respect of Its Polemic Employment.” I explain that Kant must address skepticism in this context because his warning against developing counterarguments to dogmatic attacks encourages a comparison between the critical and the skeptical methods. I then argue that skepticism fails to “satisfy” [befriedigen] reason insofar as it cannot “pacify” reason’s tendency to go beyond its own boundaries. The skeptical method reveals the past failures of dogmatic metaphysics but cannot rule out future successes. Only critical knowledge of reason’s proper bounds can do this, thereby pacifying our restless reason. I close by arguing that Kant’s discussion implies that a skeptic must feel dissatisfied with her renunciation of metaphysics, and that this dissatisfaction can lead her to take interest in Kant’s critical philosophy.

Magnifying Lacan’s “Mirror Image” (1949) to Develop the Undeveloped Notion of ‘Being-Towards-Birth’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927)

This essay will attempt a line-by-line reading of Lacan’s famous “The Mirror Image as Formative I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949) published in the collected volume of essays, Ecrits (1966). The article attempts to show that Lacan’s essay opens a space of primordiality, whereby we can revisit Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity and the Cogito, terms that originate with Descartes and evolves to Kant’s Critiques of dogmatic metaphysics, particularly in Heidegger’s Being and Time. These are steps Heidegger takes to set up his attempted critique of Hegel, who in turn tries to surpass the history of philosophy rooted in modern subjectivity, particularly in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). However, missing in Lacan’s essay and what remains unarticulated in Heidegger’s Being and Time is the following: relation between time, movement, and the space of primordiality where all notions of factical existence dissolve. Being born in time, developing in time, being in or at time, and being-towards-death, as Heidegger struggles to deconstruct – by way of his unique appropriation of phenomenology in Being and Time – can be questioned. Indeed, what Heidegger fails to develop, and he admits it explicitly, is the other side of his ‘one-sided’ treatment in the investigation: he only analyzed death as a possibility of Dasein’s greatest possibility to ‘be-Whole’ authentically (1962, 277) and completely neglected ‘being-towards-birth’ as the ‘other end’ of Dasein’s movement (1962, 425). We will argue that one is never born as a biological fact of existence, a social construction assigned at physical birth, like a gender or sex, or any religious notions of a created being from God the Creator, or any notions of rebirth, reincarnation, or resurrection, namely from religions in the West, like Roman Catholic Christianity, and the East, like Hinduism. Rather, ‘being-towards-birth’ in relation to the linear time of flowing now-points (past as no longer now, present as now, future as yet to be now), or ‘being-within-time,’ (Heidegger 1962, 457) is temporalized other than a dateable origin in spatialized time or history.

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.

Realität als vermeintliche Grenze der Erkenntnis: Hegels Metaphysik im Anschluss an und in Abgrenzung zu Kant

While Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason aims to 'humiliate' reason by declining any possibility of knowledge of things 'in themselves', he does conceive such critique as 'the necessary preparation for a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics'. In this paper I examine in what sense Hegel's Science of Logic goes beyond that Kantian view without neither relapsing back into dogmatic metaphysics nor turning into a mere pragmatism. I argue that reality in itself is ontologically deficient so that it is already reality itself (and not just the categories of understanding) that makes true knowledge of real things impossible. Nonetheless I contend that there is something in Hegel's Science of Logic that is truly absolute and turns Logic into 'a thoroughly scientific system of metaphysics', namely what Hegel calls the Concept or the Absolute Idea. Furthermore I point out the concrete importance of these metaphysical claims for human theoretical and practical knowledge. This finally provides a new reading of Hegel's Logic as a de-ontologised Aristotelian metaphysics that not just claims to regulate empirical knowledge in a Kantian manner, but to also conceptually constitute reality 'in itself'.

Kant’s Response to Hume’s Critique of Pure Reason

Abstract In this article I argue that Kant considered Hume’s account of causality in the Enquiry to be primarily relevant because it undermines proofs for the existence of God and, moreover, that this interpretation is plausible and text-based. What the Prolegomena calls ‘Hume’s problem’ is, I claim, the more general question as to whether metaphysics can achieve synthetic a priori knowledge of objects at all. Whereas Hume denied this possibility, I show how the solution Kant develops in the Critique of Pure Reason is in agreement with Hume’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics, but salvages the synthetic a priori principles he takes to be constitutive of empirical cognition.

Methodological naturalism in the sciences

Creationists have long argued that evolutionary science is committed to a dogmatic metaphysics of naturalism and materialism, which is based on faith or ideology rather than evidence. The standard response to this has been to insist that science is not committed to any such metaphysical doctrine, but only to a methodological version of naturalism, according to which science may only appeal to natural entities and processes. But this whole debate presupposes that there is a clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and thus that naturalism is a meaningful doctrine. I argue that this assumption is false. The concepts of the natural and the supernatural are in fact hopelessly obscure, such that the claim that science is committed to methodological naturalism cannot be made good. This is no victory for anti-naturalists however; explicitly supernaturalist theories, such as Creationism, can be ruled out of scientific consideration as a priori incoherent, given that they presuppose for their intelligibility that there is a meaningful natural-supernatural distinction. This is not the case for standard scientific theories however, as they are not explicitly naturalistic theories; they do not postulate natural or physical entities or processes as such.

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice by Terry Pinkard

Reviewed by: Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice by Terry Pinkard Paul Redding Terry Pinkard. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. x + 272. Cloth, $49.95. Terry Pinkard has been a leading figure within the revival of Hegelian philosophy over the last quarter century, together with Robert Pippin articulating an innovative and influential interpretation of Hegel as the rightful successor to Kant’s distinctly modern critique of “dogmatic metaphysics.” In Does History Make Sense?, he attempts the challenging task of rescuing Hegel’s philosophy of history, drawing on his earlier account (in Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, 2012) of Hegel as a kind of “modified Aristotelian naturalist,” here sketched in chapter 1. Given that the picture of Hegel as an Aristotelian “conceptual realist” has been popular with critics of the post-Kantian interpretation, one might see this as representing a move away from the “post-Kantian” reading, but this would be a mistake. Hegel’s project is here unambiguously described as “a direct descendent of Kant’s Critiques and, more especially, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre” (5). In chapters 3 and 4, Pinkard, with characteristic lucidity and economy, sketches the trajectory of Hegel’s philosophical account of history from the Greeks to the modern world, and in the enclosing chapters 2 and 5, makes a more systematic case for the underlying coherence of this project. The many failings of Hegel’s execution of the project—his dismissive accounts of non-European civilizations as absorbed in nature in a childlike way, and his uncritical acceptance of Tacitus’s mythical account of the descent of modern northern Europeans from the freedom-loving “Germanen,” for example—are emphasized. Nevertheless, Pinkard is able to build a strong case for the plausibility of the underlying features of Hegel’s account—the strongest of any I have encountered. In order to appreciate the defensible infrastructure of Hegel’s philosophy of history, we are referred to his, surely equally controversial, Science of Logic. Many might suspect this as providing the least promising way forward, but Pinkard treats such pessimism as premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of that work. Hegel is not trying to underpin claims for the necessity of particular historical events with some dubious appeal to logical necessity; rather, Hegel’s Logic provides the fullest account of his metaphysics of subjectivity and self-consciousness—that peculiar “self-relation” that distinguishes us from other primates found in nature. Thus Hegel develops the idea of animal life, both human and non-human, in which actions have reasons, and not merely causes, but especially that of a particular form [End Page 378] of such life, limited to humans, in which agents are able to act on those reasons. And not only do humans, capable of such reflectivity, attempt to make sense of their world, they attempt, reflectively, to make sense of their activity of making sense. Pinkard’s “naturalistic” take on human subjectivity draws on elements of Wilfrid Sellars’s grounding of human rationality in the fact of human locatedness within normative language-games of “giving and asking for reasons.” While all primates move in space, the “self-conscious primate” is a kind of “amphibious” being “that moves in logical space” as well (14). This in turn is linked to the peculiar temporality of human subjectivity, Pinkard seeming to exploit parallels between modal and temporal concepts as found in Aristotle and other ancients. Humans can actualize possibilities in their self-conscious acts, but only on the basis of limiting conditions inherited from the past. The idea of reflection on the conditions of subjectivity is Kantian, but rather than being a priori available, for Hegel such reflection is always limited by actual finite, institutionalized forms of life and culture inherited in history, and is typically precipitated by the threat of their unraveling. Thus, while somewhat like Herder, he treats particular life-forms as manifesting “concrete constellations of passions, principles and practices that fit into one order” (40), for Hegel the relations between the principles themselves and the practices actualizing them are riven with “contradictions.” In the ancient polis, for example...

Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature by Karin Schutjer

Reviewed by: Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature by Karin Schutjer Jonathan M. Hess Karin Schutjer. Goethe and Judaism: The Troubled Inheritance of Modern Literature. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 264 pp. Schutjer's monograph tackles a topic that has been a subject of debate for more than a century and puts forth a powerful, original, and sophisticated argument grounded in both careful, conscientious close readings of texts by Goethe [End Page 293] and a deep sense of historical context. Over the decades, numerous scholars have cataloged, categorized, and studied Goethe's various statements on Jews and Judaism, typically evaluating them in biographical terms to argue whether Goethe was anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic. Schutjer certainly integrates biographical approaches into her study, but she steers clear of the pitfalls of linking Goethe to later forms of anti- and philo-Semitism or studying Goethe in the shadow of the Holocaust. Indeed, her study is the antithesis of the sort of scholarship that cherry-picks statements to make a polemical case about Goethe's relation to Jews and Judaism. Schutjer studies the dynamic and systematic role that reflections on Judaism played in both Goethe's worldview and his massive literary oeuvre, laying bare the central role that Goethe's ideas about Judaism played in his work as a whole. Rather than simply indicting Goethe for his anti-Jewish views (he was, among other things, a clear opponent of Jewish emancipation) or seeking to acquit him of prejudice by stressing his long-standing interests in the Hebrew Bible, Schutjer explores how Goethe's conception of the modern world was inextricable from his conception of Judaism. The contradictory elements in his comments on Jews and Judaism, in other words, are certainly important in their own right, but they also shed light on major tensions in Goethe's own thinking more generally. Goethe finds in Judaism—or, rather, as Schutjer demonstrates, his own, at times idiosyncratic, understanding of Judaism—an attractive, distinctly modern posture toward the world that he deems more attractive than that of Christianity. Yet Goethe also engages in a struggle with Judaism precisely because he finds so much affinity with it, casting Judaism as an object of competition, a force that must be cleared from the playing field to make way for his own, Goethean vision of modernity. Approaching Goethe in this way, Schutjer is able to make sense of Goethe's pro-Jewish tendencies as well as the elements in his oeuvre that seem anti-Semitic, making clear how Goethe could oppose political emancipation for his Jewish contemporaries at the same time as he celebrated Judaism—particularly the Hebrew Bible—for a type of freedom and heterodoxy he contrasted with Christianity. Goethe found himself attracted to the Jewish ban on images for its opposition to dogmatic metaphysics; he discovered in the Hebrew scriptures a type of diasporic nationhood and peoplehood linked to a book rather than a state that he deemed particularly relevant for modern Germany; and perhaps more than anything else, he was fascinated by Judaism's activism and striving focused on the immanent, historical world. In this context, Schutjer does not just concern herself with Goethe's worldview. Her analysis cuts to the heart of Goethe's literary work, showing how all these elements of his fascination with Judaism come together in the topos of "wandering." Through exemplary discussions of major and minor works by Goethe, Schutjer demonstrates that Goethe's encounter with the Hebrew Bible, from his youth on, decisively shaped not just the topos of wandering but his entire literary program. This is a new and bold argument, and it is one that Schutjer formulates with eloquence and elegance. Her work is extremely well grounded in Goethe scholarship, as one would expect. It also draws on a deep familiarity with scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and biblical criticism as well as the text of the Bible itself. When Schutjer argues, for instance, that the peculiar form and texture of the Hebrew Bible, and Genesis in particular, provided an ongoing source of fascination and inspiration for Goethe's experimental literary style, she makes this claim with a deep literary appreciation of Goethe's work...

The Principle of Sufficient Reason, the Ontological Argument and the Is/Ought Distinction

AbstractKant's attack on metaphysics consists in large part in his attack on a principle that he names the Supreme Principle of Pure Reason. This principle, it is not often noticed, is the Principle of Sufficient Reason [PSR]. In interpreting this principle as such, I argue that Kant's attack on the PSR (and thereby his attack on dogmatic metaphysics as a whole) depends on Kant's claim that existence is not a first‐order predicate. If existence isn't what Kant calls a real predicate, the PSR is false. While this constitutes a powerful Kantian argument against dogmatic rationalism, it also poses a problem for Kant. For, as I argue, if the PSR is true, Kant's argument that existence isn't a first‐order predicate is false. In this sense, Kant's attack on the PSR is begging the question vis‐á‐vis radical metaphysicians (e.g. Spinoza). Concluding the paper I suggest relying on Kant's 'is'/'ought' distinction in avoiding this circularity, thereby reinforcing the Kantian critique.

Ontology, metaphysics and criticism as Transcendental Semantics as of Kant

The aim of this paper is to present the core of Kant´s critique of traditional metaphysics and ontology as a transcendental semantics that allows reformulating the problem about the objects and their reality. In order to achieve this purpose, we propound a paper divided in two parts: 1. A brief justification of Kant’s semantics interpretation; 2. A work program based on a semantics comprehended as a fundamental part of a method of resolution of philosophical problems. Basically, we can state that the critical position against traditional metaphysics and ontology leads to the question upon: how are a priori synthetic judgments possible? This question leads to its conditions of possibility, that is: sensible representations; intellectual representations; syntactic rules; semantic rules (or referential rules, on the relation between intellectual representations and some sort of sensibility or affection); the operator of the syntactic and semantic rules (subject, man, human nature, gender, people etc.). This is what we call the core of Kant’s critique and with which we may begin to solve philosophical problems even beyond those presented by our philosopher. As such, we are briefly going to observe the following steps: 1. From metaphysics in its various senses to the ontology of sensible objects; 2. A critique of pure reason against dogmatic metaphysics; 3. Criticism as semantics; 4. The semantic project and the kinds of judgments; 5. Human nature and the theory of judgment; 6. The work program within Kant’s own work; 7. Subsequent results of Kant’s project

Sacrificium Intellectus, або Обличчя сучасного догматизму

The paper argues against Orthodox dogmatic metaphysics of Vladimir Demyanov, а Kiev philosopher. The author offers a view on V. Demyanov’s place in Russian-speaking tradition of religious philosophy. Based on the analysis of V. Demyanov’s paper “Ideas to Orthodox Dogmatic Metaphysics” (2010–2011), he concludes that the tradition has met its end. The fact is presented as the ironic and contradictory V. Demyanov’s return to the Orthodox dogmatism, which Russian-language religious philosophy was trying to overcome. The author gives a detailed refutation of V. Demyanov’s arguments, such as inevitable confessional division of philosophical theories, the falsity of the Western “discursive” philosophy, the normativity of paternalism.

Kant and Milton (review)

Reviewed by: Kant and Milton Gordon Teskey Sanford Budick , Kant and Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Pp. 330. $51.50. This book might be a great idea. One wonders why no one before has thought to do a comparative study of Milton and Kant, especially when Milton—or rather the idea of Milton—seems to be behind much of what Kant has to say in the Third Critique, The Critique of Judgment, and elsewhere (for example, in the Anthropology) about poetic genius, and the sublime. Poetical art is the sensuous representation of "something lying beyond the bounds of experience" ["etwas über die Erfahrungsgrenze hinaus liegenden"]. In poetry, the imagination uses sensuous experience to create a world more unified than our ordinary experience can ever be. That certainly is Miltonic. Milton shows us heaven, hell, and eternity (things Kant actually names as "poetic"), which lie beyond our experience; you feel yourself in Heaven and you feel yourself in Hell—and you feel yourself on earth, a very different, satisfying earth. But Kant also says the imagination imitates reason by extending toward the infinite. As Sanford Budick reminds us, citing J. H. Tisch, "sublime" and "Miltonic" had become practically interchangeable in Germany in the later eighteenth century, when English aesthetic thought was at its highpoint of influence there (18). Byron is repeating a longstanding commonplace when he says that the word "Miltonic" now means "sublime." It was Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, who gave the fullest development of the idea of the sublime, a concept known to Milton through Longinus's Peri Hypsous. The sublime was the recurring theme of eighteenth-century aesthetics before Kant. Kant's aesthetics is not the only reason to compare him with Milton. The central problem of Kant's philosophy is the securing of real human freedom and moral uprightness ("pure reason") while abandoning the false freedom of dogmatic metaphysics, and the pseudomorals and pseudoaesthetics that follow from such dogmatism. (Like all great philosophers, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, Kant is easy to summarize but exceedingly demanding at the level of reading.) Freedom and Reason are central to Milton's poetry and they are central to Kant. Moreover, Milton sees freedom as related to moral choice—to be truly free is to choose what is right—and Kant's categorical imperative—act as if your action were what you would will as a universal law—is a philosophical refinement of this idea. Milton himself would accept the categorical imperative, once he had freed himself of his regressive attachment to dogmatic trust in the Bible. But, of course, he didn't. Milton was not a man of the Enlightenment like Kant, who was the genius of Enlightenment. Let us go a little farther before reining in this somewhat naively comparative line of thought, in which differences like the Bible don't count. It seems to me the broad subjects of Kant's three critiques—the critique of pure reason, the critique of moral judgment, and the critique of aesthetic judgments—give us the main points of concern in Milton's epics, and in the same order of development. What is human reason and what are its limits? How is moral judgment performed in relation to reason? And how do judgments of taste—aesthetic judgments—reflect back upon reason and morals, unifying them, even as they extend beyond the boundaries of experience? These three questions align with the important moments in Milton's epics. First, in Paradise Lost, Adam and Raphael discuss the limits and the powers [End Page 315] of reason. They do so in the one passage of Milton of which Kant has some faint awareness, though it is inaccurate, as we shall see, and evidently at second hand. Second, the tragic separation of moral judgment from reason is the subject of Book Nine of Paradise Lost. Third, Christ's victory over Satan, in Paradise Regained, is accomplished by superior aesthetic judgment. It is a judgment of taste, prepared for by (of all things) a comparison of the merits of Pindar on the one hand (to name only one of the Greek lyric poets alluded to) and of the Hebrew Psalms on the other...

A Educação Ambiental frente aos desafios apresentados pelos discursos contemporâneos sobre a natureza

A noção de natureza tem tido papel importante na filosofia e também na Educação Ambiental. Filósofos contemporâneos como Gianni Vattimo e Newton Aquiles von Zuben afirmam que uma noção única de natureza contribuiu para a difusão da metafísica dogmática, que por sua vez, solidificou totalitarismos políticos e religiosos. A Educação Ambiental latino-americana tem constituído um campo teórico e espaço público privilegiado para a difusão de noções de natureza, não dogmáticas, nem totalitárias, em estreitas relações com a diversidade cultural e social. Num primeiro momento da Educação Ambiental a noção de natureza estava relacionada aos recursos naturais. Desde que temas específicos relacionados com os discursos contemporâneos sobre a natureza, como a biodiversidade e os transgênicos ganharam o espaço público, argumentamos que a Educação Ambiental se viu diante de novos desafios teóricos, políticos, ecológicos, sociais, culturais e pedagógicos. Neste artigo procuramos identificar e analisar alguns desses desafios tendo como apoio teórico o pensamento do filósofo italiano Gianni Vattimo e do filósofo brasileiro Newton Aquiles von Zuben, nos aspectos relacionados à bioética e ao papel político da educação, na formação de cidadãos e cidadãs. Concluímos que a abordagem dos discursos contemporâneos sobre a natureza possibilita que o diálogo entre a Educação Ambiental e a bioética tende a se ampliar e a se concretizar em práticas sociais e pedagógicas cotidianas, apresentando-se, assim, como alternativa concreta para que cidadãos e cidadãs possam enfrentar os desafios trazidos com a biodiversidade e com os transgênicos, com argumentos científicos, éticos e políticos.

Who’s Who from Kant to Hegel I: In the Kantian Wake

AbstractWhile almost all of Kant’s contemporaries agreed that the Critique of Pure Reason effected a philosophically epochal change, there was far less consensus about what precisely Kant’s new critical philosophy had brought about. In large part, this uncertainty was a result of a methodological crisis that Kant’s work had sparked: the Critique had shown that traditional dogmatic metaphysics was suspect at best, but what new methods needed to be adopted in the wake of Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’? The Critique stood as the lighting rod at the center of a complicated and especially lively set of debates and disputes that erupted in Germany in the late 1780s and early 1790s: empiricists and rationalists, threatened by the ‘all‐destroying Kant’, leapt to challenge the new critical system; skeptics attacked Kant’s claims to have secured a sure footing for empirical knowledge; a few ambitious thinkers sought to complete the critical system by revealing a foundational first principle on which Kant’s system could rest. All of these elements conspired to make the early stages in post‐Kantian thought one of the richest, most vibrant – and most fascinating – periods in the history of philosophy. The present essay looks at the various figures of the move from Kant to Fichte, and presents some of the excellent new research on the era that has appeared in the last decade or so. The sequel takes up the period from Fichte to Hegel, with an eye toward understanding how Kantian critical philosophy gave way to Hegelian Absolute Idealism.

A Manifesto for Instructional Technology: Hyperpedagogy

We believe hypertext and hypermedia solidify bold and original ideas having the power to open new realms of creative possibility. Unfortunately, we find the new tools encrusted within concepts borrowed from traditional curriculum theory and instructional design. Our goal in this paper is to liberate hypertext; doing so requires challenging Western metaphysics. We rely on the philosophy of John Dewey to disclose this metaphysics and propose an alternative. The paper reviews dominant models of curriculum, especially Ralph Tyler's, revealing their concealed metaphysical assumptions. Our efforts are greatly aided by Herbert M. Kliebard's critique of the Tyler rationale, exposing the fact that, in spite of its inflated claims, all there is to Tyler's rationale is “the philosophical screen.” That is also all we think there is to all the dominant models of curriculum. We show that the philosophical screen is largely comprised of a concealed metaphysics before concluding by showing how hypertext and hypermedia, freed of dogmatic metaphysics, may yield what we call hyperpedagogy, based upon theories of emergent pedagogy and transactional metaphysics.

A Manifesto for Instructional Technology: Hyperpedagogy

We believe hypertext and hypermedia solidify bold and original ideas having the power to open new realms of creative possibility. Unfortunately, we find the new tools encrusted within concepts borrowed from traditional curriculum theory and instructional design. Our goal in this paper is to liberate hypertext; doing so requires challenging Western metaphysics. We rely on the philosophy of John Dewey to disclose this metaphysics and propose an alternative. The paper reviews dominant models of curriculum, especially Ralph Tyler's, revealing their concealed metaphysical assumptions. Our efforts are greatly aided by Herbert M. Kliebard's critique of the Tyler rationale, exposing the fact that, in spite of its inflated claims, all there is to Tyler's rationale is “the philosophical screen.” That is also all we think there is to all the dominant models of curriculum. We show that the philosophical screen is largely comprised of a concealed metaphysics before concluding by showing how hypertext and hypermedia, freed of dogmatic metaphysics, may yield what we call hyperpedagogy, based upon theories of emergent pedagogy and transactional metaphysics.

Thesen zum homo rhetoricus und zur Neugestaltung der Philosophie im 21. Jahrhundert

The following thirteen theses expose the anthropology of the homo rhetoricus and attempt to outline a new design of philosophy for the 21st century: I. Man is a rhetorical being. - II. The general power of speech exists as a fundamental and universal phenomenon in human life world and is the necessary foundation of all artificial rhetoric. - III. Man as homo rhetoricus is the main object of a fundamental, rhetorical anthropology. - IV. The categories of classical rhetoric have a heuristic function with respect to the anthropology of the homo rhetoricus. - V. The five basic faculties of invention, disposition, elocution, memory and performance form a heuristic pattern for a fundamental, rhetorical conception of spirit (Geist). - VI. The (post-)modern existence of homo rhetoricus is dominated by the figure of irony. - VII. Ironic alterity also designates the culture in the beginning of the 21st century. - VIII. The danger of an unlimited postmodern irony consists of an infinite ironical regress. - IX. Philosophy in general is also a creation of the homo rhetoricus. - X. The rhetorical metacritique of philosophy is directed against classical metaphysics as well as against its antagonist - postmodern deconstruction . - XI. Both - the supposed evidence of dogmatic metaphysics and the neosophistical evidence of non-evidence are contingent. - XII. The rhetorical enlightenment does not aim at a pure postmodern deconstruction of philosophy but consequently reaches forward to its fundamental, rhetorical reconstruction. - XIII. A rhetorically well-informed and enlightened metaphysics represents a new and positive mode of existence of the homo rhetoricus.

Postmodernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche

I focus on Nietzsche's architectural metaphor of self‐construction in arguing for the claim that postmodern readings of Nietzsche misunderstand his various attacks on dogmatic philosophy as paving the way for acceptance of a self characterized by fundamental disunity. Nietzsche's attack on essentialist dogmatic metaphysics is a call to engage in a purposive self‐creation under a unifying will, a will that possesses the strength to reinterpret history as a pathway to “the problem that we are”. Nietzsche agrees with the postmodernists that unity is not a pre‐given, however he would disavow their rejection of unity as a goal. Where the postmodernists celebrate “the death of the subject” Nietzsche rejects this valorization of disunity as a form of Nihilism and prescribes the creation of a genuine unified subjectivity to those few capable of such a goal. Postmodernists are nearer Nietzsche's idea of the Last Man than his idea of the Overman.I define postmodernism as incredulity towards meta‐narratives.Jean‐François Lyotard. The Postmodern Condition.When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it.Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.”

Postmodernism's Use and Abuse of Nietzsche

I focus on Nietzsche's architectural metaphor of self-construction in arguing for claim that postmodern readings of Nietzsche misunderstand his various attacks on dogmatic philosophy as paving way for acceptance of a self characterized by fundamental disunity. Nietzsche's attack on essentialist dogmatic metaphysics is a call to engage in a purposive self-creation under a unifying will, a will that possesses strength to reinterpret history as a pathway to the problem that we are. Nietzsche agrees with postmodernists that unity is not a pre-given, however he would disavow their rejection of unity as a goal. Where postmodernists celebrate the death of subject Nietzsche rejects this valorization of disunity as a form of Nihilism and prescribes creation of a genuine unified subjectivity to those few capable of such a goal. Postmodernists are nearer Nietzsche's idea of Last Man than his idea of Overman.Article