Dogmatic Slumber Research Articles

Nietzsche's Last Will

Nietzsche's Last Will

From dogmatic slumber to rationalist nightmares: Kant among the dreamers of reason

AbstractWhat awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber? On the traditional narrative, he was awakened by Hume's challenge to our cognition of causal connections. A more recent narrative claims that he was awakened by Hume's challenge to our cognition of non‐logical connections more generally. In this paper, I argue that a key part of Kant's awakening was far wider‐reaching: he came to realize that all dogmas must be abandoned. An oft‐overlooked technical notion, dogmas are non‐logical principles cognizable to unaided human reason. I detail how Kant repudiated dogmas by the mid‐1760's in engaging with his German predecessor, Christian Crusius. This repudiation lays the foundation for his critical project. For once liberated of dogmas, reason must look beyond itself for the principles that would enable rational cognitionof non‐logical connections.

On the Synthesis of Pure Sensibility and Pure Rationality in Immanuel Kant’s Epistemology

Hume's skepticism, more particularly his technical distinction between a priori and a posteriori propositions or statements, awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber, and provided a basis for treating the question of whether, and how metaphysics is possible. Kant said that it was the influence of David Hume (awakening from the dogmatic slumber), which had turned his mind to the new fields of speculative philosophy. One can identify two possible versions of Humean influence on Kant. The first is connected with the conception of the “skeptical method”, to which Kant adhered since about 1765, and the second is the true awakening which took place in the summer of 1771.1 In acknowledging the profound influence of Hume in his speculative philosophy, Kant asserts: I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction. I was far from following him in the conclusions at which he arrived by regarding, not the whole of his problem, but a part, which by itself can give us no information. If we start from a well-founded, but undeveloped, thought, which another has bequeathed to us, we may well hope by continued reflection to advance farther than the acute man, to whom we owe the first spark of light. I therefore first tried whether Hume's objection could not be put into a general form, and soon found that the concept of the connection of cause and effect was by no means the only idea by which the understanding thinks the connection of things a priori, but rather that metaphysics consists altogether of such connections. But as soon as I had succeeded in solving Hume's problem not merely in a particular case, but with respect to the whole faculty of pure reason, I could proceed safely, though slowly, to determine the whole sphere of pure reason completely and from general principles, in its circumference as well as in its contents. This was req This paper sets out to discuss the nature and relevance of Kant’s synthesis between sensibility and understanding, in relation to his introduction of the synthetic a priori judgment, in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber by Abraham Anderson

Reviewed by: Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber by Abraham Anderson David Landy Abraham Anderson. Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. xxii + 180. Cloth, $74.00. Abraham Anderson’s Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumbers is a book with an ambitious, although well-circumscribed, goal—to settle once and for all what precisely it is in Hume that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers—and an audacious conclusion—that both Hume and Kant are concerned primarily, if not exclusively, with rational theology. Unfortunately, at least to my mind, the methods that Anderson chooses to pursue this end and establish this conclusion prevent him from achieving either. Most strikingly, despite much of the book being dedicated to defending his interpretation of Hume, Anderson does very little to engage with Hume scholarship, especially that which opposes his interpretation, and his engagement with Kant scholarship is similarly selective. He does include a preface that canvasses the extant literature on his main topic, but his engaging with that literature all at once makes his treatment of individual questions too brief to be satisfying. Anderson’s articulation of his own heterodox interpretation of these two philosophers is admirably clear, so the omission of a robust engagement with other scholars is all the more disappointing. That said, Anderson’s focus is more on working out the details of his own interpretation than it is on convincing his reader of its truth, so a merely curious reader should find the exercise valuable nonetheless. The crux of Anderson’s view is that “Hume interrupted Kant’s dogmatic slumber by challenging not the causal principle governing experience—the principle that every event has a cause—but the causal principle extending beyond experience, which was supposed to be known by reason” (xi). Anderson holds that Hume and Kant agree that every event has a cause but also share the conviction that this principle can only be applied legitimately to experience. Anderson takes little note of the fact that whether Hume accepts any such principle, and what he means by it if he does, is a matter of controversy among Hume scholars, or that even if he does accept it, he almost certainly means something different by it than does Kant. Furthermore, Anderson also attributes to Hume Kant’s claim that to apply the causal principle beyond experience would require reasoning via concepts alone, which is an illegitimate use of such concepts (xiv). Finally, Anderson argues that establishing this conclusion, and thereby undermining the possibility of rational theology, is the primary aim of both Hume’s and Kant’s philosophical work (for Hume, see 134; for Kant, see 70). Anderson admits that neither philosopher was explicit that this is their primary aim but finds speculative evidence lurking for this interpretation nonetheless: “To defend a reading of the sort I have proposed, I must insist that Hume had his reasons for not being absolutely explicit about his aims. To attack theology openly was to invite a harsh response, as the ‘Specimen’ shows” (134); “Kant is not fully explicit about the antitheological implications of Hume’s question, perhaps because he wishes to avoid supporting the theological attack on Hume mounted by Priestley and the Scots” (83). [End Page 167] Perhaps Hume and Kant are not explicit about the main aims of their philosophical systems for these reasons, but perhaps these are simply not the main aims of those systems at all. Many of Anderson’s most important claims are similarly speculative, supported by a selective presentation of texts and an even more selective consideration of secondary literature. (E.g. Anderson makes extensive use of Kemp Smith as a foil, despite the advancements in scholarship on Hume and Kant in the near century since Kemp Smith’s books were first published.) There are also significant exegetical omissions. For example, although many scholars do expect to find Kant’s response to Hume in the Second Analogy, which Anderson does discuss, Kant is explicit that his answer to Hume generalizes from just the concept of cause to all pure a priori concepts. He thus also points to the Transcendental Deduction as the place...

Introduction: On Learning, Freedom, and Democracy

Introduction: On Learning, Freedom, and Democracy

Hume’s and Kant’s understanding of epistemic normativity

Question (d) how do we form beliefs?, implies descriptive answers. On the other hand, the question (n) how should we form beliefs?, implies normative answers. Can we provide answers to (n) questions without answering (d) questions? This (n) - (d) relation can be characterized as epistemic normativity. Hume and Kant provide answers to both questions. Hume is more inclined to psychologize these answers through an empirical approach to questions related to beliefs. While Kant is more inclined to consider a priori conditions of our reasoning. Through general rules and epistemic maxims, Hume and Kant provide normative guidelines in accordance which we should form beliefs. However, in order to be able to talk about normativity, at all, we need to answer questions related to doxastic voluntarism. For Kant, the question of freedom is, to some extent, an obvious precondition for his critiques (especially of the practical mind). While with Hume, precisely because of his empirical approach to beliefs and desires, the matter is more obscure, and it seems as if Hume advocates doxastic involuntarism. In this paper, I will try to present the similarities between Hume and Kant in terms of epistemic normativity. Where it seems as if their views are incompatible, I will try to examine why this is the case. I will focus on Hume?s Treatise of Human Nature and Kant?s Second Analogy. In the end, I will present a couple of thought experiments and try to ?test? Hume and Kant. If I manage to confirm the initial hypotheses, then this paper will be a successful epistemic endeavor. However, if I fail to find the expected similarities between Hume?s and Kant?s understanding of epistemic normativity, then this work can be characterized as a historical approach to the normative framework of ?dogmatic slumber?.

Кант і «пробудження» від раціоналістичного принципу достатньої підстави

The paper inspects Anderson’s central thesis that Kant’s dogmatic slumber was interrupted by Hume’s critique of metaphysics (rational theology) in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, namely, by his critique of the rationalist principle of sufficient reason, which lies at the heart of dogmatic proofs of God’s existence. I recreate the meaning of “Hume’s objection,” define the larger role the principle of sufficient reason plays in Kant’s philosophy, and evaluate the explanatory potential of Anderson’s interpretation in view of Kant’s early and critical texts, as well as his other autobiographical statements (such as his famous letter to Garve). Although Anderson’s hypothesis seems well-founded and even explicates the hidden connection between the entire critical project and the refutation of Spinozism, I argue it is almost impossible to reconcile it with the current research in Kant’s Entwicklungsgeschichte.

The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly

The Anomaly of Anomaly of Anomaly

Non-Wakefulness: On the Parallax between Dreaming and Awakening

Non-wakefulness proves to be a basic condition of experience, since human beings, living in webs of supernumerary information processes, can only build social relations through unacknowledged forms of passive or “interpassive” (Pfaller) structures of transference due to limited forms of being non-awake toward the properties of all kinds of things. This can cause multiple conflicts both for the individual human being reaching out to facts, as well as for political communities where one sees another as blinded by some kind of “dogmatic slumber”. The article tries to show how the concept non-wakefulness explains in what way mental states are – individually as well as collectively – in relation with objects that are necessarily “withdrawn” (Harman) from us as presented especially in contemporary debates on Speculative Realism. Furthermore, the text develops an understanding of waking-up as the latter marks the moment when a mental state of epistemic deficiency is temporarily left behind. Reality exists only insofar as it is smoothed out via unconscious structures of non-wakefulness, while in dreams objects may unconceal themselves for a short period of time when ‘secondary process’ functions (Freud) of our judgmental capacities are dropped.

Revolutionary Sensibility, Embodied Poetics

Revolutionary Sensibility, Embodied Poetics Alan Richardson (bio) The invitation for the symposium in honor of jerome j. mcgann that this special issue represents came as something of a surprise. I had never had the chance to study with, teach with, or collaborate with McGann although, of course, like most professional scholars of Romanticism, I have gained immeasurably from his work over the years. So I chose to frame my own contribution as one that might speak for the indebtedness of a whole generation of scholars, in recording something of my own particular debts to McGann’s significant body of work. I ask for the reader’s indulgence, then, if I need to say a little about myself, in order to make the magnitude of those debts clear. Not, sadly, the full magnitude: we were also asked to structure our symposium presentations around one of McGann’s works in particular and my choice, The Poetics of Sensibility, should be obvious from my essay title. If I could write at greater length, I would want to say much more about the importance to me in my formation as a Romanticist of McGann’s innovative and widely influential work of the period 1979 to 1985—the very years I was in graduate school, although I did not really begin to absorb this work till a year or two later. Not to mention all that I (and my peers) have gained over the years from McGann’s magnificent Byron edition (which came out during that same period), I am thinking especially of the essays gathered together in his 1985 collection, The Beauty of Inflections, and, of course, of The Romantic Ideology, which appeared in 1983.1 For fledgling Romanticists as I was at that time, The Romantic Ideology hit us like so much ice-cold water flung in our faces, abruptly waking us from our dogmatic slumbers. My slumbers, perhaps, deeper than most, as I had spent my graduate years at the feet of the Old Historicists at Harvard—which at that time was a country for old men. Let me clarify that studying with that doughty, that dying generation of scholars would later prove to give me real advantages in my own early and mid-career as a New Historicist. For their grasp of historicism, as they construed it and transmitted it, was capacious, subtle, and meticulous. But as to the “New” part: they could give me no real help there. I had taken in [End Page 535] just enough literary theory as an undergraduate to know that, if I were to survive—and I mean less survive professionally than survive intellectually—I needed, to paraphrase what Ezra Pound said of another provincial, the young T. S. Eliot, to actually train myself and modernize myself on my own. Yet, as we all know, literary scholars and critics can not in fact do this on their own—we need the right methods and trustworthy models—and I could find no one in the field to guide me at first hand. So I turned to the generation of Romanticists just ahead of mine, a group of path-breaking, theoretically savvy, intellectually fearless critical scholars whose early books were already trailing clouds of glory for us neophytes to follow. The models that proved most vital for me prominently included the work of James Chandler and Mary Poovey: Wordsworth’s Second Nature and The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer both came out in 1984, in my case, that is, just in time.2 But it was the example of McGann’s writings that made the greatest single difference for me. The essays gathered in The Beauty of Inflections, in particular, showed me a way to redeem what I had considered the driest and dustiest aspect of my graduate training, the laborious care I had been urged, or perhaps compelled, to take with matters of bibliography, of textual editing and transmission, dates and places and imprints, production and early reception history. McGann, generously sharing lessons he had learned in the course of editing Byron, showed how the old-school disciplines of philology could, with the necessary theoretical and methodological reframing, become newly significant, indeed crucial, tools...

A. Anderson, Kant, Hume, and the interruption of dogmatic slumber

A. Anderson, Kant, Hume, and the interruption of dogmatic slumber

Phenomenology without Foundations = Pragmatism?

This essay attempts to spell out what might be left of Husserlian phenomenology when one leaves behind Husserl’s own grounding ambitions. Husserl construes transcendental phenomenology as first philosophy. In a pragmatist vein of leaving it behind in the interest of something other, I discuss what would happen if one were to ‘pragmatize’ phenomenology. After first laying out Husserl’s vision, in a second part I reconstruct the motives that led to it in reaction to a ‘Cartesian anxiety’ of not securing an indubitable ground of knowledge. After that, the article spells out some pragmatic reflections on what phenomenology would be, without the need to secure foundations of knowledge. Such a liberation would in effect enable phenomenology to more fully make true on the ideals of the Enlightenment (which Rorty, too, underwrites) of emancipating oneself of one of the last vestiges of a dogmatic slumber.

The Dogmatic Slumbers of Constitutional Doctrine

My forthcoming (2019) dissertation raises the question whether European constitutional scholarship has adequately dealt with some of the challenges American Legal Realists have launched. There, I undertake to reconstruct some of the claims of American legal realism so as to be able to critically subject European constitutional scholarship to these claims. Conversely, I (re)construct some theoretical and methodological answers that have been proffered so as to fend off the aforementioned challenges. The defense resting on the justificatory focus of legal scholarship (as opposed to a focus on discovery) has been one of the common responses, as I try to explain below, to dislodge realist criticism. Relativizing the context distinction in the context of legal scholarship, as I will try to do here, does not by itself provide a conclusive argument for a reconceptualization of doctrinal scholarship. However, in my dissertation I offer additional arguments to establish the need for this reconceptualization, focusing on the relativity of the autonomy of the law as an object of inquiry for legal scholarship, and discussing the concept of “reification” as I see it emerging out of legal realist thought. This is a work in progress, which I am happy to discuss further.

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber by Abraham Anderson

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber by Abraham Anderson

La plausible impronta (política) de Diderot en Kant

Así como Hume despertó a Kant del sueño dogmático y Rousseau le descubrió el mundo moral, Diderot le habría hecho acceder al universo de la política. El último Kant podría estar muy influido, sin saberlo, por el Diderot que convirtió la Historia de las dos Indias en la "Biblia de las revoluciones", así como por el de la Enciclopedia. Se defiende la tesis de que todo el proyecto ilustrado tendría una índole radical, y conviene matizar la distinción entre Ilustración moderada e Ilustración radical, toda vez que los puntos en común parecen superar a las discrepancias. Spinoza y Heine podrían resultar útiles para enfatizar este parecer.

Miltonic Sublimity and the Crisis of Wolffianism before Kant

A generation before Kant emerged from his "dogmatic slumber,” Christian Wolff’s rationalist metaphysics had already undergone a crisis. When Johann Jakob Bodmer translated Paradise Lost into German (1732) it sparked a polemic among leading Wolffians. The metaphysics of Milton's poetology raised concerns about the extent and bounds of rational imagination analogous to Kant's concerns about the limits of pure reason. The aesthetics of creative genius Bodmer articulated in his defense of Milton was based on Wolff’s rationalism yet found warm acceptance among leading Romantics of the following generation. This article therefore contributes to the rationalist roots of Romantic irrationalism.

Politics beyond Persons

Contesting the assumptions that orient political life has been the business of political theory at least since Socrates. Countless dogmas have been disabled over the years by the prick of the philosopher’s pen—and by the public critique and political action it inspired. Today the vanguard of the field is challenging what is perhaps the oldest, deepest, and most entrenched dogma of all: the idea that political standing applies exclusively to persons, and that humanity’s unrestrained exercise of power over the natural world is perfectly legitimate. Environmental political theory has been contesting these assumptions for some time, and our contemporary ecological problems, from climate change to superbugs to resource depletion, are now forcing the field as a whole to take notice.1 To challenge the human exploitation of nature is not only to disrupt the boundaries of our political communities and the structure of our political institutions but to problematize virtually every aspect of life in modern society. What we eat and wear and do for work, what we buy and sell and build, where we live and travel and are buried – everything about our lives today depends on the rapacious instrumentalization of the earth. The assumption that the earth is for us, and hence that we have a legitimate title to exercise unlimited power over it, is so pervasive as to be invisible. It is constitutive of our political life, and it structures all the things we do within our political communities, but we never think about it. Our dogmatic slumber has been deep and relatively untroubled in this regard. Yet the assumption rests on beliefs that have been evacuated of authority, some for a long time. The first is

The Antinomy of Practical Reason as absurdum practicum

The antinomies of pure reason play a significant role in Kant’s critical system. The conflict of reason with itself woke Kant up from his dogmatic slumber and led him to the construction of his transcendental idealism. However, the antinomies of practical reason have not occupied the same place as those of reason in its speculative use. Actually, many commentators of Kant’s critical philosophy consider that there is no antinomy of practical reason at all. The aim of this article is to show that there is an antinomy of practical reason. Particularly, we will show why the antinomy of practical reason should be understood under the light of the Kantian concept of absurdum practicum . Keywords: Kant, practical antinomy, absurdum practicum.

Robert M. Veatch and Lainie F. Ross: Transplantation ethics, 2nd ed.

On the whole, the long-awaited second edition of Transplantation Ethics does not disappoint. Structurally, the book can be readily employed as a reference compendium for those seeking discrete information supplemented by references for additional reading. It is sufficiently versatile to be comfortably read straight through, or it can be read (or assigned), textbook-style, as specific chapters or sections for a comprehensive overview of core controversies such as the definition of death or principles or organ allocation. The book also includes a useful treatment of more contemporary topics such as uterus transplantation and vascularized composite allografts. The transplant professional without a substantive background in ethical theory or medical ethics will find sections of it conceptually challenging, which should be understood as a positive recommendation: It deserves to be the definitive reference on the shelf of transplant professionals interested in ethics and public policy. Early on, Veatch and Ross outline a non-consequentialist, secular, liberalindividualist, egalitarian ethical framework, which informs discussions of specific ethical problems and challenges throughout the rest of the book. However, philosophers whose considered normative commitments deviate from this bill of particulars won’t find many arguments in this book which will much disturb their dogmatic slumbers. Theology-based concerns, virtue theory, and neo-Hippocratism (a favorite hobby-horse of Veatch’s, though it isn’t clear whether any individual neo-Hippocratics exist) are relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance or parochialism. ‘‘Feminist theory’’ is regrettably reduced to ‘‘care ethics,’’ and is dismissed in a

Activist political theory and the question of power

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency is, first and foremost, a manifesto for an approach to political philosophy*what Ypi calls ‘activist political theory’*and can, I think, be best understood as an attempt to disturb analytic political philosophy from its ‘dogmatic slumber’ and motivate its movement towards the tradition of critical theory. In the first section of this commentary, I will lay out the grounds for this view. Having thus sketched an account of the point and purpose of this text, I will then focus on the relationship of both the methodological and the (illustrative) substantive arguments on global justice to the question of power. At a methodological level, I will argue that Ypi does not take the significance of power sufficiently seriously as an issue for political theory with emancipatory intent. With regard to her substantive arguments concerning global justice and state power, I will argue that she does not adequately address the character of power as a positional good because the analysis does not operate at the fundamentally appropriate institutional level of analysis. (Published: 4 July 2013) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 6 , No. 2, 2013, pp. 85-91. http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/egp.v6i2.21316