Faculty Of Judgment Research Articles

Jürg Zünd : voir/faire voir l’espace

GoalsBy extending the analysis of a case identified by Ludwig Binswanger, the Jürg Zünd case, using a philosophical reading inspired by phenomenology, we strive to show that the patient – this is what gives meaning to his disorder – attempts to display the relevance (failure of reason) as well as the limits (reason remains operative) of a doctrine that was made familiar to him by his psychiatrist: existential analysis, notably its representation of space and language. This aims to illustrate the dangers posed by too insistent a dialogue between patient and caregiver when this patient is associated with diagnosis and therapy. Finally, it is a question of better marking the remaining gap between the practical field and the experiential field. The patient has renounced the rationality of her actions but continues to subscribe to that of her experience, the only means of “proof” remaining to her. MethodExtend the psychiatrist's analysis by establishing a correspondence between the symptoms of the illness and the validations/refutations of this same analysis. The main danger of the analysis carried out here is a hyper-rationalization of mental disorder, but if, in the mental disorder, no element of reason remains, no psychiatry can see the light of day either. It is, however, clear that the simple failure of reason cannot be enough to put the scientific exploitation of mental disorder into perspective. We can therefore only follow the author in his frequent references to the fundamental texts of phenomenology. We could say that our analysis is experimental in nature. ResultsAn in-depth analysis of the case shows that there is indeed a link between the patient's system of attitude and behavior and a desire to test the relevance of the phenomenological analysis applied by the caregiver to the patient. DiscussionIn the third Critique, known as the Faculty of Judgment, Kant strives to restore to a reason invalidated in its pure use a path, a field of sensitive expression that, spanning understanding and language, allows this reason to “say itself”, but this behavior is in turn struck by impotence, due to its antinomic structure. Only the body, left out of Kantian analysis, allows reason to find its balance because it is already in itself penetrated, corseted, steeped in reason, but also, by the same token, crushed by this reason, a reason which, by overwhelming the only means of expression that remains to it, overinvests this body and makes itself inaudible again. It will therefore be necessary to return the body to itself, free it from the influence of reason, reify it and, at the same time, allow to reappear what, perhaps, remains in the man of reason: madness, weak reason inhabiting a weakened body. To contradict reason is to speak it out loud, in the experience of its almost although never quite definitive loss, suspended as it is on its own memory. From being the object of clinical inquiry, madness thus becomes its criterion. It establishes its own regime of proof, proof, which, of course, cannot be administered by means of language that is now disqualified. ConclusionMadness has its say in the failure of reason, a failure already thwarted by the disabling examination to which it has been subjected by the Kantian-inspired critical doctrine, which strives to “reason” a reason that exceeds its rights.

The Synthetic Unity of Reason and Nature in the Third Critique

ABSTRACT In this paper, I advance a new interpretation of the argumentative structure of the third Critique, which in turn clarifies the connection between its two apparently unrelated parts. I propose to read the third Critique as a response to Kant’s question of hope, which concerns the satisfaction of reason’s practical and theoretical interests. On this proposal, while the first part on aesthetics describes what we—as possessors of theoretical reason – may hope for, the second part, on teleology, describes what we – as possessors of practical reason – may hope for. The main question of the third Critique is, ‘What may we hope if we act as we should, i.e. act rationally?’ Kant’s implicit answer is, ‘to attain the ideals of reason, which leads to happiness as a consequence of it.’ This novel reconstruction of the argumentative structure of the third Critique contributes to the literature by (i) explaining how the two parts of the third Critique on aesthetics and teleology are connected, (ii) clarifying how the ideals of reason are connected to hope and happiness, and (iii) showing how the spheres of nature and freedom can be synthetically unified through the faculty of judgment.

“Judgment without standards”: Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy

AbstractThis article considers Hannah Arendt's posthumously published Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, lectures delivered at the New School for Social Research in the fall semester of 1970. By taking Arendt's highly provocative reading of Kant as a point of departure, the essay probes Arendt's own theory of judgment. Arendt frequently draws distinctions that prove untenable. If the faculty of judgment, in Arendt's words, has to do with one's “ability to make distinctions,” and yet her own distinctions continually falter, and that in a text about judgment, then it seems that she thwarts her own discourse. More specifically, she complicates her assertions by staging something that she, in Kantian terms, describes as “enlarged thought”; she explores the subject of judgment from different perspectives and allows for perspectival plurality, thereby “wooing,” as it were, our consent. In so doing, Arendt, in thoroughly Kantian fashion, establishes judgment as a performative category that defies being taught and instead remains a matter of practice.

Forensic psychiatry in Belgium in 2021: An overview of the current situation

Forensic psychiatry is a discipline dating from Antiquity. A discipline, which is in Belgium a relatively recent development, forensic psychiatry is focussed on two distinct areas, namely the care of detained patients and expertise. Care concerns those detained patients as defined by the Law of May 5, 2014, specifically those who have been diagnosed with mental illnesses and for whom the faculty of judgement, and therefore criminal responsibility, is deemed to be affected. These patients must therefore be treated and not punished. They have thus been hospitalised for an indeterminate period in specialised centres, which are distributed across Belgium.Forensic psychiatry is recent in the way that it is structured and has acquired professionalism.In a general way, only by making the discipline more academic will allow it to be recognised and thus improve the training of future experts in Belgium.This article will describe in a structured and exhaustive manner the position of forensic psychiatry in Belgium.

Judgment and Social Being

A notion of ideology relies necessarily on deeper assumptions about a consciousness subject to misapprehension and error. But in their inversions of Hegel, the mature Marx’s account of the commodity and general formula of capital dethrone consciousness altogether, assigning faculties of judgment and knowledge to the commodity instead. This essay turns to the late work of Georg Lukács to trace an alternative power of judgment formed by labor as such, in the problem of “teleological positing.”

The Holocaust of His Discretion

Abstract This essay establishes the significance of the concept of “discretion” to the scope and nature of episcopal power in the early Stuart Church. Examples are drawn from the Church’s constitutional documents and the ecclesiology of Richard Hooker, where “discretion” named a faculty of judgment and the particularly controversial form of autonomous power over adiaphora, or “things indifferent,” proper to the clergy. Turning to the manuscript and print records of a dispute between Bishop of Lincoln John Williams and the Archiepiscopal regime of William Laud, the essay argues that contrasting interpretations of discretion within the Church’s institutional culture characterized divergent approaches to conformity. These differences were established through the metaphors that translated between objects at the edges of episcopal jurisdictions and the concerns closest to the Church’s doctrinal identity. Disputes over these metaphors aggravated constitutional tensions in the years preceding the civil wars.

Passagem e Progresso na Antropologia de Kant

Esse artigo tem como objetivo analisar como a antropologia pode representar um modo de realização da passagem entre liberdade e natureza no pensamento de Kant. Assim, pretendemos deixar claro que o problema inaugurado nas introduções à Crítica da Faculdade de Julgar, sobre a possibilidade de uma passagem entre o abismo aparentemente intransponível da liberdade e da natureza se torna possível não apenas a partir das reflexões realizadas sobre a faculdade de julgar e suas implicações nos juízos de gosto sobre o belo e nos juízos de finalidade, mas, também, a partir da tese do progresso presente na filosofia da história de Kant que recebe uma de suas formas de realização nas questões que envolvem a natureza humana (antropologia).

Locke on the role of judgment in perception

AbstractHow much is given in perceptual experience, and how much must be constructed? John Locke's answer to this question contains two prima facie incompatible strands. On the one hand, he claims that ideas of primary qualities come to us passively, through multiple senses: the idea of a sphere can be received either by sight or touch. On the other hand, Locke seemingly thinks that a faculty he calls “judgment” is needed to create visual ideas of three‐dimensional shapes. How can these accounts be made consistent? The problem comes to a head in the discussion of Molyneux's problem: can a person born blind and then made to see identify a sphere and a cube, when he had only touched them in the past? Locke's answer is no, but, as George Berkeley points out, it is hard to see why: if the ideas of shapes come to us through sight as well as touch, nothing should stop Molyneux man from instantly recognizing sphere and cube. Pace much of the existing literature, I argue that although Locke does think we receive visual ideas of primary qualities, the faculty of judgment is required to “inflate” those ideas into three dimensions and to correct for other perspectival distortions. I then show how this answer is consistent with the rest of his theory of perception.

Determinación y reflexión

This paper discusses the reception and the influence of the Critique of Judgement. It focuses on the central distinction between both fundamental types of functions in the Faculty of Judgement: the determinant and the reflexive function; it considers also its projection to the constitution of experience developed in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley's Prefaces

The prefaces to Shelley's poems are generally seen as an important addendum to understanding the complex narratorial personae in the poems they accompany; to pull these textual edges into the centre of enquiry allows for consideration of the unique perspectives on ethics and aesthetics that they offer. I argue that Shelley's prefaces conflate Sympathy conceived of as a personal and morally accountable emotional reflex, such as found in the thought of Adam Smith, and sympathy conceived as the abstract, disinterested aesthetic judgment of Kant's Critique of Judgment. This conflation casts the sensitivity of the poet as both a faculty of judgment which forges an only indirect relationship to moral concerns, and, paradoxically, as something requiring explicitly moral behaviour. This tension engenders a psychological trauma which makes the idea of ‘the self’ a contested, liminal space that marks the edges of Shelley's understanding of the mental operations that occur in aesthetic experience.

Hanna Arendt y la Crítica de la Facultad de Juzgar

El núcleo central de este trabajo consiste en presentar a la Crítica de la Facultad de Juzgar de Kant como un recurso significativo en la formación del pensamiento político de Hanna Arendt. Según la interpretación que la autora realiza del juicio reflexivo y su vinculación con la comunidad ampliada presente en la concepción kantiana de sensus communis, es posible considerar una redefinición del juicio ahora más ligada a la contingencia de la acción y a la pluralidad de los espectadores en el ámbito de la esfera política. En síntesis, se trata de señalar los aspectos más problemáticos de la localización del legado de Kant en los últimos trabajos de Arendt a la vez que llamar la atención sobre la cuestión concerniente a la importancia del aporte kantiano a los ejes centrales del debate de la teoría política contemporánea. AbstractThe core of this paper consists of presenting Kant's Critique of the Faculty of Judgment as a significant resource in the formation of Hanna Arendt's political thought. According to Arendt's interpretation of reflective judgment and its relation to the enlarged community that is present in the kantian conception of sensus communis, a redefinition of judgment, now closer to the contingency of action and the plurality of spectators in the realm of the political sphere is possible to consider. In short, the aim is to point out the most problematic aspects of tracing Kant's legacy in Arendt's latter works as well as to draw attention to the question concerning the importance of the kantian contribution to the key points of the discussion of contemporary political theory.

Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric

Kant and the Promise of Rhetoric

The Power of Judging – or how to distinguish ‘indifference’ in Kant and Arendt. Some critical notes on the structure of activities

***O Poder do Julgar – ou como distinguir ‘Indiferença’ em Kant e Arendt. Algumas notas críticas sobre a estrutura das atividades***Um dos cenários mais horríveis da Ética – mais do que a imoralidade ou amoralidade – é a indiferença moral. A obra final de Arendt, A Vida do Espírito, mostra uma faceta diferente da “indiferença” e a vê como um componente vital do julgamento e da reflexão. O seguinte artigo aborda esta compreensão da indiferença. Arendt extrai da Terceira Crítica de Immanuel Kant, onde a emoção e a experiência são consideradas constitutivas, em contraste com as duas Críticas anteriores, a primeira das quais trata da função lógica do julgar e a segunda do julgamento moral. A este respeito – o background arendiano para o julgar pertence à estética e não à ética – é a liberdade do juízo estético que garante seu potencial ético. No trabalho de Arendt, o julgamento é a base incontestável de seu pensamento. Além dos dois tipos convencionais de julgamento de Kant – determinantes e reflexivos –, ele apresenta uma terceira maneira de julgar em sua Crítica da Faculdade do Juízo. Somente esse terceiro juízo estético reflexivo subjetivo (subjektiv ästhetisch-reflektierendes Urteil) tem o potencial para o que Kant chama de “reabilitação da emoção”. Este terceiro tipo de julgamento demonstraria que aqui Kant combina uma forma de indiferença e a idéia de julgamento protótipo, dando à indiferença um aspecto positivo. E apenas essa terceira forma constitui a base para os pensamentos gerais de Arendt sobre julgamento. A gama de tipos de julgamento no pensamento de Kant poderia de fato ser interpretada não apenas como três maneiras diferentes de pensar, ao que ele se refere com o termo Denkungsart, mas sim como três maneiras diferentes de entender o mundo.É, portanto, de particular interesse para Arendt em termos do que ela chama mudanidade. A diversidade do julgamento elaborada na Terceira Crítica de Kant é uma expressão existencial da capacidade humana para o que é conhecido como “Haltung” na língua alemã e em todas as outras línguas apenas traduz-se fragmentariamente como “postura”, “hábito” ou “atitude”. Não é simplesmente a capacidade de adotar um certo “Haltung”, mas também de mudá-lo.

8 The Public Sphere and the Faculty of Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s Theses on Public Opinion

8 The Public Sphere and the Faculty of Judgment: Hannah Arendt’s Theses on Public Opinion

A Pragmatics of Political Judgment

I. Introduction: A Pragmatics of JudgementTo take part in politics is to judge and in judgement we seek rectitude and finality. We attempt to establish what is the case in matters of right and wrong, advantageous and harmful, just and unjust. We declare what should be done. But judgement in politics is marred by faults-bias, lack of measure, automatism, dependency on the object of judgement, inefficacy-and due to these faults each judgement is open to be corrected by a counter-judgement, to be corrected in turn, and so it goes: 'endless wrangling' in Edmund Burke's terms. Yet we continue to judge. Is this not monstrous? Each participant in a political scene insists on judging others despite it being evident that no participant can claim to speak for the whole, despite the evidence that all participants-failing violence-have to co-exist. Why the ostensive act of communication when no dialogue is sought with the object of judgement? Is the real goal just to shore up one's own position? In critical and polemical judgement-one side calling the other 'terrorist,' the other side responding 'colonizer'-there is no subjectivisation of the object of judgement, not even a pedagogy, just the command 'disqualify that voice, count it for less.' Critical judgement itself does not seek to change the very object that it claims must be changed. The monstrosity of judgement is evident: it arrogates rectitude yet perpetuates error; it claims to put an end to controversy yet fuels it. The task of this paper is rid ourselves of this, one of our forms of monstrosity.The first question is if political judgement so evidently fails to correct the other or to accurately guide future action then what does it do?When philosophers explore the question of judgement, they often take an epistemological or a normative approach. The question is either one of what kind of knowledge forms a basis for correct judgement, or what source of normative criterion forms the basis for evaluation. In the Principles of Philosophy Descartes defines judgement as an affirmation concerning both the existence and the nature of objects falling under the senses. The process of hyperbolic doubt begins in the philosopher's recognition that many of his 'past opinions' and judgements were founded on unguaranteed principles and inexact knowledge. It is the faculty of will in its adolescent haste to overtake and surpass the faculty of judgement that causes error in judgement. Descartes's project is to search for clear and evident first principles from which to deduce perfect knowledge of objects. This is the route of epistemological foundationalism.1Isaiah Berlin chooses this route in his essay on political judgement. He searches for a foundation of judgement either in a supposed science of politics based on the laws of history, or in the nature of practical reason. His embrace of the latter leads him to repeat Aristotle's tautology of defining phronesis (practical wisdom) as the knowledge possessed by the phronimon, the wise man. Berlin's exemplar is Bismarck, apparently a match for Aristotle's supposed subject of knowledge, Pericles.2 In line with Berlin, Vincent Descombes defines political judgement as an instance of practical rationality: a deliberation that leads directly to action. To identify error in political judgement he seeks normative criteria and finds them not in reason, nor in communicative action, but in those norms and ends that are internal to social roles and professions (Hegel's objective spirit). An actor will be said to have made an error in judgement when it contradicts such norms. Society, and its natural evolution, is thus the ultimate judge.Here Descombes joins Hannah Arendt who condemns the French Revolution for the Jacobins' attempt to change society itself-in contrast with the American Revolution, which focused on constitutional change alone. In her lectures on Kant's political philosophy-reconstructed as the third volume 'Judging' of The Life of the Mind-Arendt conceives of political judgement as the activity of a disinterested spectator rather than an actor. …

SOBREDETERMINAÇÃO DA VIDA MORAL EM FACE DA VIDA BIOLÓGICA: ABORDAGENS KANTIANAS PARA QUESTÕES DE BIOÉTICA(S)

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how, in spite of overdetermination, moral and bio-logical life articulate; not only observing the amplitude of that over the latter, but highlighting the role of moral life when signifying biological life, whether it is human or another species'. In this scope we can ask: through which ways can one signify biological life? Is it possible to escape the conscience paradigm and be morally worthy in either life? To answer this we will analyze the § 42 in the Critique of Faculty of Judgement, from which we will show the Kantian's moral aspect about inanimate and animated nature. Following, we will articulate the pragmatic and practical character in the human and non human relation. After, we will defend not the overdetermination of one upon the other, but the direct relation between them.

The Mythologies of Contextualism: Method and Judgment in Skinner's Visions of Politics

This article argues that Skinnerian contextualism is an unsuccessful attempt to develop a truly methodical approach to textual interpretation. According to Skinner, the various ‘mythologies’ that he associates with textualism are due to its misplaced confidence in the faculty of judgment. Whereas textualists believe that an interpreter's own judgment is his or her most useful tool in attempting to understand a text, contextualism proceeds from the assumption that we cannot help but make faulty judgments when confronted with historical materials given the nature of human cognition. Having dissociated itself from textualism on these grounds, contextualism attempts to repair the defects of textualism by minimizing the role of judgment in interpretive practice. As this article will show, these efforts have been fruitless. Moreover, Skinner's attempt to reinforce contextualism by importing claims about the strategic motives behind philosophical argumentation is either incoherent or unconvincing.

Editorial

With no over-arching theme, this issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics presents a diversity of articles that under different perspectives deal with a variety of different topics and medialities, ranging from a critical theoretical exploration of the faculty of judgement, over an analytic evaluation of architectural value, to an enactive approach to aesthetic preference and the bodily conditions of meaning constitution.

Ethische Urteilskraft. Methodologische Erwägungen aus argumentationstheoretischer Perspektive

Abstract This contribution is based on the observation that many day-to-day discussions as well as introductions to applied ethics emphasize the fact that in individual cases the formation of judgment is no longer open to theoretical analysis, and there is therefore a demand for “the faculty of judgment”. However, it remains unclear as to what is actually meant by “faculty of judgment” and what role ethical argumentation is then able to play in individual decisions. Wouldn’t a remark like “Everyone has to figure it out for themselves!” call into question a claim of ethical judgment for an intersubjectively shared rationality and commitment? This contribution will face the task of distinguishing various argumentative functions of the appeal to “the” faculty of judgment using a model of ethical argumentation. In each case, it will be demonstrated to what extent the sentence “Everyone has to figure it out for themselves!” can not only contribute to immunization, but also be legitimate in its own right. Further, an outline of how to respond to, qualify and invalidate this statement will be provided as well. The main goal of this paper is to show that “the” faculty of judgment does not describe “one” faculty at all but consists of several properties whose profile, demand and development should be examined and discussed discretely.

Cervantes and the Cognitive Ideas of His Time: Mind and Development in Don Quixote

El Quijote se ha explorado desde el punto de vista de la filosofia medica de su epoca atendiendo a temas como la melancolia y la locura, asi como al dialogo que mantiene con el Examen de ingenios de Juan Huarte de San Juan. Sin embargo, quedan aun por desvelar aspectos importantes acerca de como Cervantes investiga, a traves del personaje de Sancho Panza, la relacion mente-cuerpo-entorno y, en concreto, el desarrollo cognitivo humano, convirtiendolo en uno de los temas principales de la novela. En sincronia con las ideas de Huarte, Juan Luis Vives y otros pensadores acerca de la naturaleza humana, Sancho representa, en un principio, el ingenio inhabil y el alma animal que se preocupa de sus necesidades mas basicas. Forzado a sobrevivir dentro del mundo caballeresco, pronto comienza a ejercitar y desarrollar sus facultades racionales (imaginativa, memoria, estimativa), iniciando una transformacion que lo llevara de ser bruto a humano. ********** THE CONNECTION BETWEEN CERVANTES and Renaissance medical philosophy has been explored by both humanists and scientists, often focusing on Don Quixote and Juan Huarte de San Juan. Many of these studies trace humoral imbalance and its effects (melancholy, madness) on the famous knight-errant and other characters of the novel or look for Huarte's footprints in Cervantes's work. (1) There is indeed little doubt that Cervantes well acquainted with the ideas about the mind that circulated in early modern Spain and, as Lopez-Munoz, Alamo, and Garcia-Garcia put it, was also familiar with several medical treatises concerning the neurosciences, which were very much in vogue in Spain in the late Renaissance period (501). I argue that Cervantes not only interested in the cognitive science of his time from the point of view of humoral theory and illness, but that he also concerned with developmental psychology--mind development--in the context of early modern notions of human nature and the human soul. The soul--what we today call the mind--along with its faculties and its relation to the body, became the center of a prolonged dialogue among sixteenth-century figures such as Juan Luis Vives and Huarte. Recognized as the father of modern psychology and the inspirer of Cervantes's masterpieces, respectively, Vives and Huarte drew on the work of Plato, Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen, and the Judeo-Arabic tradition in their attempts to decipher the mysteries of consciousness. (2) Renaissance humanism and the studia humanitatis, with emphasis on man and his values (Kristeller 4), became the definitive catalyzer of an investigation that Spanish thinkers carried out from both scientific and artistic perspectives, blurring the boundaries between medicine and literature. I argue that both Renaissance medical philosophers such as Vives and Huarte and fiction writers such as Cervantes shared an empirical agenda whose purpose to understand and illuminate the workings of the human soul, the mind. The ultimate aim of this essay is to emphasize the continuity and permeability between two realms that we today perceive as separate: the humanities and the sciences. ANIMAL OR RATIONAL? HUMANISM AND THE SOUL The ability to evaluate or to judge--known as the estimativa faculty--gained particular importance in the early modern cultural period, when humanity understood in terms of our capacity to transcend, via the faculty of judgment, our animal soul in order to embrace our rational one. One of the fundamental distinctions between brutes and humans--between the animal and the rational soul--was the free judgment, or free-will, that accompanied reason. In the context of scholastic thought, when speaking about human nature, St. Thomas Aquinas had stated: Other kinds of things, for example, irrational animals, act by reason of judgment, but not free judgment; as brute animals. For example, sheep, when they see a wolf, judge it by a natural, but not free judgment, that they should flee from the wolf, since they so judge by an instinct from nature, not by a comparison [. …