Kant's Critique Research Articles

Against the fanaticism of forces: Kant's critique of Herder's Spinozism

Against the fanaticism of forces: Kant's critique of Herder's Spinozism

The Divorce of Reason and Experience: Kant's Paralogisms of Pure Reason in Context

I consider Kant's criticism of rational psychology in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason in light of his German predecessors. I first present Wolff's foundational account of metaphysical psychology with the result that Wolff's rational psychology is not comfortably characterized as a naïvely rationalist psychology. I then turn to the reception of Wolff's account among later German metaphysicians, and show that the same claim of a dependence of rational upon empirical psychology is found in the publications and lectures of Kant's pre-Critical period. Considering the Paralogisms in this context reveals Kant's conception of rational psychology to be distinctly novel and has important consequences in shifting the argumentative focus of the chapter.

Necessity & possibility: the logical strategy of Kant's Critique of pure reason

Necessity & possibility: the logical strategy of Kant's Critique of pure reason

The Demand of Freedom in Kant's Critique of Judgment

This paper examines the issue of the unity of the critical philosophy in Kant's Critique of Judgment through a careful consideration of the actual bridge that joins nature and freedom. Kant argues that this bridge is made under the demand for the furtherance of life, and is accordingly to be equated with the demand of freedom. This article specifically focuses on this demand that is, in effect, carried out by the principle of purposiveness. It is argued that this demand is somewhat artificial since it does not fully take into account the real struggle between nature and freedom.

TEOLOGÍA NOMINALISTA Y RACIONALIDAD ILUSTRADA. LOS PRESUPUESTOS OCKHAMIANOS DE LA FILOSOFÍA DEL DERECHO KANTIANA

El propósito de este trabajo es mostrar una serie de nexos conceptuales y temáticos entre los modelos filosóficos ockhamiano y kantiano que proporcionen un marco comprensivo de sus respectivas reflexiones sobre el Derecho. Nuestra tesis principal es que existe un continuum entre ciertos presupuestos capitales de la teología nominalista y la racionalidad ilustrada que dotan de una unidad sustancial a lo que se conoce como “pensamiento moderno” y que proyectan esa continuidad en el ámbito de lo jurídico. En este sentido, se propone una reflexión sobre el nominalismo tácito subyacente al criticismo kantiano, criticismo que si bien prescinde de toda premisa teológica, reconstruye una metafísica que conserva lo esencial de su estructura. Para ello partimos de una muy somera referencia a la similitud de las respectivas teorías del conocimiento, para después indagar de forma más exhaustiva la estructura del acto moral en las doctrinas ockhamiana y kantiana, y concluir señalando determinados fundamentos y elementos comunes a ambas en los dominios del pensamiento jurídico-político.

Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine (review)

Reviewed by: Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine Jill Scott Lucia Ruprecht . Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. 158 pp. £ 45. ISBN 978-0-7546-5361-5. The intermedial study of dance and literature has been developing since the early 1990s as part of a larger trend towards interdisciplinary studies. Important contributions to this subfield, such as Sarah Davies Cordova's Paris Dances (1999) and Felicia McCarren's Dance Pathologies (1998), have tended to focus on late-nineteenth-century or modernist examples from French literature. The reasons for this focus are twofold: classical and romantic ballet developed primarily in France, and French literature echoed these developments. Studies on dance and literature have been slower to emerge in German studies, and Lucia Ruprecht's Dances of the Self adds several new dimensions to the intersecting discourses of movement and textuality: 1) she considers dance in the work of three major German writers, 2) she takes us back almost a full century from the symbolist dancophiles of Mallarmé, Valéry, or even Hofmannsthal, and 3) she moves away from a purely textual metaphor of dance to discuss the actual dances of the period and the ways in which these are represented in language. She documents choreography and dance history, and she brings into discussion real dancers who influenced these authors. Though one might assume a book on dance to treat the frivolous entertainment for the bourgeoisie, Ruprecht's book is anything but lighthearted. At least as much philosopher and theorist as literary scholar, she takes us on a swift trip through Enlightenment concepts of the body to poststructuralist positions on subjectivity. Her readings of Kant are framed in a post-Foucauldian rhetoric. At times, the pace at which new ideas are introduced – Winckelmann, Kant, and Schiller, then on to Foucault (disciplining the body and the care of the self), Butler (gender performativity), Austin (performative utterances), Derrida (reiteration and iterability), Freud (primacy of the visual in psychosexual development), Lacan (mirror stage), Kristeva (subject in process), and [End Page 477] Benjamin (politics and poetics of allegory) – is dizzying, and leaves one struggling to follow Ruprecht's own thread. On the one hand, the book has the feel of a dissertation in its efforts to cover all the bases and demonstrate breadth and erudition. On the other hand, it is all the richer because Ruprecht casts such a wide net. The principle argument is that Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine, each in his own way, pick up on Winckelmann's classicist body idealized in the Greek statue, but challenge this harmonious perfection by contaminating its static purity with movement and erotic sensuality. Each author uses the paradoxes of form and expression within dance, but also the tensions between writing and dancing to extend and even modernize notions of corporeality. Furthermore, through extended metaphors of dance and movement, the three writers in question produce new configurations of subjectivity. Terpsichorical allegories create movement landscapes that enable these writers to produce a counteraesthetics and a counterpolitics of the self all in one sweep. While ballet is at the core of dance aesthetics in the eighteenth century, Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine turn to other related movement arts – puppet theatre, commedia dell'arte, mime, and cancan – to explore alternative corporeal and textual expressions. The writers use self-reflexivity and rhetorical playfulness, argues Ruprecht, as forms of both entertainment and "performative exercises for the articulation of cultural and personal narratives embodied in the dances of the self." Kleist's marionettes, functioning as prosthetic limbs and uncanny pseudohumans, do not meet the aesthetic requirements for the ideal body, but instead perform clumsy, mechanical, or even dysfunctional dances. As such, Kleist counters Schiller's discourses on grace as well as thwarting practices of ballet around 1800. Moving away from Kant's Critique of Judgment and the disinterested gaze, Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater and Schiller's Gracefulness and Dignity perform beauty as relative, and devise a concept of grace that includes gravity. Romantic ballet goes to great lengths to create illusions of antigravity, but can go no further than pointe, the result of...

Durkheim por paradigmas e modelos

With a strict philosophical view, this article aims at examining the relation between Philosophy and the Social Science of Durkheim. It is our hypothesis that his Science has straight relation to Philosophy, which brings elements that constitutes it. In order to show such a constitution, we have confronted Durkheim's epistemology with ideas carried out by Bacon, Descartes and, especially, Kant's Criticism. This procedure has indicated the paradigms and models possible to be identified in Durkheim's Social Science.

Grillparzer's “The Poor Musician”: The Artist-Hermit in Search of a Community

A parallel reading of Franz Grillparzer's “The Poor Musician” and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment occasions reflections on the possibility of defining community in aesthetic terms. While aesthetic judgment remains subjective for Kant, even as it formulates a universal claim, Grillparzer shows how a faulty interpretation of universality can disfigure a work of art and deprive unwary readers of their freedom to interpret by charming them with a simulacrum of community. Grillparzer does not merely deplore this, but also sets in the text points of resistance against such invasive interpretations, thus forcing the readers to reflect on both the work and their own judgment. Moreover, the novella's focus on music asks for a reappraisal of Kant's classification of the fine arts, which is based on a quasi-linguistic criterion of communicability and thus restricts their postulated universality.

A Universality Not Based on Concepts: Kant's Key to the Critique of Taste

‘Beautiful is what, without a concept, is liked universally.’ Thus ends the second Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful in Kant's Critique of Judgment.What could yield a non-conceptual universality? Kant finds this in the harmonious ‘free play’ of the mental powers, which he characterizes as a mental state that is both non-cognitive and inherently universally valid. In general, any interpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory will depend on the view of its relationship to cognition. This relationship itself should be understood in reference to Kant's notion of the mental state (or activity of the cognitive powers) in judging generally, as presented in the Critique of Judgment.

The European Constitution: A Semiotics Analysis of Ideology, Identity and Global Commun in Present-Day Europe

This paper proposes an analysis of the European Constitution from the perspective of its conditions of possibility. The focus is on the conditions that subtend the European constitution, the conditions, the premises that make the European Constitution possible. In the present context of discourse “possibility” is understood in the sense of Kantian critique. But here critique is based on Reasonableness rather than on Reason—in fact a thesis orienting this essay is that the human being to survive and to survive well must quickly change from a rational animal into a reasonable animal. Is the European constitution possible? Where must we search for the necessary conditions that support the European constitution (1) in common historical and cultural traditions, in common practices, in common social behaviours or (2) merely in a shared decision, an accord, a contract, a convention? There exists a third possibility: the idea that Europe has no future without a European constitution founded on awareness that all European Nations participate in a common destiny, which in the era of globalization is the destiny the whole world, indeed of life over the whole planet. Such participation must be based on the logic of otherness and reasonableness of which the human being alone as a semiotic animal is capable. As a semiotic animal, that is, an animal capable of metasemiosis, reflection and critical consciousness, the human being is responsible for all of life over the planet.

Reconciliation in Hegel’s Speculative Idealism

In the following, the author argues that Hegel's speculative idealism at- tempts to reconcile the competing philosophical positions of idealism and realism. Through an examination, fi rst, of current scholarship and, second, of Hegel's critique of the Ideal of Pure Reason in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the author shows that one of Hegel's main criticisms is that the exclusion of the thing-in-itself denies real- ism. The author argues that Hegel's response to the problem of the thing-in-itself is to affi rm realism. The author concludes by demonstrating how Hegel's concept of Geist reconciles idealism and realism.

Circular Art of Life

Kant's Critique of Judgment and Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man are generally recognized as crucial documents in the development of modern aesthetics away from rule-based conceptions of objectivity. This paper claims that they are also, in crucial ways, circular. In both Kant and Schiller, aesthetic taste turns out to be grounded in the realm of the social in a way that challenges the idealist notion that aesthetic evaluation and education would―or should―occur against the backdrop of humanity in general, rather than of concrete communities. The threat of conceptual circularity, I claim, is thus directly tied to the ineradicable significance of social circles for the articulation of Kant's and Schiller's aesthetics.

A (SELLARSIAN) KANTIAN CRITIQUE OF HUME'S THEORY OF CONCEPTS

Abstract: In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume attempts to explain all human cognition in terms of impressions, ideas, and their qualities, behaviors, and relations. This explanation includes a complicated attempted reduction of beliefs, or judgments, to single ideas. This paper attempts to demonstrate one of the inadequacies of this approach, and any of its kind (any attempted reduction of judgments to their constituent parts, single or multiple) via an argument concerning the logical forms of judgment found implicitly in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and more explicitly in the works of Wilfrid Sellars.

Wittgenstein, Kant and the critique of totality

In this paper, I explore Wittgenstein's inheritance of one specific strand of Kant's criticism, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of reason's inherent pretensions to totality. This exploration reveals new critical possibilities in Wittgenstein's own philosophical method, challenging existing interpretations of Wittgenstein's political thought as `conservative' and exhibiting the closeness of its connection to another inheritor of Kant's critique of totality, the Frankfurt School's criticism of `identity thinking' and the reification of reason to which it leads. Additionally, it shows how Wittgenstein's linguistic philosophy offers to challenge and undermine, in a historically novel way, the metaphysical assumptions underlying some of our most characteristic and ubiquitous social practices.

Aesthetic vision and German Romanticism: writing images

The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between internal and external. In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as self and other, symbol and allegory, and light and dark, should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy, literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Unwarranted Return: A Response to McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek’s (2005) “Schema Theory Revisited”

Schema Theory Revisited, McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek (2005) propose a rearticulation of schema theory intended to encompass the ideas that schemata and other cognitive processes are embodied, that knowledge is situated in the transaction between world and individual, and that such transactions are mediated by socially and culturally enacted practices. We welcome the opportunity to respond to what we value as an attempt to arrive at a more complete theory of comprehension but one we feel clearly fails to reconcile the competing metaphysical assumptions underlying schema theory, social constructivism, and theories of embodied cognition. Moreover, the authors' argument is premised on the flawed belief that purely abstract constructs can somehow be applied to embodied ones without any physiological basis. Our response addresses the incommensurability of conflating schema theory with sociocultural perspectives and then with theories of embodied cognition. We focus on the persistent ontological problem of granting form and substance to schema. And finally, we wish to amend the contribution of embodied cognition to reading comprehension by addressing possible misinterpretations expressed in the article and by highlighting existing work that forms a richer, embodied basis for an intersubjective existence and an emerging sense of self. McVee et al. (2005) stated that they were responding to the question In what do schemas have their origins? (p. 539). A return to Kant's (1781/1990) Critique of Pure Reason provides us with critical insights into the origins of schema theory and early philosophical attempts at reconciling abstract reason with sensation or, to use the authors' terms, the ideal with the material. A schema was conceived as a higher order, disembodied construct that purportedly synthesizes perceptual information into appropriate conceptualized form. A priori conditions determine both conceptual categories and the synthesis of empirical consciousness. To suggest that schemata are somehow embodied violates a central assumption of all versions of

Kant on Genius and Art

The paper distinguishes between two different senses of ‘genius’ found in Kant's Critique of Judgement, and criticizes an argument commonly attributed to Kant. The argument is in support of the conclusion that an agent must possess and employ genius in the ‘productive faculty’ sense in order to produce an artwork. It is shown that Kant did not in fact make this argument. He defended a different claim concerning the need to employ the concept of a productive faculty of genius in order to make pure judgements of taste concerning artworks. I conclude with the suggestion that there are indications in Kant's theory of a significant departure from a tradition of thought according to which there is something essentially mysterious about the possibility of the production of fine art.

Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (review)

Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (review)

Kant and the Aesthetics of Nature

I try to identify the characteristic and distinguishing features of a theory of natural beauty (as opposed to the sublime) that can be found in Kant's Critique of Judgement. Lest this may seem superfluous, I argue first that, contrary to a common view, Kant's theory does not take the experience of beauty in nature as theoretically basic and that he does not deal with beauty in art only as a derivative case of aesthetic experience. I then try to understand what it means to require, as Kant famously does, that beautiful nature has to look as if it were art. Does this commit him to a projectionist view, according to which we appreciate nature aesthetically only for what it really is not (namely art) rather than for what it is? Pursuing this question we find that for Kant nature can be the object of pure judgements of taste only insofar as nature can be explained scientifically, which in Kant's framework means purely mechanically. This ‘blind mechanism’ of nature plays an important role in Kant's explication of the moral significance the experience of beautiful nature has for us.

Kant, Theremin, and the Morality of Rhetoric

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Immanual Kant calls rhetoric deceitful that not worth any respect at all (CPJ, 5:328;205n).1 Even by the standards of the long and conflicted relationship between philosophy and rhetoric, Kant's disdain for rhetoric is extraordinary. While historians of rhetoric frequently acknowledge this dismissal of their subject, they understandably often hurry on to Enlightenment figures more sympathetic to the art of persuasion. Certainly, the notorious density of Kant's prose, combined with the brevity of his critique of rhetoric and the intensity of his hostility toward it, hardly invites rhetoricians to linger in Kantian thought.2 And yet, a simple acknowledgement of Kant's animosity toward rhetoric does not convey the full significance of his critique. A careful examination of Kant's indictment of rhetoric in the Critique of the Power of Judgment and elsewhere in his works reveals not only an attack on the morality of rhetoric but an attempt to alter the traditional relationship between rhetoric and poetics, to rhetoric's detriment. Kant thus prepares the way for the Romantic assault on rhetoric and the nineteenth-century fragmentation of the classical conception of rhetoric. Kant's characterization of rhetoric as unethical, illusive, and inferior to poetics did not go unchallenged. The Protestant theologian Franz Ther emin (1780-1846), in Eloquence a Virtue (1814), presented a vigorous and comprehensive response to Kant's critique. Theremin does not merely rebut Kant's charges against rhetoric but, rather, he confronts Kant in his own criti cal domain. Theremin does this not only by asserting the virtue of rhetoric, but by demonstrating that rhetoric can, and indeed does, conform to Kant's own standards of morality. So infused with morality is Eloquence a Virtue that in late nineteenth century America3 the able German rhetorician, Theremin, was widely credited for making rhetoric purely ethical procedure (Day 1990, 866).4 But if Kant's dismissal of rhetoric has been, for the most part, but briefly noted, Theremin's