Kant's Critique Research Articles

On the Ethics of Sanctified Sacrifice: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany

On the Ethics of Sanctified Sacrifice: John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany

Reflexão e fundamento: sobre a relação entre gosto e conhecimento na estética de Kant

A Crítica da Faculdade do Juízo, de Kant, é primordialmente uma investigação crítica acerca de uma certa classe de juízos chamados reflexionantes, que se subdivide em dois grupos, estéticos e teleológicos, e se define em oposição a uma outra classe, a dos chamados juízos determinantes. Nosso objetivo neste artigo é elaborar a hipótese de um privilégio fundacional do juízo reflexionante estético relativamente ao conhecimento determinante. Para tanto, pretendemos cumprir duas etapas. Em primeiro lugar, procederemos a uma análise da conexão entre os temas centrais - e aparentemente dissociados - do belo e da faculdade do juízo enquanto tal que justifica a passagem do projeto de uma crítica do gosto ao de uma crítica do juízo e delimita como alvo da obra o fundamento de determinação (Bestimmungsgrund) de uma "intersubjetividade" conceitualmente indeterminada. Em segundo lugar, passaremos à análise da relação entre a reflexão e o princípio da finalidade da natureza, com base na Introdução da terceira Crítica, a fim de identificar, na formulação "prática" do princípio do gosto, o germe de uma anterioridade que subordina a determinação à reflexão estética.

Kant's Critique of Hobbes

Kant's Critique of Hobbes, Howard Williams, Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 2003, pp. 244.Howard Williams argues that Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) international political theory is a significant critique of Thomas Hobbes'(1588–1679) theory of the sovereign state. Kant's critique is rooted in a conviction that reform, rather than revolution, is the only rationally defensible response to an empirically defective sovereign. In other words, Kant reforms rather than jettisons altogether Hobbes' account of the sovereign state. Rather than absolute internal authority and an untamed gladiator externally, Kant's sovereign state advances gradually towards popular sovereignty and global legality. Williams concludes, “Kant's critique of Hobbes presents the most appropriate account of political sovereignty for today” (232).

Paris with Ganymede: A Critical Supplement to Damisch's Judgement

In 1998, Hubert Damisch, commenting on the work of the seventeenthcentury Dutch painter Pieter Saenredam, remarked that this artist often skewed the viewing axis of his compositions onto the bias to produce perspective views that are 'slightly awkward, slightly warped.' He continued: 'What Saenredam reveals is what I hope is in play in my own work, namely, that it only takes a slight warping, a slight displacement of the main axis, for one to be able to see things differently. In the same spirit of productive bias, and by way of tribute, I offer the following reflections ins ired by Damisch's The Judgement of Paris (1992; English edition 1996). Taking certain insights of Freud and Lacan as foundational, building methodological bridges between L'vi-Strauss' structuralist anthropology and Aby Warburg's mnemonic networks able to pierce the veils of time, this remarkable book is an investigation of representations of the title theme covering some 3000 years. In a distinctly Damischian way, it takes this judgement corpus as a composite 'theoretical object' spurring philosophical reflection.3 'How does it signify, this story; what sensitive spots in our culture does it touch, what depths does it plumb, such that even today it holds a particular resonance for us?'4 Damisch's first-line answer, his working hypothesis, is that the judgement of Paris is the preeminent western symbolic expression of the vexed cultural status of beauty vexed because of its ultimate if elusive derivation (according to psychoanalysis) from sexual pleasure a status that hinges on Paris' selection of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, as the 'most beautiful' of the three female deities among whom he must choose. Furthermore, that this status is reinforced by Paris' choice having precipitated the Trojan War, a narrative analogue for human mortality, awareness of which is a necessary prerequisite for the human capacity for the aesthetic emotion. Within this framework, Damisch compares ancient and mediaeval textual accounts with visual depictions, giving close attention to later moralising constructions as well as to analogies between the three goddesses, the Three Graces, and the three primary functions of Indo-European culture as formulated by Georges Dumezil. With purposive anachronism, he reads the celebrated print by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael (ca. 1517) through the lens of Kant's critique of taste (1790) and Manet's appropriation of a subsidiary group for his Dejeuner sur 1'herbe (1863), which art-work is then linked to the scandal it occasioned and brought to bear retroactively on the question of beauty as epitomised by the theme of Paris' choosing, the visual quotation being construed, per Derrida's gloss on Kant's parergon, as emblematic of modern art's investment in ancient art's (ostensible) supplement: colour. All of this is preceded by reflections on the book's first psychoanalytic principles in the matter of beauty, and by an attempt to think these with Kant's third-Critique premise of the 1. 'A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,' October, vol. 85, summer 1998, pp. 3-17; this quote p. 11. 2. Hubert Damisch, Le jugement de Paris (Flammarion: Paris, 1990); English edn, The Judgment of Paris, trans. J. Goodman (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1995). References are to the English edition. 3. 'A Conversation' (1998), pp. 8, 11. 4. Damisch, The Judgment of Paris (1995), p. 100.

THE POINT OF KANT'S AXIOMS OF INTUITION

Abstract: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason makes important claims about space, time and mathematics in both the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Axioms of Intuition, claims that appear to overlap in some ways and contradict in others. Various interpretations have been offered to resolve these tensions; I argue for an interpretation that accords the Axioms of Intuition a more important role in explaining mathematical cognition than it is usually given. Appreciation for this larger role reveals that magnitudes are central to Kant's philosophy of mathematics and to the part that intuition plays in it.

Categories and Logical Forms in Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction

Compared with the other sections of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the Metaphysical Deduction is among the most obscure and it seems that the section has not received as much critical and interpretive attention as its cousin, the Transcendental Deduction. This is rather surprising because it is at the Metaphysical Deduction that Kant crucial in establishing his program of justifying empirical knowledge in the face of radical skepticism. It is argued in this paper that the connection between the two types of logic is as follows: the logical forms, which belong to formal logic, are the ratio cognoscendi of the Pure Concepts of Understanding, since they provide the key to knowing the latter. On the other hand, the categories are the ratio essendi of the Logical forms, for it is the former that are the condition of the possibility of the latter.

Continuity and Inheritance: Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Work of C.S. Peirce

/. Revisiting Peirce3 s Kantian Inheritance When I a babe in philosophy, Charles Peirce wrote, my bottle filled from the udders of Kant.1 It is widely recognized that this early form of philosophic nourishment granted young Peirce the opportunity to recognize the respective shortcomings of empiricism and idealism and provided the point of departure for his philosophic architectonic. Peirce himself comments on this indebtedness to Immanuel Kant at multiple points, especially in the early stages of his work. In reference to his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, Peirce writes that the list grew originally out of the study of the table of Kant.2 This table, found in the beginning of the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason is crucial in Peirce's thinking, for it stands as Kant's attempt to bring analytic unity to the manifold of representations in judgment and supplies the necessary triadic structure that characterizes Peirce's system. The community of Peirce scholars today seems to acknowledge the contribution Kant made to the development of American pragmatism3 and, more particularly, Peirce's pragmaticism. This acknowledgement, however, has been somewhat cursory, and often serves as a mere preparatory move in highlighting the way in which Peirce overcomes and abandons the Kantian project as framed in the First Critique. According to Karl-Otto Apel, Andre De Tienne4 and Sandra Rosenthal,5 Peirce grows up, and weans himself from Kant's formal theory of cognition. The commentators' perspective on the relation between Peirce and Kant is understandable; despite his praise for the king of modern philosophy, Peirce regards Kant's work as antiquated and underscores the way in which the Critique of Pure Reason stands apart from a more organic, active, and pragmatic reading of ontology and epistemology. Peirce writes that he was a pure Kantist until he forced by successive steps into pragmaticism.6 My intent is not to reemphasize the arguments posed by Peirce against his philosophic forefather, but rather to suggest a type of response to these criticisms a response made on Kant's own terms. I will not attempt to

Lonergan and Gilson on the Problem of Critical Realism

The Thomist 69 (2005): 557-92 LONERGAN AND GILSON ON THE PROBLEM OF CRITICAL REALISM PAUL ST. AMOUR Saint Joseph's University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania WHEN THOMISTS have occasion to enumerate the many assets of the Thomistic tradition, especially vis-a-vis perceived skeptical and constructivist extremes of modern and postmodern thought, one attribute inevitably extolled is realism. Although generally parsimonious in circumscribing the limitations of human reason, Aquinas did affirm the capacity of the embodied human knower to know corporeal things beneath itself, to acquire self-knowledge, to affirm rationally the existence of God, and to speak some truth about the nature of God by way of negative and analogical predication. With the proviso that the proportionate object of the intellect in this life remains the quiddity of a material thing, Aquinas deemed the human intellect capable of knowing what really is, albeit partially and imperfectly . 1 Aquinas was always mindful of the fact that understanding and being are perfectly identified only in God, yet he affirmed that human inquiry could successfully attain a limited but veridical familiarity with being. While a commitment to realism is, and must remain, an indispensable feature of Thomism, establishing theoretical underpinnings for such a commitment has proven problematic in the modern philosophical context. To specify what justifies a commitment to Thomistic realism, or even to clarify precisely what realism entails, is to become involved in epistemological 1 Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 84, a. 7; I, q. 85, a. 8; I, q. 87, a. 2, ad 2; I, q. 88, a. 3. 557 558 PAUL ST. AMOUR controversy. Bernard Lonergan once hinted that the doctrine of Thomistic realism is not as straightforward as it seems by making the somewhat unsettling observation that"Georg van Riet needed over six hundred pages [in L'epistemologie Thomiste (1946)] to outline the various types of Thomist epistemology that have been put forward in the last century and a half."2 Such an overview, if brought up to date, would of course be even more scandalously voluminous today. There are both philosophical and historical reasons for lack of a consensus regarding Thomistic realism. Lonergan has suggested that the issue is philosophically problematic because it is not possible adequately to determine the precise meaning and rational justification of realism without first resolving certain prior and more fundamental issues: What constitutes human knowing?3 What is being?4 How is being objectively known?5 It is a fact, however, that realists, even those sincere in their commitment to the realism of Aquinas, continue to differ on questions of cognition, being, and objectivity. The basic historical reason for a lack of doctrinal unanimity stems from the stubborn fact that Thomism has moved beyond the thirteenth century, not as some neatly arranged set of immutable propositions, but rather as a living philosophical tradition. The Thomistic tradition subsists and is mediated by the understandings and priorities of thinkers who are intellectually indebted to Aquinas, but who also happen to philosophize in cultural and intellectual contexts quite different from that of Aquinas himself. With regard to the issue of realism, some contemporary Thomists considered it worthwhile to bring Thomism into vital contact with the methods and difficulties of modern philosophy. While acknowledging the value of an historical retrieval of Aquinas's metaphysics of knowledge, they found it difficult simply 2 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study ofHuman Understanding, vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1992), 433. 3 Ibid., 27-371. 4 Ibid., 372-78; 410-617. 5 Ibid., 399-409. LONERGAN, GILSON, AND CRITICAL REALISM 559 to ignore the modern inversion of the medieval priority of metaphysics to epistemology, or to dismiss as mere subjectivism the modern turn to the conscious subject. They were bothered by the fact that the Cartesian methodic doubt and the Kantian critique of knowledge tended to render precritical Thomistic realism vulnerable to the charge of na!ve realism. They took seriously the objection that it may be inadequate and dogmatic simply to present a Scholastic metaphysics of knowledge and posit its validity as realism in the absence of any further critical justification. Hence the renaissance of Thomism...

P. Tillicho ontologija ir I. Kanto transcendentalinė filosofija

Vienas žymiausių XX a. religijos filosofų Paulis Tillichas savo sisteminėje teologijoje kritikuoja Kanto nustatytą transcendentalinį horizontą (pažinimo ribas). Kita vertus, konstruodamas tikrovės sampratą, jis pasinaudoja Kanto kategorine analize bei metafizikos kritika. Taigi Tillicho požiūris į Kanto epistemologiją yra polemiškas ir reikalauja gilesnės analizės. Kaip ir Kantas, Tillichas kelia klausimą, ką reiškia egzistuoti ir kaip ši egzistencija susijusi su Dievu. Nors Kanto transcendentalinė dialektika pagrindžia negalimybę įrodyti Dievą intelektinėmis operacijomis, protas gali mąstyti ultimatyvią tikrovę. Abiejų filosofų pagrindinė problema tampa proto taikymas anapus jo teorinės kompetencijos.

On the Mechanism of the Generation of Aesthetic Ideas in Kant's Critique of Judgment

On the Mechanism of the Generation of Aesthetic Ideas in Kant's Critique of Judgment

Kant on Hobbes, peace, and obedience

Kant's essay ‘On the common saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice”’ contains a chapter ‘On the relationship of theory to practice in political right’ to which he added, in brackets, ‘(Against Hobbes)’. The problem is that Kant leaves his Hobbes-criticism implicit. The main point seems to be the Hobbes's citizens are without any rights. We explore the differences and similarities between Kant's and Hobbes's political views and evaluate the effectiveness of Kant's criticism. We pay attention to Nominalism and Platonism, the idea of happiness in social life, the use and role of the Golden Rule (Categorical Imperative) in political thought, the quest for freedom, and the principle of political non-resistance. Especially freedom of speech is important for Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. This is the only right Kant's citizens may have, independently of the sovereign's will. Our conclusion is that both Kant and Hobbes emphasize peace and order under sovereign power although they do not agree on how such an ideal can be achieved.

Kant's practical philosophy: from critique to doctrine

The whole range of Kan't philosophy is examined in this book. Unlike the majority of studies, this work traces the evolution of Kant's practical concerns from his 'pre-critical' works to the culminating Metaphysics of Morals and argues for a remarkable continuity in Kant's treatment. In demonstrating Kant's commitment to a material understanding of ethics, Gary Banham cogently argues that they have to be understood as teleological and perfectionist. Tracing in detail the connection between Kant's critique of morality and his account of rational religion provides a new setting for Kant's treatment of evil. In distinguishing Kant's critical works from his doctrinal ones, this study sets out the importance of Kant's accounts of property, right and virtue. Providing a comprehensive treatment of Kant's enquiries, Banham shows the extent of Kant's creative engagement with tradition and challenges the reception of his work current in moral philosophy and political theory.

The Fourth Critique

The paper asks whether interpretive practice today could be said to rival the revolutionary moment of Kant's Critique of Judgment, at the centre of which stands the functional relation between of the heuristic stipulation of a shifting frame and its hermeneutically dependent detail. After all, the paper argues, the evolution of interpretation from Kant to postmodern writings has endowed us with a rich repertoire of tools to bring to the task of reading. However, the paper insists, there are two conditions which, if violated, result in the abandonment of interpretation: (1) contrary to talk of 'empty' or 'mere' signifiers, we cannot let go of the signified and (2) contrary to claims to radical interpretive freedom we cannot abandon heuristic coherence. Coherence phobia and the dream of a signifier without conceptuality are discussed against the background of notions of indeterminacy and infinite regress. The paper concludes that neither of the two constraints, insistence on the signified and heuristic coherence, should be regarded as metaphysically nostalgic but rather as grounded in the 'material' conditions of the autopoietic facts of human-scale perception and hence our organic bodies.

Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe, and Hölderlin

A new exploration of and classical German aesthetics. Within the German tradition, the great promise of beauty is to link particular experiences within a conception of the whole. But this promise has long been viewed as an aesthetic ideology, even, by some, as a blueprint for fascism. Karin Schutjer challenges these familiar critical views by showing that classical German aesthettics gave shape to complex visions of social solidarity. Turning to pivotal philosophical and literary works from the late eighteenth century, she shows how the hopes and fears surrounding the French Revolution stimulated an imaginative rethinking of individual and collective identity-one which can inform modern thinking about the possibilities and limits of community. Schutjer examines how the dualism of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement held promise for by suggesting a whole originating in individual life and an individual life originating in the whole. She then explores how this paradoxical structure develops into complex narratives of in Schiller's On Aesthetic Education, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Holderlin's, Empedokles, and shows how these writers stretch, adapt, and ultimately undermine this dualistic concept. Narrating Community after Kant makes an important statement about discourses on in German intellectual culture around 1800, demonstrating that is always a work in progress while challenging those who invoke community as the foundation of permanent institutions. It sheds new critical light on these classical thinkers and shows how their ideas can serve as a rich resource for our own thinking about community. This book will prove insightful to students and scholars interested in German literary, philosophical, and cultural studies.

Kant: Dogmatism, scepticism, criticism

In this article the author tries to present the place and significance of Kant's critical philosophy, starting from the relationship set in his claim that there are "three phases that which philosophy should run through in the purpose of metaphysics", and they are dogmatism, skepticism and criticism. Then he stresses the importance of Kant's claim that the relation is not only systemic but also "temporal sequence grounded in the nature of human cognitive ability". In the article, furthermore, the attention is devoted to the relation of Hume to the ancient skepticism, as well as to the relation of Kant to the ancient and Hume's skepticism. Finally, the author considers the significance of the influence of Hume's skepticism on Kant's criticism and transcendentalism, and tries to indicate some differences of principle between these philosophical standpoints.

What's the Point of Calling Out Beauty?

The purpose of this paper is to use Kant's Critique of Judgement in order to raise and motivate the question of the point of judgements of beauty, to illustrate the philosophical tendency to neglect or even repress it, and to begin to look for an answer to that question. On the way, I will consider Kant's implied answer to the question and will argue that it is unsatisfactory in that it relies on a false picture of the everyday subject's relation to his or her world.

Kant's Theory of Judgment, and Judgments of Taste: On Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Taste

Kant's use of the leading thread of his table of logical forms of judgment to analyze judgments of taste yields more results than Allison's account allows. It reveals in judgments of taste the combination of two judgments: a descriptive judgment about the object, and a normative judgment about the judging subjects. Core arguments of Kant's critique of taste receive new light from this analysis.

Hume, Kant, and the Sea of Illusion

Given Hume's seemingly ambivalent—and often cryptic—claims about the limits of human knowledge, it is no surprise that a skeptical and a naturalistic reading compete as the proper interpretation of the Treatise. Although Hume was traditionally viewed as a skeptic, more recently the view of the Treatise has been in the ascendancy.1 On this view, while Hume deploys various skeptical arguments, they are mainly in the service of revealing the essentially naturalistic structure of human cognition.2 In other words, Hume is taken to be engaged in a type of philosophical psychology, and the results of this project are taken to accord with generally naturalized claims about the mind. In this paper, however, I want to take issue with this version of Hume, and instead try to show not only that Hume's skepticism is an ineliminable feature of his view, but that in fact Hume's skepticism in the Treatise is complicit with his naturalism.31 propose to do this by enlisting help from what might initially seem to be an unlikely quarter: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and specifically the doctrine of illusion found in the Transcendental Dialectic.4 Both Kant and Hume, I will argue, come to realize that human reason is fraught with illusion—and, in fact, that this illusion is in an important sense natural. Moreover, both Kant and Hume distinguish between the natural illusions that characterize human reason and the errors that fol-

Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology

Zammito, John H. Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 576 pp. $68.00 hardcover; $29.00 paperback. In this prequel to his The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Zammito offers a compelling account of one of the most significant divergences in eighteenth century German thought: the breach between Kant and his student Herder over the relation of philosophy to anthropology, or the study of human nature. He presents the intellectual biographies of Kant and Herder as two trajectories which converged from roughly 1762-1767 and then diverged, sharply dividing the intellectual world then and subsequently. Zammito argues that the personal acquaintance between Kant and Herder coincided with a distinctive and underappreciated phase in Kant's career. In the early 1760s, Kant rejected the rationalist philosophy of the Wolffian tradition, in favor of the empiricism of the British philosophers and Rousseau. At the same time, he developed misgivings about the established role of a university professor as too isolated from the needs of an emerging German cultured class. He accordingly refashioned himself for a brief time as a Popularphilosophe. In this persona, Kant offered his students, including Herder, new intellectual vistas arising from empirical philosophy, including an anthropological study of the human mind and of history and culture. However, by 1768 Kant had begun to see new possibilities for a rigorous philosophy founded on rationalist principles, and to react against any signs of facile dilettantism in philosophy. During this new dogmatic turn, he offered a lukewarm response to Herder's early writings, thereby initiating a lifelong intellectual and personal breach between them. By the early 1770s, when Herder was reconceiving philosophy as an anthropological discipline, Kant was pursuing his own interest in anthropology as an empirical and pragmatic sideline, especially by developing a new course in anthropology at the University of Konigsberg: a survival of his ambitions as a popular philosopher, but rigorously separated from his philosophical work. In spite of its considerable strengths as a work of biography and intellectual history, Zammito's study deals only superficially with the main philosophical issue in the later divergence between Kant and Herder: the relationship of anthropology to philosophy, or more precisely of Herder's hermeneutic historicism to Kant's critical philosophy. …

Double Dialectics: Between Universalism and Relativism in Enlightenment and Postmodern Thought

Introduction: Between Universalism and Relativism: Philosophizing Common Sense The Postmodern Need for a Philosophy of Common Sense: Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and The Differend Dialectical Reduction: A Reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Beyond the Particular and the Universal: D'Alembert's Discours preliminaire to the Encyclopedie An Ethics of Cultural Exchange: Diderot's Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville Hybridity and Ethics in Chateaubriand's Atala The Dialectical Process of Decolonization: Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth The Problem of Cultural Relativism: Said's Orientalism and The World, the Text, and the Critic Bibliography Index.