Pure Concepts Research Articles

“Another Logic is known”: Benedetto Croce's assessment of “Indian Logic”

AbstractThis essay aims to shed new light on the theoretical pertinence of classical Indian logic and epistemology in Benedetto Croce's criticism of Western Aristotelian and modern logic. As a matter of fact, Croce gave a positive and extraordinarily enterprising evaluation of “Indian Logic” in his review of Hermann Jacobi's Indische Logik (1905) and in his book Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept (1996 [1909]). Yet Croce's significant and considerable evaluation of “Indian Logic” has remained neglected until today. This essay tries to clear the field of some prejudices that misled scholarly research on Croce and Indian philosophy, and it glosses in detail the “neglected” judgment on “Indian Logic” in Croce's Logic. In doing so, it critically discusses some epistemological questions starting from Croce's philosophy, such as the character of “natural induction,” the relationship between language and thought, and the connection between historical languages and logical forms.

The Concept of Transcendental Apperception and its Role in the Second Edition of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction

The aim of this article is to trace the meaning that Immanuel Kant assigns to the concept of transcendental apperception and to present its role in the second edition of the Transcendental Deduction in his Critique of Pure Reason. It will be shown that the doctrine of transcendental apperception resolves some problematic features of the theories of consciousness in the traditions of Rationalism and Empiricism. In this regard, Kant’s transcendental apperception will be examined in contrast with the concepts of inner sense (John Locke and David Hume), Cogito (René Descartes), and intellectual intuition (Gottfried Leibniz). This comparative approach will allow us to gain a clearer understanding of the meaning of transcendental apperception. Finally, its role in the justification of the pure concepts of understanding will be considered.

Design, the Decoration of Culture?

Interior designers have tended, like architects, to determine three-dimensional space using geometry by manipulating representations of material substances or building work. Geometry without substance is of thought only and only has one quantity; number. As such design becomes the manipulation of representations with the traditions of geometry. One of those traditions is the understanding of geometry as pure static Cartesian abstraction impurely expressed in substance. Design has tended to do this for a number of reasons, one of which is to engage more fully with the design of built form and another is to distance itself from decoration. This paper explores the issue and asks three questions: Is the repetition of Enlightenment geometry a necessary condition for architecture and design? If it is, does material substance become merely an excessive characteristic of pure concepts conceived as pure abstract geometry? Is culture becoming so dependent on geometry that to make geometry a pure abstraction is to understand material substance as excessive? These questions are reformulated through the investigative process of the paper and are asked in a different form as a conclusion.

Kant on Philosophy as Conceptual Analysis

For Kant, philosophical investigations are inherently analytic. The proper method of philosophy is analysis, and the object of analysis are concepts. Hence, Kant’s short description of philosophy as “rational cognition […] from concepts” (KrV, A 837/B 865) can be substituted by “philosophy is conceptual analysis”. The article shows that Kant follows a representationalism about concepts and a combination of intensional and extensional feature semantics. Against the claim that Kant is a proponent of the concept-judgement-inversion, it is argued that concepts are being articulated in form of singular terms, propositions, and sets of propositions alike. Kant interlinks different kinds of concepts with different kinds of definitions, as the reconstruction of his theory of definitions reveals. Philosophy foremost deals with what Kant calls “given” empirical and pure concepts. Such concepts are object of analysis, i.e., explication and exposition. The article ends with answers to five possible objections. Is philosophy all about analysis?

C. I. Lewis's Theory of Ideas: Royce's Problem and Lewis's Solution

Abstract Implicit in C. I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism is an account of how our ideas undergo a process of social development. Lewis's account of that process resolves a problem with Josiah Royce's theory of ideas. Royce holds that there are both sensuous and symbolic ideas. It is, however, possible for someone to have only a sensuous idea of how middle C sounds and for another person to have only the symbolic idea that middle C is 261.63 Hz. In what sense, if at all, can these two persons have the same idea, namely, the idea of middle C? On Lewis's account, while ideas in individual minds are typically constituted of both sensory correlates and pure concepts, ideas are also social products that individuals inherit through education and language acquisition. For two people to have the same idea is for them both to be heirs to the social development of the idea.

Sellarsian image- models and Kantian Imagination

It has been assumed by an important element of Kantian scholarship that there is a central connection between the categories and the logical forms of judgement (let us call this the ‘Standard View’ or SV). Although this suggestion is true in a broad sense, it has prevented interpreters from appreciating one fundamental idea of Kant’s theoretical philosophy: that the employment of pure concepts pertains in an equally fundamental way to the unification of sensory material, or what Kant calls the ‘manifold of sense in intuition’, as Wilfrid Sellars has pointed out in his theory of ‘image- models’. We will call this ‘Kantian Intuitionism’, as opposed to the SV. Not only that, this widely held connection of category to judgement has caused what we may call a ‘propositional’ prejudice in contemporary discussions on conceptualism. Specifically, we can appreciate this misconception within the famous Dreyfus- McDowell debate, and their mutual incapacity to account for the Kantian premise that conceptuality suffuses sensory experience without appealing to propositional structures. Parting from Kant’s ‘Clue’ [B104/A79], our contention in this article is that his idea that conceptuality is embedded in both judgmental thought and perception, can be shown to be an appropriate answer to the Standard View, and furthermore, to constitute a starting point to enlarge the comprehension of some doctrines of Kantian theoretical philosophy. Among these, the Transcendental Deduction and the Schematism. In this sense, our reading will show the broad implications of the ‘Clue’, not only for the comprehension of Kant, but also for the clarification of some contemporary philosophical discussions.

Reproduction of Architecture in Modernizing Local Architecture: The Case of Muqarnas

The present study aims to investigate the cultural identity concept and its relation to cultural heritage within a conservation framework under the threat of unfettered interventions for modernity and its requirements by analyzing the reproduced architectural works. Furthermore, the study focused on clarifying and tracking the effects of architectural reproduction on society and individuals, as well as on the local way of thinking and local culture in a specific region known as the "Levant." The research method is developed in two interconnected ways: qualitative 'interpretive' research methods are used to explain the pure concept of cultural heritage, while a 'simulation strategy' is used between traditional and historical architectural elements to create new architectural elements with historical origins and contemporary touches. Construct logic is a method of "modernizing local architecture”, in that it controls modern architecture and uses it to develop local architecture rather than obliterating and distorting it. "Muqarnas," one of the Islamic architectural decorative elements widely used in the Levant and surrounding geography, is chosen as the simulation case study for developing new contemporary architectural elements used both structurally and decoratively. The simulation approach used in the study is limited to several traditional architectural elements from the study's historical and cultural context, which were documented with architectural and technical data as well as illustrative drawings. It may be possible to raise conservation awareness by simulating some traditional architectural elements and developing them in a highly technical environment. Furthermore, it can provide the opportunity to obtain new architectural elements of a contemporary cultural nature that resist architectural reproduction in a variety of internal and external fields, as well as structural solutions.

Towards Robust Metrics for Concept Representation Evaluation

Recent work on interpretability has focused on concept-based explanations, where deep learning models are explained in terms of high-level units of information, referred to as concepts. Concept learning models, however, have been shown to be prone to encoding impurities in their representations, failing to fully capture meaningful features of their inputs. While concept learning lacks metrics to measure such phenomena, the field of disentanglement learning has explored the related notion of underlying factors of variation in the data, with plenty of metrics to measure the purity of such factors. In this paper, we show that such metrics are not appropriate for concept learning and propose novel metrics for evaluating the purity of concept representations in both approaches. We show the advantage of these metrics over existing ones and demonstrate their utility in evaluating the robustness of concept representations and interventions performed on them. In addition, we show their utility for benchmarking state-of-the-art methods from both families and find that, contrary to common assumptions, supervision alone may not be sufficient for pure concept representations.

Analysis and Necessity in Arithmetic in Light of Maimon’s Concept of Number as Ratio

Abstract The article examines how Salomon Maimon’s concept of number as ratio can be used to demonstrate that arithmetical judgments are analytical. Based on his critique of Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments, I show how this notion of number fulfills Maimon’s requirements for apodictic knowledge. Moreover, I suggest that Maimon was influenced by mathematicians who previously defined number as a ratio, such as Wallis and Newton. Following an analysis of the real definition of this concept, I conclude that within the framework of Maimon’s philosophy, arithmetical judgments cannot be analytical, nor is arithmetic an objectively necessary science, but rather only subjectively necessary. We should also cast doubt on his claim that we can create real objects from pure concepts of the understanding.

English language teachers’ conceptions of assessment

Conceptions of assessment are critical to implementing new assessment policies since they influence how teachers understand, interpret, and implement new policies. This small-scale qualitative study investigated 12 secondary school English language teachers’ views about the current secondary school assessment policy and their conceptions of assessment. The data were collected through in-depth interviews in Maputo, Mozambique. The findings suggest that most participants are unfamiliar with the current assessment policy. The participants conceive of assessment as extrinsically motivating students, improving teaching and learning, holding students accountable, reporting, compliance, and irrelevant. Some participants reported pure conceptions of assessment (either improvement or student accountability), while others reported mixed conceptions (either mixed school and student accountability and improvement and mixed student accountability and irrelevant). The emerging profiles of teachers’ conceptions of assessment are expected to provide a starting point for a discussion about designing effective professional development programs in assessment literacy in Mozambique.

Separation of Power: An Elusive Dream

This article describes the basic doctrine of separation of power to highlight how this doctrine has evolved. Then, this article inspects whether this doctrine is practically viable or an elusive dream. To this end, this research article utilised qualitative research methodology and focuses on the nature and effectiveness of the doctrine of separation of power. The article investigates whether the separation of power is a pure or genuine concept to pinpoint its complex nature. Then, this article critically analyses the less purity in Montesquieu’s concept of separation of power. In the end, this article scrutinizes and finds the pure concept of separation of power.

Kant on the Limits of Human Knowledge

This paper tackles Kant’s theory of knowledge. The authors explain Kant’s answer to the questions he put forward, i.e. What can I know? What and how senses and understanding know? And what part of knowledge is a priori? And what is posteriori? To answer these questions, Kant wrote his great book ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ on which the authors depend in this paper. The main idea Kant start with is “though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience”. In Kant’s view, knowledge arises from the combination of sense intuitions which are the manifold of representations of things as they appear to us, with the pure concepts of the understanding, i.e., categories, under what Kant called “the synthetic unity of apperception” i.e., the “I think” which must accompany all our representations. Kant used the faculty of imagination which creates schemata to facilitate the employment of the pure concepts of the understanding, i.e., categories to the manifold of sense intuitions. The authors concluded with Kant that our knowledge is limited to the scope of experience.

Kant’s Categories of Quantity and Quality, Reconsidered: From the Point of View of the History of Logic and Natural Science

According to Kant, the division of the categories “is not the result of a search after pure concepts undertaken at haphazard,” but is derived from the “complete” classification of judgments developed by traditional logic. However, the sorts of judgments that he enumerates in his table of judgments are not all ones that traditional logic has dealt with; consequently, we must say that he chose the sorts of judgments in question with a certain intention. Besides, we know that his choice of judgments and categories is strongly influenced by certain views of natural science that he fully accepts. For this reason, his argumentations are sometimes seriously inconsistent. As to Kant’s argumentations of categories, many problems have already been pointed out, but in this paper, I take up the categories of quantity and quality once more, and make clear his argumentations’ hidden logic and its distortion from the point of view of the history of logic and natural science. First, I confirm that there are non-negligible problems in his explanation to the effect that his derivation of the categories of quantity and quality is based on the quantity and quality of judgments. Next, I reconsider the meaning of his treating the categories of quantity and quality as pure concepts of the understanding. Finally, I conclude that by having recourse to the categories of quantity and quality Kant tried unjustly to apriorize the distinction between the “extensive magnitude” and “intensive magnitude” that has a long formational history since Aristotle.

The Importance of Kant’s Schematism for Schelling’s Project of a Philosophy of Nature

Abstract Counteracting a widespread interpretation of Schelling’s project of a philosophy of nature as anti-Kantian, this paper claims that Kant’s doctrine of the schematism plays a central role in the emergence and development of Schelling’s project. My argument will be structured in the following way. First, I will discuss Schelling’s reception of the schematism in his Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature of 1797, especially as regards his association of it with Kant’s dynamical conception of matter in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Relying on this reconstruction, I will argue, secondly, that Schelling brings together a central issue of the Critique of Pure Reason (the objectivity of pure concepts) and the overall problem of the Metaphysical Foundations (the transition from pure philosophy to empirical sciences) by addressing the issue of a schematism specifically related to outer sense. Thirdly, I maintain that this issue is at the core of the overall argument developed in the Ideas, where it appears in the form of a schematism of “materiality as such”. Finally, I suggest that the notion of a schematism of materiality as such offers a useful key to understanding the unfolding of Schelling’s project between 1797 and 1800.

Allen W. Wood: Kant and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 270 Seiten. ISBN 978-1-10-842234-5.

Abstract I present and develop a novel account of the schematism by reading it through the distinction between constitution and regulation. I thus show that Kant’s stipulation of only eight schemata for the twelve pure concepts of the understanding is not haphazard but answers, instead, to two distinct processes of synthesis, mathematical and dynamical, that either constitute objects in intuition or regulate objects of experience. Based on this, I offer a detailed reconstruction of each of the schemata specified by Kant, and I provide an explanation of the systematic role each plays in the Analytic.

Kant's Copernican Revolution and the Theory of Experience

The article analyzes the relationship between Kant's “Copernican revolution” and his theory of experience. The author demonstrates that the principles of the “altered way of thinking” form the foundation of the theory of experience and determine the structure and characteristics of transcendental cognition. The author explicates the structural elements of experience: sensible intuitions, pure a priori concepts of understanding, pure transcendental synthesis, schematism of pure concepts, principles as a system of rules for the use of categories, regulative ideas of reason. All these elements are constitutive and regulative components of experience. In this case, Kant's theory of experience is the realistic constructivism.

Understanding and Imagination. A Kantian Interpretation of Hegel's “Inverted World”

In this article, I discuss an interpretation of Hegel's concept of the “Inverted World” (verkehrte Welt), which is present in the final part of the chapter on Force and Understanding in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Other than my own reading of the chapter, I also summarize the three most important interpretations of the verkehrte Welt from the last century: those of Jean Hyppolite, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Joseph Flay. I have chosen these three due to the typology of interpretation within them: the first one adopts a Christian reading of Hegel, the second a Hellenistic phenomenological interpretation, and the last one, which is closest to the interpretation I also propose, a reading consistent with the thought of Immanuel Kant. The article ends with a possible interpretation of Hegel's verkehrte Welt through Kant's “Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” from his Critique of Pure Reason, where I argue that Kant's fundamental faculty of imagination and its object, schemata, play the same role in Kant's system that Hegel's verkehrte Welt does in the development of natural consciousness.

БРОСОК КОСТЕЙ: НИЦШЕ О ЧИСТОМ ПОНЯТИИ «ПРИРОДА»

The article explores the meaning of the pure concept of «nature» found in Nietzsche’s 1881 drafts and associated with the project of returning the «meaning to the earth». As a rule, this concept and its historical consequences remain out of sight of researchers studying Nietzsche’s philosophy and Nietzscheism. This omission overshadows some important lines of genesis of modern philosophical ontologies, largely due to the split in the interpretation of nature after the era of romanticism. One of the strategies of this split is embodied in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and, through him, in the poetic ontologies of the 20th century. The study undertaken in this article primarily proceeds from Nietzsche’s texts of 1881–1882, when the idea of eternal return took shape, and then reconstructs the place of the pure concept of «nature» in the general context of the thinker’s works. The paper also analyzes the key interpretations of works by Nietzsche offered in the middle and second half of the 20th century. The greatest attention is paid to the texts of M. Heidegger and J. Deleuze, but also W. Kaufmann, P. Klossovsky, R. Safransky, P. Sloterdijk, and A. Badiou. The result of this hermeneutic and comparative-analytical work is the consideration of the pure concept of «nature» as the «meaning of the earth» through the unity of three concepts — the Dionysian worldview, the eternal return, and the will to power. The paper concludes that the concept of «nature» as immediate expressiveness of existence is opposed to the abstractness of the classical New European concept of nature («natura»). In other words, it is an ontology of «a Throw of the Dice», i.e. ontology of the chance, freeing the singularity from reflexive mediation.

Book Review. A New Insight into Theory of Conceptual Metaphor

Book Review. A New Insight into Theory of Conceptual Metaphor

Concept-less Schemata: The Reciprocity of Imagination and Understanding in Kant’s Aesthetics

AbstractIn this paper, I discuss Kant’s concept-less schematism (KU, 5: 287) in the thirdCritique1and make three claims: 1) concept-less schematism is entirely consistent with the schematism in the firstCritique; 2) concept-less schematism is schematism with noempiricalconcept as an outcome; and 3) in accordance with 1) and 2), the imagination is free to synthesize the given manifold and leads to judgements of taste without this meaning either that the categories play no role at all or that these judgements are full-fledged cognitive determining judgements. While most commentators read the freedom of the imagination as its independence from the understanding, I argue that the freedom of the imagination is based on a non-determining employment of the pure concepts of the understanding. The freedom of the aesthetic imagination consists in the temporal schematization of the categories without any complementary determination of the empirical concept.