Had Rousseau still been around, maybe he’d have also played a cameo role in a new hit documentary, Inequality for All, directed by Jacob Kornbluth with economist Robert Reich as the unlikely lead. (Rousseau’s appearance would have only been cameo, of course, because later in life he avoided the limelight he’d courted earlier in life; and he was a reluctant public orator, despite being a dab hand at voicing inconvenient public truths.) Inequality for All follows Reich teaching his packed undergraduate class on Wealth and Poverty at UC Berkeley. In 1978, Reich says, your typical male worker doing just fine in the US was pulling in around $48,000 a year; your boss back then was probably making around $390,000. Thirty-odd years on, in 2010, the former struggles to earn $33,000 a year, while the latter’s average share has bloated to well over a million bucks a year.

via Old Discourse on New Inequality – Andy Merrifield | Pluto Press – Independent Progressive Publishing.

Neo-Kantianism

By its broadest definition, the term ‘Neo-Kantianism’ names any thinker after Kant who both engages substantively with the basic ramifications of his transcendental idealism and casts their own project at least roughly within his terminological framework. In this sense, thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Mach, Husserl, Foucault, Strawson, Kuhn, Sellers, Nancy, Korsgaard, and Friedman could loosely be considered Neo-Kantian. More specifically, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ refers to two multifaceted and internally-differentiated trends of thinking in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Centuries: the Marburg School and what is usually called either the Baden School or the Southwest School. The most prominent representatives of the former movement are Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer. Among the latter movement are Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Several other noteworthy thinkers are associated with the movement as well.

via Neo-Kantianism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

Reviewed by J. M. Fritzman, Lewis & Clark College

This is the first of eight volumes in the series The History of Continental Philosophy. In his introductory chapter, Thomas Nenon notes that, in contrast to analytic philosophy, continental philosophy developed through a deep and sustained dialogue with Kants philosophy and those thinkers influenced by it in France and Germany during the nineteenth century. He is correct; Kants philosophy begins its rehabilitation in analytic philosophy with the 1966 publications of Jonathan Bennetts Kants Analytic and Peter Strawsons Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kants Critique of Pure Reason. He also observes that, although Kants philosophy has now been appropriated by both analytic and continental philosophy, the other philosophers discussed in this book have generally been ignored in analytic philosophy.

Nenon writes that the French Revolution was taken by Kant to directly challenge two of the fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment. The first belief was that enlightenment is compatible with order, stability, and the gradual reform of political and social institutions. The second was that progress in any one area of human endeavor would be mirrored by progress in other areas. Nenon suggests that there were two chief responses to this challenge. The “romantic view” of Fichte, the early Hegel, and Marx maintained that progress will result in the elimination of the state. The “realist position” of the later Hegel held that the rational state is not only required for progress but is itself an instance of that progress.

Following this introductory chapter, there are ten that discuss specific philosophers.

via Kant, Kantianism, and Idealism: The Origins of Continental Philosophy // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

Stephen Hawking recently fluttered the academic dovecotes by writing in his new book The Grand Design – and repeating to an eager company of interviewers and journalists – that philosophy as practised nowadays is a waste of time and philosophers a waste of space. More precisely, he wrote that philosophy is ‘dead’ since it hasn’t kept up with the latest developments in science, especially theoretical physics. In earlier times – Hawking conceded – philosophers not only tried to keep up but sometimes made significant scientific contributions of their own. However they were now, in so far as they had any influence at all, just an obstacle to progress through their endless going-on about the same old issues of truth, knowledge, the problem of induction, and so forth. Had philosophers just paid a bit more attention to the scientific literature they would have gathered that these were no longer live issues for anyone remotely au fait with the latest thinking. Then their options would be either to shut up shop and cease the charade called ‘philosophy of science’ or else to carry on and invite further ridicule for their head-in-the-sand attitude.

via Hawking contra Philosophy | Philosophy Now.

via Immortality [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy].

For this 17th century outsider, philosophy is like a spiritual practice, whose goal is happiness and liberation

Although Baruch Spinoza is one of the great thinkers of the European philosophical tradition, he was not a professional scholar – he earned his modest living as a lens grinder. So, unlike many thinkers of his time, he was unconstrained by allegiance to a church, university or royal court. He was free to be faithful to the pursuit of truth. This gives his philosophy a remarkable originality and intellectual purity – and it also led to controversy and charges of heresy. In the 19th century, and perhaps even more recently, “Spinozist” was still a term of abuse among intellectuals.

via Spinoza, part 1: Philosophy as a way of life | Clare Carlisle | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. The fundamental idea of Kant's “critical philosophy” — especially in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — is human autonomy. He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system.

via Immanuel Kant (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Link

Volume 13 Issue Number 2 Fall 2009
Volume 13 Numéro 2 Automne 2009

Table of Contents/Table des matières

Articles

Foucault et Taylor sur la vérité, la liberté et l’identité subjective. Le vouloir-dire-vrai dans la parrêsia, VALÉRIE DAOUST

Deleuze’s Post-Critical Metaphysics, ALISTAIR WELCHMAN

Nietzsche as a Reader of Wilhelm Roux, or the Physiology of History, LUKAS SODERSTROM

Hume et Bergson, une pratique de la méthode chez Deleuze. Réflexions pour une éthique de la lecture, RENÉ LEMIEUX

The Threat of Givenness in Jean-Luc Marion: Toward a New Phenomenology of Psychosis, JOSEPH CAREW

Book Panel/Table-ronde

Bernhard Radloff’s Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt, GRAEME NICHOLSON, TOM ROCKMORE AND BERNHARD RADLOFF
Étude critique/Review Essay

Michel Foucault : Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres et Le Courage de la vérité, ALAIN BEAULIEU

Description: Examines the influence of Aristotle and Kant on the nineteenth-century social theory of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber.

The classical origins of nineteenth-century social theory are illuminated in this sequel to the award-winning Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece. George E. McCarthy stresses the importance of Aristotle and Kant in the creation of a new type of social science in the nineteenth century that represented a critical reaction to Enlightenment rationality and modern liberalism. The seminal social theorists Marx, Durkheim, and Weber integrated Aristotle’s theory of moral economy and practical wisdom (phronesis) with Kant’s theory of knowledge and moral autonomy. The resulting social theories, uniquely supported by a view of practical science that wove together science and ethics, proved instrumental to the development of modern sociology and anthropology.

George E. McCarthy is National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College. His books include Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece, also published by SUNY Press; Objectivity and the Silence of Reason: Weber, Habermas, and the Methodological Disputes in German Sociology; Romancing Antiquity: German Critique of the Enlightenment from Weber to Habermas; and Dialectics and Decadence: Echoes of Antiquity in Marx and Nietzsche.