Continental Philosophy

The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom by Robert Clewis:

In this book Robert R. Clewis shows how certain crucial concepts in Kant’s aesthetics and practical philosophy – the sublime, enthusiasm, freedom, empirical and intellectual interests, the idea of a republic – fit together and deepen our understanding of Kant’s philosophy. He examines the ways in which different kinds of sublimity reveal freedom and indirectly contribute to morality, and discusses how Kant’s account of natural sublimity suggests that we have an indirect duty with regard to nature. Unlike many other studies of these themes, this book examines both the pre-Critical Observations and the remarks that Kant wrote in his copy of the Observations. Finally, Clewis takes seriously Kant’s claim that enthusiasm is aesthetically sublime, and shows how this clarifies Kant’s views of the French Revolution. His book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant’s philosophy.

• Appendices summarise and classify Kant’s thoughts on enthusiasm, respect, beauty and sublimity • Clewis’ interpretation of aesthetic enthusiasm clarifies Kant’s views of the French Revolution • Draws upon Continental and analytic scholarship in English, French, Italian and German languages

Dreams in Exile: Rediscovering Science and Ethics in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory

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.

A review of Kenneth Rogerson’s The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics

Kant claims that the experience of beauty rests on what he calls a “harmony,” or a “free play” of the faculties of imagination and understanding, punctuated by pleasure. Famously, this free play is supposed to be “without concept” (§9, 5:217-9; 102-4).[1] In his new book, Kenneth Rogerson argues that “only the doctrine of beauty as the expression of ideas gives Kant a plausible explanation of how we can see objects of beauty as free harmonies” (p. 3).[2] The novelty of Rogerson’s approach is twofold. First, he argues that aesthetic ideas can explain not only artistic, but also natural beauty. Second, he stresses the importance of expression: both nature and art talk to us, as it were, and thereby bring about the free play of our faculties. Rogerson bases his solution to the problem of the concept-less harmony on a sharp distinction between concepts and ideas. Since his solution involves ideas rather than concepts, it meets Kant’s “no-concept” requirement head on: “an artwork (or natural object) that can be interpreted as expressing an aesthetic idea will accomplish this expression via a mental state that is free of concepts and yet orderly due to the fact that it expresses an idea” (p. 3).

The rest of the review

A review of Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective

Narrative conceptions of agency have attracted considerable philosophical interest in recent years, and both of these books make significant contributions to the growing literature on this theme. Each treats a wide range of related concepts, including not just narrative agency itself but also personal and practical identity, temporality and the self, practical reasoning, and autonomy.

Kim Atkins’ Narrative Identity and Moral Identity is a book about the nature of human selfhood. Atkins uses the terms “selfhood” and “identity” interchangeably, and approaches her subject in part through a discussion of theories of personal identity. Her central interest, however, is in practical rather than metaphysical identity. A person, in the sense of interest to Atkins, is a practical unity of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives (more on this below), and questions about personal identity, in her sense, are questions about the continuity of this practical unity over time.

Rest of the review

A review of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future by Fred Dallmayr:

The fate of reason today hangs in the balance. This is no small matter. Ever since its historical beginnings, reason or rationality has been the central focus and point of honor of Western modernity — a focus enshrined in Descartes’ cogito, Enlightenment rationalism, and Kantian (and neo-Kantian) critical philosophy. The result of this focus was an asymmetrical dichotomy: separated from the external world of “matter” (or nature), the cogito assumed the role of superior task master and overseer — a role fueling the enterprise of modern science and technology. During the past century, the edifice of Western modernity has registered a trembling, due to both internal and external contestations. Subverting the modern asymmetry, a host of thinkers – with views ranging from American pragmatism to European life philosophy and phenomenology — have endeavored to restore pre-cognitive “experience” (including sense perception and affect) to its rightful place. In the context of French “postmodernism,” a prominent battle cry has been to dislodge “logocentrism” (the latter term often equated with anthropocentrism). In the ambiance of recent German philosophy, the battle lines have been clearly marked: pitting champions of modern rationalism, represented by Jürgen Habermas, against defenders of experiential “world disclosure,” represented by Martin Heidegger. In his book, Nikolas Kompridis endeavors to shed new light on this controversy, with the aim not so much of bringing about a cease fire but of providing resources for arriving at better mutual understanding.

Read the rest of the review

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The ego, the Other and the primal fact — Toru Tani

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism — Dermot Moran

Some differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s conceptions of transcendental philosophy — Thomas J. Nenon

Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s ontological hermeneutics — Carlos Alberto Sanchez

A non-Bergsonian Bachelard — Jean François Perraudin

Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads Being and Time — Thomas Brockelman

Ricoeur and the pre-political — Farhang Erfani and John F. Whitmire

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Measure-taking: meaning and normativity in Heidegger’s philosophy — Steven Crowell
The destiny of freedom: in Heidegger — Hans Ruin
On Simmel’s conception of philosophy — Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Olli Pyyhtinen
Collective self-legislation as an Actus Impurus: a response to Heidegger’s critique of European nihilism — Hans Lindahl
Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian transcendental idealism — Adrian Johnston
DeLanda’s ontology: assemblage and realism — Graham Harman

Two of the most prominent questions in Kant’s critical philosophy concern reason. The first, central to his theoretical philosophy, is the unprovable pretensions of reason in earlier “rationalist” philosophers, especially Leibniz and Descartes. The second, central to his practical philosophy, is the subservient role accorded to reason by the British empiricists—above all Hume, who declared, “Reason is wholly inactive, and can never be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.” (Treatise, 3.1.1.11; see also the entry on Rationalism vs. Empiricism.) Thus the titles of two key works: the monumental Critique of Pure Reason, and the Critique of Practical Reason that is middle point of his great trio of moral writings (between the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and The Metaphysics of Morals).

Link

Review of Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume

Paul Guyer’s stated aims in this collection of previously published essays are to show that “the philosophical approach Kant developed for showing that our concept of and beliefs about causation have a foundation that Hume denied they have also provides Kant with an approach for addressing the concerns Hume raised about external objects and the self”, and that, beyond the domain of metaphysics proper, “important elements of Kant’s moral philosophy, his aesthetics, and his teleology can be fruitfully read as responses to Hume” (p. 7). These are fairly bland claims, but in the course of establishing them, Guyer presents in short compass his own systematic and comprehensive interpretations of these two thinkers in the areas in which their themes overlap. Here I summarize the basic positions Guyer stakes out for himself in the book’s five chapters, and express a few worries along the way.

Link to the review

Fark Yaralari’s e-texts, once more. Link

Link

(h/t: Robert Sinnerbrink)

We are pleased to release the June 2008 Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

The journal website: http://www.kritike.org
Current issue: http://www.kritike.org/Current_Issue.html
Call for papers: http://www.kritike.org/Call_for_Papers.html

KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008)

1. Editorial: Marking the First Year of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy – The Editor

Articles:

2. Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality – Mark W. Westmoreland

3. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: Tragedy, Love, and Religion – Kenneth Masong

4. ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die?’ – Saitya Brata Das

5. A Comparative Study on the Theme of Human Existence in the Novels of Albert Camus and F. Sionil Jose – F. P. A. Demeterio

6. The War on Concepts: The Thought of Jan Patocka and the War on Terror – Katy Scrogin

7. Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism – Saladdin Said Ahmed

8. The Causal Relevance and Heterogeneity of Program Explanations in the Face of Explanatory Exclusion – Wilson Cooper

9. A Freewheeling Defense of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy – Todd D. Janke

10. The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective – Michael James Braund

Book Reviews :

11. Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography – Marko Zlomislic

12. Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays – Robert C. Cheeks

13. Drake, David, Sartre and Bernasconi, Robert, How to Read Sartre – Marella Ada Mancenido

A review of Allen Wood’s Kantian Ethics

Read the review

2008 UK KANT SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Space and Time in Kant and Post-Kantian Philosophy

University of Sussex, 27-28 August

Link

JBSP: Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

Finitude: History & Politics

ANTONIO CALCAGNO: Michel Henry’s Non-Intentionality Thesis and Husserlian Phenomenology

FABIO PRESUTTI: Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and the ‘Idea of Language’ in the Synthesis of ‘Being’

BETH LORD: The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant’s Opus Postumum

JAMES N. McGUIRK: Aletheia and Heidegger’s Transitional Readings of Plato’s Cave Allegory

TRACY COLONY: The Wholly Other: Being and the Last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy

FARHANG ERFANI: Fixing Marx with Machiavelli: Claude Lefort’s Democratic Turn

Interview with Axel Honneth, in Le Monde, obviously in French.

Link

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Distributive Justice and Welfarism in Utilitarianism — Jörg Schroth

Gödel, Kant, and the Path of a Science — Srecko Kovac

Hegel's Account of Rule-Following — David Landy

Husserl, Phenomenology, and Foundationalism — Walter Hopp

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When was 9/11? Philosophy and the terror of futurity — Stella Gaon
    
Foucault's Kantian critique: Philosophy and the present — Christina Hendricks

Deliberation interrupted: Confronting Jürgen Habermas with Claude Lefort — Stefan Rummens

Collapsing categories: Fraser on economy, culture and justice — Chris Armstrong

Religion and capitalism: Weber, Marx and the materialist controversy — Juan Manuel Forte

Review essay: Postphenomenology: 'Festschrift' for Don Ihde (Under consideration: Evan Selinger's Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde) — Søren Riis

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on this topic.

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The role of judgment and orientation in hermeneutics — Rudolf A. Makkreel

Aesthetic reflection and its ethical significance: A critique of the Kantian solution — Christoph Menke

Does Kant share Sancho’s dream?: Judgment and sensus communis — Alessandro Ferrara

Reflective judgment as world disclosure — María Pía Lara

Imagination and judgment in Kant’s practical philosophy — Alfredo Ferrarin

Rereading `Truth and Politics’ — Ronald Beiner

Rereading Rawls in Arendtian light: Reflective judgment and historical experience — Carlos Thiebaut

Judgment and the reification of the faculties: A reconstructive reading of Arendt’s Life of the Mind — Robert Fine

Conscience, morality and judgment: An inquiry into the subjective basis of human rights — Serena Parekh