Confidence or trust is obviously a sort of reliance or dependence. Confidence is related to fiducia , which in turn is related to fido and to the Greek peitho . The latter term implies persuasion or persuasiveness. If we follow, as we should, the nuances hidden in these terms, we may assume that confidence is a reliance stemming from persuasion or accompanied by it. Confidence may be related to a person, including oneself, and in this sense we speak of self-confidence; (...) or it may be related to another person, either in the singular or in the plural, or even perhaps to the course of events at large, to history, to the cosmos, to God etc. It is in this sense that confidence is the opposite of or contradictory to fear. And Aristotle indeed placed the brave man between the two poles of fear and confidence. The man who exceeds in confidence is rash, and he who exceeds in fear and falls short in confidence is a coward. (shrink)

My aim is to prove that Hermann Cohen was not only a philosopher of dialogue but has played an exceedingly important role in the history of that current of thought. His books Ethics of Pure Will (1904) and Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) offer a detailed analysis of the relationships between I and Thou, I and It, I and We. In the first book these relationships are considered from the ethical-legal point of view and in (...) the second from the viewpoint of religious anthropology. However, Cohen considers the problem of inter-personal relationships not in isolation, but as an important component of his entire philosophical system. Deduction of the concept of personality in Ethics of Pure Will is based on Cohen’s logic of the origin expounded in the first part of his system in The Logic of Pure Cognition. Cohen explains that the origin of the self-consciousness of I as a personality is not the external world, but another person, i.e. Thou. In turn, the partnership relationships between I and Thou create the community We which forms the basis of the law-governed state. The process of artistic creation in the framework of inter-personal relationship is explored in Aesthetics of Pure Feeling. Finally, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism formulates the conception of religion as the most complete realisation of inter-personal relationship. Thus, dialogism became an important dimension of Cohen’s entire philosophical system, a fact noted by Martin Buber. Franz Rosenzweig, in unfolding dialogical thinking, expressly appeals to all the elements of Cohen’s system. There are signs of his influence on Bakhtin’s doctrine. Thus, examining Cohen’s doctrine as part of the philosophy of dialogue gives insights into this entire trend as a coherent whole. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is Cassirer’s Neo-Kantian reading of Kant’s conception of unity of space. Cassirer’s neo-Kantian reading is largely in conformity with the mainstream of intellectualist Kant-scholars, which is unsurprising, given his own intellectualist view of space and perception and his rejection of the existence of a ‘merely sensory consciousness’ as a ‘formless mass of impression’. I argue against Cassirer’s reading by relying on a Kantian distinction first recognized by Heinrich Rickert, a neo-Kantian from the Southwest school, between (...) Kenntnis (roughly knowledge by acquaintance) and Erkenntnis (roughly propositional knowledge). Correspondingly, I claim that concepts and categories are conditions for Erkenntnis of objects as such, namely for thinking of and apprehending the pre-existing unity as an object, rather than for the ‘constitution’ of this very unity. (shrink)