_Requiem for the Ego_ recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and (...) a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In _Requiem_, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism. (shrink)

The more recent interpretations of Kant’s 1768 essay Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space stressed the important role of the human body in determining the spatial feature of directionality. For that reason it seems to provide great support to an alternative account of Kant’s official doctrine of space in the Trascendental Aesthetic, namely a reading grounded on a «phenomenological» approach to the text. The present article firstly explains why a revision in translation allowed to discover (...) in the 1768 essay the new topic of the body. Then it shows how Kant’s remarks have been connected with his mature views by ascribing to him a constant phenomenological attitude. Finally it argues that a similar hypothesis is not much consistent with Kant’s aims, because of the methodological rules of philosophizing he was following in 1768. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of Freud's relationship with philosophy.

Kant is generally conceived to have offered little attention to the fact that we experience the world in and through our bodies. This book argues that this standard image of the great German philosopher is radically wrong. Not only does Kant - throughout his career and in works published before and after the Critique of pure reason - reflect constantly upon the fact that human life is embodied, but the Critique of pure reason itself may be read as a critical (...) reflection aimed at exploring some significant philosophical implications of this fact. Bringing this aspect of Kant's philosophy into focus is important, not only because it sheds new light on our understanding of Kant's work, but also because it is relevant to contemporary discussions in philosophy about embodiment, learning and practice. By taking his philosophy of embodiment into account, the author makes Kant stand out as a true contemporary in new and unexpected ways. (shrink)

Angelica Nuzzo offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's theory of sensibility in his three Critiques. By introducing the notion of "transcendental embodiment," Nuzzo proposes a new understanding of Kant's views on science, nature, morality, and art. She shows that the issue of human embodiment is coherently addressed and key to comprehending vexing issues in Kant's work as a whole. In this penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled with: How does a body that feels pleasure (...) and pain, desire, anger, and fear understand and experience reason and strive toward knowledge? What grounds the body's experience of art and beauty? What kind of feeling is the feeling of being alive? As she comes to grips with answers, Nuzzo goes beyond Kant to revise our view of embodiment and the essential conditions that make human experience possible. (shrink)

Linking the process of rational decision making to emotions, an award-winning scientist who has done extensive research with brain-damaged patients notes the dependence of thought processes on feelings and the body's survival-oriented regulators. 50,000 first printing.

The problems which that earlier period considered fundamental to all science were those of the theory of knowledge: What is true in our sense perceptions and thought? and In what way do our ideas correspond to reality? Philosophy and the natural sciences attack these questions from opposite directions, but they are the common problems of both. Philosophy, which is concerned with the mental aspect, endeavours to separate out whatever in our knowledge and ideas is due to the effects of the (...) material world, in order to determine the nature of pure mental activity. The natural sciences, on the other hand, seek to separate out definitions, systems of symbols, patterns of representation, and hypotheses, in order to study the remainder, which pertains to the world of reality whose laws they seek, in a pure form. Both try to achieve the same separation, though each is interested in a different part of the divided field. (shrink)

O presente comentário analisa um breve texto tardio de Kant sobre afisiologia especulativa. Além de ilustrar muito bem os princípios metodológicos doprograma de pesquisa kantiano para as ciências da natureza – segundo o qual as ficçõesespeculativas, de valor apenas heurístico, podem ser utilizadas para observar eorganizar fenômenos na procura de suas leis empíricas –, esse escrito antecipa,metodológica e epistemologicamente, os trabalhos de Freud sobre a metapsicogiafisiológica.t:This commentary analyzes a short text by late Kant on speculativephysiology. It ilustrates main metodological principles (...) of Kant’s research programmefor natural sciences – according to which speculative fictions with exclusively heuristicvalue are allowed to be used in observing and organizing phenomena in search forempirical laws – and in addition it anticipates, both methodologically andespistemologically, Freud’s writings on physilogical metapsychology. (shrink)