It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In _Lines of Thought_, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes’s _Discours de la méthode_ and _Géométrie_, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and (...) the significance of graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy. While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes’s method and _cogito_ have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes’s notion of intuition, the “things” Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his “foundation” in the _Discours_, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes’s literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and “I” are the only “things” we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the _cogito_, Descartes’s theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the _Géométrie_ as a freely constructed line of thought, the _cogito_, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between “the ancients and the moderns.” Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, _Lines of Thought_ will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern. (shrink)

The previous chapter provided not only concrete evidence that Kant's System is based on the principle of perspective [II.2-3], but also a general outline of its perspectival structure [II.4]. The task this sets for the interpreter is to establish in greater detail the extent to which the System actually does unfold according to this pattern. This will be undertaken primarily in Parts Two and Three. But before concluding Part One, it will be helpful to examine in more detail the logical (...) structure of the relationships between the various parts of Kant's System, and how they fit together to compose what we have called Kant's 'Copernican Perspective'. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to better understand Kant’s conception of philosophy as a “world concept”, which is at the heart of the Architectonic of Pure Reason. This is pursued in two major parts. The first evaluates the textual foundation for reading Kant’s world concept of philosophy as cosmopolitanism and concludes that he most probably never himself equated philosophy as a world concept with any form of cosmopolitanism. The second major part of the paper clarifies (...) this concept of philosophy through the specific role it plays in the argument of the Architectonic. Kant’s unique concept of science is examined and compared with several specific applications of it found elsewhere in Kant’s writings. From this it is concluded that Kant’s intention in the Architectonic was to derive his world concept of philosophy from its logical counterpart, namely the scholastic concept of philosophy, and that its function there is to provide the idea from which the entire structure of Kantian critical metaphysics can be derived. Philosophy as a world concept, it is further argued, is the complete system of critical or Kantian metaphysics in application and the philosopher in this sense is the ideal critical metaphysician who fully realizes its laws through her own understanding and will. (shrink)

Locates in Schelling a new understanding of our relation to nature in philosophy.

Did Chinese mysticism vanish after its first appearance in ancient Taoist philosophy, to surface only after a thousand years had passed, when the Chinese had adapted Buddhism to their own culture? This first integrated survey of the mystical dimension of Taoism disputes the commonly accepted idea of such a hiatus. Covering the period from the Daode jing to the end of the Tang, Livia Kohn reveals an often misunderstood Chinese mystical tradition that continued through the ages. Influenced by but (...) ultimately independent of Buddhism, it took forms more various than the quietistic withdrawal of Laozi or the sudden enlightenment of the Chan Buddhists. On the basis of a new theoretical evaluation of mysticism, this study analyzes the relationship between philosophical and religious Taoism and between Buddhism and the native Chinese tradition. Kohn shows how the quietistic and socially oriented Daode jing was combined with the ecstatic and individualistic mysticism of the Zhuangzi, with immortality beliefs and practices, and with Buddhist insight meditation, mind analysis, and doctrines of karma and retribution. She goes on to demonstrate that Chinese mysticism, a complex synthesis by the late Six Dynasties, reached its zenith in the Tang, laying the foundations for later developments in the Song traditions of Inner Alchemy, Chan Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism. (shrink)

In this paper, a formal theory is presented that describes syntactic and semantic mechanisms of philosophical discourses. They are treated as peculiar language systems possessing deep derivational structures called architectonic forms of philosophical systems, encoded in philosophical mind. Architectonic forms are constituents of more complex structures called architectonic spaces of philosophy. They are understood as formal and algorithmic representations of various philosophical traditions. The formal derivational machinery of a given space determines its class of (...) all possible architectonic forms. Some of them stand under factual historical philosophical systems and they organize processes of doing philosophy within these systems. Many architectonic forms have never been realized in the history of philosophy. The presented theory may be interpreted as falling under Hegel’s paradigm of comprehending cultural texts. This paradigm is enriched and inspired with Propp’s formal, morphological view on texts. The peculiarity of this modification of the Hegel-Propp paradigm consists of the use of algebraic and algorithmic tools of modeling processes of cultural development. To speak metaphorically, the theory is an attempt at the mathematical and logical history of philosophy inspired by the Internet metaphor. And that is why it belongs to the tradition of doing metaphilosophy in The Lvov-Warsaw School, which is continued today mainly by Woleński, Pelc, Perzanowski, and Jadacki. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martin Heidegger and OntologyEmmanuel Levinas (bio)The prestige of Martin Heidegger 1 and the influence of his thought on German philosophy marks both a new phase and one of the high points of the phenomenological movement. Caught unawares, the traditional establishment is obliged to clarify its position on this new teaching which casts a spell over youth and which, overstepping the bounds of permissibility, is already in vogue. For (...) once, Fame has picked one who deserves it and, for that matter, one who is still living. Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride. In this study, it is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him.To get to the heart of Heidegger’s system, it seems fitting to begin with a problem that is generally familiar. We choose the problem of knowledge, a deeper understanding of which takes us to the very threshold of Heidegger’s thought. For this problem, central to modern philosophy, is one of the main obstacles of modern philosophy that Heidegger wishes to surmount. Neo-Kantianism, which takes knowledge as the philosophical problem of the first rank, is the movement against which Heidegger rebels with all his strength. We have, thus, every chance of gaining access to his thought by the main door, so to speak. Once inside the system we will try to trace its outlines, 2 reserving, for a second part of our work, the determination of Heidegger’s place in the history of ideas, especially in the phenomenological movement, as well as of his relations with the philosopher to whom he owes so much—Edmund Husserl. 31In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots. That knowledge should need a criterion at all presupposes that truth is not identical to all that is known and that the course [End Page 11] of things can fail to correspond with the course of thought. “How does knowledge correspond to being?” is a more profound formulation of the problem of knowledge.But we are not going to touch anymore on the primordial phenomenon that generates the problem. The problem of correspondence between thing and thought presupposes a free activity of thought and its isolation in relation to the object. It is precisely this presupposition which renders their harmony and even their contact problematic. “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” is what the problem of knowledge, in the last analysis, boils down to. Its true source is thus the concept of “subject” as elaborated by modern philosophy. The cogito presided over the subject’s birth. The cogito was the affirmation of the privileged nature of the subject’s immanent sphere, of its unique place in existence; hence, the cogito was the specificity of the subject’s connection to the rest of reality, the sui generis nature which opens up the passage from immanence to transcendence, the passage from ideas contained in the thinking substance to 4 their “formal existence.”The concept of the subject, understood as a substance having a specific position in the entire domain of being, presents us with difficulties of two kinds. First, how do we understand this leave-taking from the self which the thinking substance brings about and which displays an entirely original aspect? Indeed, we could say that thought, in reaching out toward objects, does not actually take leave of itself, since its objects—considered as ideas and contents of thought—are, in a certain sense, already within it. In order to make sense of this paradox, Descartes... (shrink)

This is a revised version of a paper that was originally presented at the first Kant in Asia international conference (on the theme "The Unity of Human Personhood") in May of 2009. It was published as Chapter 64 in Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy, ed. Stephen R. Palmquist (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp.811-821. I argue that Kant and the Yijing both employ a form of architectonic reasoning, though their respective understandings of the logical structure of human (...) reasoning are incommensurable. A more thoroughly revised version of the paper was later published in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy and was followed by a series of several other articles arguing that there is a way of arranging the Yijing's 64 hexagrams such that their form is compatible with the form of Kant's table of categories. (shrink)

This is a thoroughly revised version of a paper that I originally presented at the "Kant in Asia" international conference on "The Unity of Human Personhood, held in Hong Kong in May of 2009. After explaining what Kant means by his "architectonic" form of reasoning, I argue that the Yijing (the Chinese "Book of Changes") exhibits the same type of reasoning. I contrast two uses of architectonic reasoning: divining the truth vs. divination. The article concludes with an illustration (...) of how the Yijing might be used as a guidebook for obtaining wisdom. (shrink)

Bourdieu’s thought is disturbing. Provocative. Scandalous even, at least for those who do not easily tolerate the unmitigated truth about the social. Nonetheless his ideas, among the most important and innovative of our time, are here to stay. This thought has taken form in the course of a career and through works on diverse subjects that have constructed a far-reaching analytical model of social life, which the author calls more readily an anthropology rather than a sociology. In their totality, they (...) constitute today an original and powerful proposal to explain human practices. In the face of criticisms commonly leveled at Bourdieu’s thought (notably the charge that it reduces everything to a single schematic model), it is important to identify the spirit of his enterprise. Early on, it is true, his thought drew on a few fundamental concepts—the trilogy habitus, field (champ), practice (pratique)—to which it constantly returned, and followed a clearly defined trajectory. At the same time, however, he continually reformulated, adapted, and refined his analytical model, depending on the operations to which he subjected new objects of inquiry. The regenerative and transformative force of his thought was supported by two convictions. First, that there being nothing more vain than theory for theory’s sake, it is preferable that theoretical production originate in the study of concrete and occasionally very specific cases. Second, that in order to escape stereotypical classifications, boundaries separating disciplines are best transgressed, thereby favoring new constructions of the object of inquiry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Architectonic, Truth, and RhetoricGlenn Alexander MageeScientists, we are often told, employ "aesthetic criteria" in their work: a scientific theory must be "simple" and "elegant" if it is to be a good candidate for truth.1 Is this also true of philosophers? Do philosophers rely (implicitly or explicitly) on aesthetic criteria in the development of their ideas, not simply in order to make their ideas accessible or palatable but also (...) as a guide to truth? This question bears on the relationship between art and philosophy, between art and truth, and between beauty and truth. If the answer is yes, then is there a point at which the line between art and philosophy becomes blurred? This is often claimed, though almost always in reference to the way in which philosophers use metaphor and rhetoric to express their ideas. However, I am suggesting in addition that the line may be blurred not just in the expression of their ideas but in the very form or structure they give to their philosophies. This aesthetic moment is not dispensable. On the contrary, philosophers make their thought into an aesthetic object because of a tacit, pre-reflective intuition that the beautiful is the true. In what follows, I will argue for this thesis and explore its implications.I.First of all, the philosophers I have in mind are philosophers in the classic sense: creators of systematic worldviews, those who aim at knowledge of the whole. I have in mind, therefore, thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, [End Page 59] Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, among others. All these thinkers are alike in that they do not approach philosophy piecemeal, as a set of disconnected "problems." Instead, they take the aim of philosophy to be to give a complete account of what is real. In the introduction to The Phenomenology of Spirit, for instance, Hegel writes that philosophy is "actual cognition of what truly is" (1977, 46). This is a definition one can imagine Plato and Aristotle—indeed almost all of the great philosophers—agreeing with. Philosophical knowledge, in this classical understanding, becomes a whole of ideas in which each element depends on every other and nothing of significance is left out. (Perhaps the best example of such a philosophy is, again, Hegel's.) It is only to "systems" of philosophy that our question about aesthetic criteria in philosophy is applicable,2 for it is only when a number of ideas are taken together into an overall structure and given a fundamental unity that a philosophy can become "beautiful" or "ugly."The Greek word sustema literally means "things which stand together or are made to stand together so as to form a whole" or "a whole compounded of several parts" (Klein 1985, 201). The Greeks applied the word to many things but never, it seems, to thought. Then, as Jacob Klein writes, "from about the year 1600 on there is a sudden and most remarkable shift: book after book appears under titles like 'System of Logic,' 'System of Rhetoric,' 'System of Grammar,' 'System of Theology,' 'System of Ethics and Politics,' 'System of Physics,' 'System of Jurisprudence,' 'System of Astronomy,' of Arithmetic, of Geography, of Medicine and even 'System of Systems' " (1985, 201). According to Klein, systematic philosophy is a response to the peculiar anxiety of modernity expressed so well by Yeats: "Things fall apart"—and we need a philosophical system to put them back together again.The idea of a system of philosophy cannot, however, be dismissed merely as a "modern invention," for it is a legitimate extension of the Greek concept of sustema. The Greek philosophers would not have reflected on their activity as "systematic" because they regarded themselves as describing a reality that was itself a sustema. Pressed to explain what philosophers are, Pythagoras, according to legend, compared them to the theoroi or onlookers at the Olympic Games. As Werner Jaeger writes of the legend, "The comparison depends on the ambiguity of the word theorein, which means both watching a spectacle and contemplation and research in the ' theoretical' sense" (1962, 432). Reality is a sustema; the philosopher's account of reality is a reflection of it and thus is itself a sustema... (shrink)

Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre's Philosophy explores the fundamental question of why we act as we do. Informed by an ontological and phenomenological approach, and building mainly, but not exclusively, on the thought of Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido considers the concept of a ""form of life"" as a term that bridges the gap between subjective identity and communities.

Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of (...) the Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

The key work of the early Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the Grundlage ser gesammten Wissenschaftslehre [Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science] of 1794-95. The very circumstances of its publication ensure that it is a rather terse and disjointed statement of Fichtean philosophy. It consists of a very short preface, a “famous” section devoted to first principles, the so-called “basic propositions of the entire doctrine of science,” and eight discourses of widely diverging length. The first discourse, devoted to the (...) “theoretical” Wissenschaftslehre is one and a half times the length of the other seven. The third, fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth are barely a few pages long. It is an extremely peculiar work and not merely due to the circumstances of its publication. Its very argumentative structure threatens to trap the reader in forming hasty and preliminary judgements on the exact nature of the philosophical claims being made, and, quite specifically, those philosophical claims which might be ascribed to the author himself. The following contends that lack of attention to the structure of a work that, admittedly, exhibits very little in an overt fashion has led to wholesale confusion about the early system and its philosophical intent. Specifically, that too much attention has been paid to the famous section on grounding principles, and, furthermore, that attention only to these sections will lead to fundamental confusion and misunderstanding. This paper will attempt to examine this peculiar Fichtean text via the readings made by Dieter Henrich and Frederick Neuhouser, respectively. (shrink)

In The Sources of Normativity Korsgaard introduces her conception of practical identities understood as the source of moral obligations. This conception forms a point of transition from Korsgaard’s theory of action to her solution to the problem of the authority of moral norms. In order to describe how universal categorical reasoning is compatible with the moral content of particular practical decisions, Korsgaard needs to show how our contingent practical identities can be reconciled with what she defines as the universally (...) shared identity that expresses our humanity. To make this reconciliation work, she devises an argument for the public shareability of reasons amended by her reinterpretation of the Kantian as if principle. I suggest that, in doing so, Korsgaard steps too far away from Kant’s architectonic approach to the question of why moral norms bind us, and that, consequently, the Korsgaardian reconciliation between the two kinds of identities, as it stands, cannot be accomplished. (shrink)

John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180) was the foremost political theorist of his age. He was trained in scholastic theology and philosophy at Paris, and his writings are invaluable for summarizing many of the metaphysical speculations of his time. The Policraticus is his main work, and is regarded as the first complete work of political theory to be written in the Latin Middle Ages. Cary Nederman's new edition and translation, currently the only version available in English, is primarily aimed at (...) undergraduate students of the history of political thought and medieval history. His new translation shows how important this text is in understanding the mores, forms of conduct and beliefs of the most powerful and learned segments of twelfth century Western Europe. (shrink)

Leading international environmental philosophers further the debate about the environment and the metaphysical, ethical, social and international implications.

The aim of this chapter is to take a closer look at medieval discussions concerning the phenomenon of ‘perceiving as,’ and the psychological mechanisms that lie behind it. In contemporary philosophical literature this notion is usually used to refer to conceptual aspects of perception. For instance, when I perceive a black birdlike shape as a crow, I may be said to perceive the particular sensible thing x as an instance of a universal crowness φ, that is, as belonging to a (...) natural kind and falling under the concept of ‘crow’. In this sense, perceiving x as φ requires mastering the concept φ. However, I use the term ‘perceiving as’ in a wider sense and concentrate on various kinds of non-conceptual sensory processes, which can be understood as forms of ‘perceiving as’. Even though conceptual perception requires intellectual powers, medieval discussions on cognitive psychology can be understood properly only by taking into account the complex forms of perception that fall short of being truly intellectual, but are nevertheless over and above the simple sensation of sensible qualities of external things. The borderline between simple sensation and conceptual perception is unclear, and quite a lot is going on in the grey area between the two. Instead of presupposing any modern notion of ‘perceiving as’ and applying it to medieval discussions, my purpose is the opposite: to look at medieval discussions and see if they can be used to broaden modern discussions by including also non-conceptual varieties of perception. I shall begin the analysis in section two by specifying various types of cogni- tive processes that were discussed by medieval authors and can be considered as forms of ‘perceiving as’. The bulk of the historical work will be done in sec- tion three, where I focus on medieval discussions on three interrelated cogni- tive functions – perceiving different sensible qualities as a synthetic whole, incidental perception of one sensible quality through another, and the possi- bility of perceiving substances and recognising individuals. The reader should bear in mind that I shall use ideas from several medieval authors without pay- ing much attention to the differences between their theories of perception. Although occasionally radical, these differences are not highly relevant in the context of the present chapter. In section four, I propose two theoretical mod- els that can be used for analysing medieval views concerning these psychologi- cal phenomena. Finally, I conclude the chapter by making some remarks on the potential impacts of reading medieval views in relation to the concept of ‘perceiving as’. (shrink)

According to Hannah Arendt, action is the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter. From this point of view, action is the basis of political life. But, although human actions are direct human interactions, each person must have a body and senses, a sensation of reality and a feeling of realness—and do we not share these characteristics with animals? Therefore, do we have the right to claim that human interaction and consciousness of (...) an acting self are uniquely, humanly political? For example, what if we were to maintain that language is a second-order conventionalization of the expressive body immersed in an atmosphere, assimilating and being assimilated. If this were to be the case, how then can we explain the passage from elemental life, the life we share with all living things, to the acting in and among human pluralities that Hannah Arendt identifies with the political? Kant tried to do this by separating reason from sensation and separating respect from nature’s purely physical, causal forces. This essay examines Arendt’s claim that it is uniquely the activity that passes between humans that makes it possible for humans to consider themselves political. (shrink)

Whereas the history of philosophy defines metaphysics as asking the question 'What is Being?'; here is asked 'Where is Being?' What is to be analyzed is indeed part of the tradition of metaphysics to inquire about Being qua being, but here the inquiry is into its structure, its position within the ontological whole. The concept of the 'architectonic' is borrowed from Kant... In this work, three philosophical structures are chosen for a more extensive examination: the three 'architectonics' are (...) that of Plato's Chora, Aristoteles' continuum, and finally Leibniz's labyrinth"--Back cover. (shrink)

When assessing North American students' oral participation in classes, should all students be subject to the same evaluation criteria or should teachers make reasonable allowances for Asian students practicing humility? How do we weigh the promotion of 'courage' through character education initiatives with traditional Asian dispositions? Viewing Asian humility in Western classrooms and as it rubs up against liberal principles of equality or justice, and a virtue ethic raises a number of philosophical questions around authenticity, polyvalence, and relativity. I approach (...) first through the lens of liberal philosophy as the 'dilemma of diversity' meets a boundary with communitarianism, and then through the contextualist lenses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault. Drawing on Tully's political philosophy, I inspect humility as embedded in language-games and then open it to revision through comparative history, inviting participants in the teacher's game of assessment to renegotiate the rules: a process complicated by their reticence to speak up. I also use Medina and Scheman's political reading of Wittgenstein to discuss how teachers can discern humility as performative silence within the classroom, distinguishing between genealogical accounts that show how comportments could be otherwise from perspicuous inspection of interconnected language-games in current educational settings. (shrink)

The notion of form-of-life refers to a living dimension that has overthrown the structures of power in which humans are supposedly destined to live, disclosing the possibility of a new understanding of political and legal life. By placing the 'form-of-life' in the context of contemporary philosophy, this book re-imagines anew some of the basic categories of human socialities - such as work, rights, obligation, property, and use. It explores the ways in which Agamben's philosophy might be helpful in (...) developing political and legal strategies that leave behind a situation dominated by pervasive sovereign violence. At a moment of history in which the fundamental promises of Western modernity are undergoing a decisive crisis, to look beyond the basic categories of human social institutions becomes an urgency. Through a close engagement with Agamben's concept of form-of-life, this book seeks to challenge the current crisis of juridical, political and economic reality"-- Back cover. (shrink)

I respond to Karin de Boer, Thomas Land, and Claudio La Rocca’s comments on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the Method of Metaphysics (CUP 2023). I first provide a quick outline of some of the main claims I make in the book. I then directly address their criticisms, which I group into three categories. The first group of comments raises doubts concerning my characterization of the central tasks of the critique of pure reason. The second targets the fact that (...) I downplay faculty analysis as an essential characteristic of the critique. The third has to do with my claim that the Critique of Pure Reason aims to show that metaphysics is capable of architectonic unity, where this unity is only achievable when we construe metaphysics according to the worldly concept of philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Against the Thracian Maid Know Thyself! Philosophy and History The Glass of Reflection Symbolism and Transcendence References.

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of representational mind: perception. Focusing on its form, function, and underlying capacities, as indicated in the sciences of perception, Burge provides an account of the representational content and formal representational structure of perceptual states, and develops a formal semantics for them. The account is elaborated by an explanation of how the representational form is embedded in an iconic format. These structures are then situated in (...) current theoretical accounts of the processing of perceptual representations, with an emphasis on the formation of perceptual categorizations. An exploration of the relationship between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-clarifies the distinction between perceiving, with its associated capacities, and thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing on a broad range of historical and contemporary research, rather than relying on introspection or ordinary talk about perception, Perception: First Form of Mind is a scientifically rigorous and agenda-setting work in the philosophy of perception and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

With this monograph on Kant and the problem of language, Raphaël Ehrsam develops a well-argued reconstruction of the architectonic place of language in Kant’s philosophy. The author terms his argument “genetic thesis”. On Ehrsam’s genetic thesis, in Kant’s philosophy the mastery of linguistic competences is indispensable to the acquisition of a priori theoretical and practical cognitions. The material of the book can be divided into three parts. In the first part (Introduction and Chapter One), Ehrsam frames the (...) subject by outlining his thesis and foregrounding Kant’s notions of acquisition and epigenesis. In the second part (Chapters Two - Five), he then articulates his thesis by reconstructing the functions played by specific linguistic instances in Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. The third part (Chapter Six) is devoted to sketching Kant’s thoughts on how the human being, both as an individual and a species, acquires linguistic competences. (shrink)

What is the basis of our capacity to act morally? This is a question that has been discussed for millennia, with philosophical debate typically distinguishing two sources of morality: reason and sentiment. This collection aims to shed light on whether the human capacity to feel for others really is central for morality and, if so, in what way. To tackle these questions, the authors discuss how fellow feeling is to be understood: its structure, content and empirical conditions. Also discussed are (...) the exact roles that relevant psychological features - specifically: empathy, sympathy and concern - may play within morality. The collection is unique in bringing together the key participants in the various discussions of the relation of fellow feeling to moral norms, moral concepts and moral agency. By integrating conceptually sophisticated and empirically informed perspectives, Forms of Fellow Feeling will appeal to readers from philosophy, psychology, sociology and cultural studies. (shrink)

Here we are witness to the great cultural event of the West, the emergence of a Latin philosophical language translated from the Greek. Once again, it would be necessary to make a systematic study of the formation of this technical vocabulary that, thanks to Cicero, Seneca, Tertullian, Victorinus, Calcidius, Augustine, and Boethius, would leave its mark, by way of the Middle Ages, on the birth of modern thought. Can it be hoped that one day, with current technical means, it will (...) be possible to compile a complete lexicon of the correspondences of philosophical terminology in Greek and Latin? Furthermore, lengthy commentaries would be needed, for the most interesting task would be to analyze the shifts in meaning that take place in the movement from one language to another. In the case of the ontological vocabulary the translation of ousia by substantia, for example, is justly famous and has again recently inspired some remarkable studies. This brings us once more to a phenomenon we discretely alluded to earlier with the word philosophia, and which we will encounter throughout the present discussion: the misunderstandings, shifts or losses in meaning, the reinterpretations, sometimes even to the point of misreading, that arise once tradition, translation, and exegesis coexist. So our history of the Hellenistic and Roman thought will consist above all of recognizing and analyzing the evolution of meanings and significance. Pierre Hadot holds the chair of the History of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the Collège de France. He is the author of many books and articles on the history of ancient philosophy and theology. Among his works are Plotin et la simplicité du regard, Porphyre et Vitctorinus, Marius Victorinus: Recherches sur sa vie et ses oeuvres, and Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, is associate professor of philosophy and a member of the Committees on the Conceptual Foundations of Science and General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He introduced and edited the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism” . He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations. Paula Wissing, a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant’s The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks . She also contributed translations of articles by Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas for the “Symposium on Heidegger and Nazism.”. (shrink)

Explores some steps toward non-assimilative encounters in the "global village.".

In previous work, I have drawn attention to certain systematic differences among philosophical traditions as regards to the literary forms that are prevalent in each. In this paper, however, I focus on the commentary form. I raise the question of why the use of commentaries abounds in most traditions except those transmitted in the English language and suggest that problems of translation are central to this issue. I argue that the appearance of commentaries in a philosophical tradition is a (...) criterion of such untranslatability that emerges in a broader cultural, economic, political, and religious context. Features of the relation between language and forms of communication in the history of philosophy are here explicated, concentrating especially on the German case. (shrink)

The life and ideas of F. W. J. Schelling are often overlooked in favor of the more familiar Kant, Fichte, or Hegel. What these three lack, however, is Schelling’s evolving view of philosophy. Where others saw the possibility for a single, unflinching system of thought, Schelling was unafraid to question the foundations of his own ideas. In this book, Bruce Matthews argues that the organic view of philosophy is the fundamental idea behind Schelling’s thought. Focusing in particular on (...) Schelling’s early writings, especially on Plato and Kant, Matthews explores Schelling’s idea that any philosophical system must be perspectival and formed by each individual student of philosophy, providing a unique new understanding of an important and often-overlooked figure in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Possibility and reference have been central topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of language in the past decades. Wolfgang Freitag’s Form and Philosophy provides a novel approach to these notions and their interrelations, based on the concept of form as the key modal concept: form is the possibility space of objects. In its historic dimension, the book analyses the role of form in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In its systematic dimension, the (...) book offers an alternative ontological basis to David Armstrong’s combinatorial theory of possibility and rejects David Lewis’ analysis of possibility in terms of possible worlds. Representation is shown to rest on the idea of direct reference as proposed by David Kaplan and Saul Kripke. It is argued that the problem of reference links up with Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, the nature of which is extensively discussed. It emerges that form and reference are complementary with respect to the notion of representation. Once their individual roles are seen, many metaphysical puzzles appear in a new light or disappear altogether. (shrink)

This work argues that an opportunity is being missed by the philosophical tradition, especially within philosophy of culture: an opportunity not just to philosophize “about” culture, but to embody culture and put it into practice. It argues that philosophy itself is a powerful form of culture – one that needs to be better understood and more explicitly practiced. To highlight this blind spot, the work introduces a distinction between “philosophy of culture,” and “cultural philosophy.” Cultural (...) class='Hi'>philosophy should be better explored by the discipline for two reasons: a clearer understanding of cultural philosophy would benefit all practitioners of philosophy; also, a philosopher of culture who engages cultural philosophy will be a more effective philosopher of culture. The goal of the project is to highlight the possibility of (and value in) a “cultural philosophy,” and to serve as something of a prolegomenon toward further work in that area. (shrink)

This essay concerns Adorno's articulation of an idea of philosophy as it is developed through his considerations of philosophy's form or mode of presentation. It hereby attempts to illuminate some of what remains obscure about Adorno's understanding of a renewal of philosophy after Marx and the crisis of German Idealism. Various forms–from "anti-system" and "constellation" to "essay," "fragment," "encyclopaedia" and "dictionary"–are examined for what they contribute to an idea of philosophy. This focus distinguishes this essay (...) from other studies of form in Adorno that have predominantly literary or musical concerns. (shrink)

I would like in this article to make some tentative comparative observations about several sorts of reasoning in Western and Chinese philosophy. I try to say something about three important forms of reasoning: logic, skepticism, and practical reason. In each of these cases one can find strands of Chinese philosophy that are strikingly similar to counterparts in Western philosophy. And while in two of the cases in question the strands involved are less common and less fully (...) developed than their Western counterparts, in the third case they are highly sophisticated and in many ways superior to their Western counterparts. (shrink)

In "Literary Forms of Argument in Early China," Gentz and Meyer explore a new analytical approach to the study of written thinking by focusing on the argumentative function of literary patterns in early Chinese texts.