What is the Quid Juris in Kant's Deduction? Chapter 3 from my book on the Deduction (Kant's Deduction From Apperception) provides an answer to that question, and also contains an extensive discussion of the relevant literature on this topic (Henrich, Proops, Seeberg & Longuenesse).

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains the purpose of the transcendental deduction of the categories by referring to the practice of legal deduction (KrV, A 84/B 116). However, he does not elaborate the details of the analogy and the reader is left to fill in the blanks concerning legal deductions and their supposed similarities with transcendental deductions. In this paper, I suggest we use judicial imputation to clarify Kant’s analogy between transcendental and legal deductions. My claim is that (...) the core of the analogy is not the similarities between the acquisition of property and that of concepts but rather similarities in the application of a law to a deed. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains the purpose of the transcendental deduction of the categories by referring to the practice of legal deduction (KrV, A 84/B 116). However, he does not elaborate the details of the analogy and the reader is left to fill in the blanks concerning legal deductions and their supposed similarities with transcendental deductions. In this paper, I suggest we use judicial imputation to clarify Kant’s analogy between transcendental and legal deductions. My claim is that (...) the core of the analogy is not the similarities between the acquisition of property and that of concepts but rather similarities in the application of a law to a deed. (shrink)

Este trabajo estudia la teoría de los diferenciales de Salomon Maimon como respuesta a la cuestión quid juris y a la vez como clave para la fundamentación de la posibilidad de la metafísica como ciencia. Se reconstruye primero la crítica de Maimon al tratamiento kantiano de la pregunta quid juris. Luego, se analiza la respuesta del propio Maimon a esa pregunta, para establecer finalmente cómo tal respuesta abre el camino para la explicación de la posibilidad de (...) la metafísica como ciencia. (shrink)

Maimon once described the philosophical project underlying his Essay on Transcendental Philosophy as an attempt “to unify Kantian philosophy with Spinozism”. But in the only reference to Spinoza in the Essay, he stresses that Spinoza was not the source of his argument. In this paper I will argue that, notwithstanding the disclaimer, Maimon's solution for the problems that in his view haunted Kant's theory of knowledge was indeed significantly influenced by Spinoza, as well as by the medieval Jewish Aristotelian Maimonides. (...) Since the key concept in the solution proposed by Maimon is the metaphysical doctrine of the “infinite intellect”, my focus will be on clarifying how this doctrine is related to Maimonides' doctrine of the divine intellect and to Spinoza's doctrine of Deus sive Natura. My main contention is that important aspects of Maimon's doctrine of the “infinite intellect” are based on a Spinozistic interpretation of Maimonides' doctrine of the divine intellect. (shrink)

Fichte argues that the conclusion of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is correct yet lacks a crucial premise, given Kant’s admission that the metaphysical deduction locates an arbitrary origin for the categories. Fichte provides the missing premise by employing a new method: a genetic deduction of the categories from a first principle. Since Fichte claims to articulate the same view as Kant in a different, it is crucial to grasp genetic deduction in relation to the sorts of deduction that (...) Kant offers. I propose to interpret genetic deduction as the simultaneous fulfillment of two tasks: answering the question quid facti by deriving the categories from the I and answering the question quid juris by establishing our entitlement to the categories as conditions of experience. While the second task represents Fichte’s agreement with Kant’s transcendental deduction, the first reflects his correction of Kant’s metaphysical deduction. (shrink)

This essay partly builds on and partly criticizes a striking idea of Dieter Henrich. Henrich argues that Kant's distinction in the first Critique between the question of fact (quid facti) and the question of law (quid juris) provides clues to the argumentative structure of a philosophical "Deduction". Henrich suggests that the unity of apperception plays a role analogous to a legal factum. By contrast, I argue, first, that the question of fact in the first Critique is settled (...) by the Metaphysical Deduction, which establishes the purity of origin of the Categories, and, second, that in the second Critique, the relevant factum is the Fact of Reason, which amounts to the fact that the Moral Law is pure in origin. (shrink)

The paper gives an interpretation of Kant's doctrine of the fact of reason against the background of a constructivist reading of his philosophy, which does not allow us to appeal to any indubitable facts. The fact of reason is the object of a philosophical account of the moral law forms the quid juris part of deduction or legitimization of the law. A more intuitive grasp of the fact is the phenomenon of reverence for duty which ordinary people grasp (...) in form of a feeling and emotion. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

How can we invent new certain knowledge in a methodical manner? This question stands at the heart of Salomon Maimon's theory of invention. Chikurel argues that Maimon's contribution to the ars inveniendi tradition lies in the methods of invention which he prescribes for mathematics. Influenced by Proclus' commentary on Elements, these methods are applied on examples taken from Euclid's Elements and Data. Centering around methodical invention and scientific genius, Maimon's philosophy is unique in an era glorifying the artistic genius, known (...) as Geniezeit. Invention, primarily defined as constructing syllogisms, has implications on the notion of being given in intuition as well as in symbolic cognition. Chikurel introduces Maimon's notion of analysis in the broader sense, grounded not only on the principle of contradiction but on intuition as well. In philosophy, ampliative analysis is based on Maimon's logical term of analysis of the object, a term that has yet to be discussed in Maimonian scholarship. Following its introduction, a new version of the question quid juris? arises. In mathematics, Chikurel demonstrates how this conception of analysis originates from practices of Greek geometrical analysis. (shrink)

Introduction -- Matter, form of cognition, form of sensibility, form of understanding, time and space -- Sensibility, imagination, understanding, pure a priori concepts of the understanding or categories, schemata, answering the question Quid Juris, answering the question Quid Facti, doubts about the latter -- Ideas of the understanding, ideas of reason, etc. -- Subject and predicate. the determinable and the determination -- Thing, possible, necessary, ground, consequence, etc. -- Identity, difference, opposition, reality, logical, and transcendental negation -- (...) Magnitude, alteration, change, etc. -- Truth, subjective, objective, logical, metaphysical -- On the I, materialism, idealism, dualism, etc. -- Short overview of the whole work -- My ontology -- On symbolic cognition and philosophical language. (shrink)

Salomon Maïmon argues that the formal determination of experience in Kant’s first Kritik insufficiently answers the question ‘quid juris?’. As an alternative to Kant’s theory, he develops a genetic transcendentalism in which experience is completely determined a priori. Discussing this genetic approach, I focus on how the spatiotemporal determinations of conscious experience are traced back to pure ideal relations. Relying on Leibniz and his theory of space and time, I explain how the extensive magnitudes of consciousness are founded (...) in intensive magnitudes of what Maïmon calls ‘pure thought’. As the latter is the transcendental ground for both sensibility and the understanding, Maïmon’s theory contains a radical form of immanence, much like the philosophy of Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. (shrink)

A puzzle arises when we consider that, for Kant, the categories are 'original acquisitions' of our understanding to which we must nevertheless prove our entitlement via 'deduction', on pain of dogmatism. I resolve this puzzle by articulating skepticism’s role in the transcendental deduction, drawing on Kant’s construal of the skeptical 'question quid juris' in the juridical terms of entitlement to property. I then situate skepticism’s transformative potential within what Kant regards as reason’s 'maturation' from dogmatism toward self-knowledge. Finally, (...) I contrast Hegel’s account of spirit’s progress toward 'absolute knowledge', which shifts both the mode of skepticism and the prospect of maturation. (shrink)

Focusing on Walter Benjamin's earliest pieces dedicated to school reform and the student movement, this article traces the basic critical approaches informing his mature thought back to his struggle to critically implement and transform the theory of concept formation and value presentation developed by his Freiburg teacher, Heinrich Rickert. It begins with an account of Rickert's work, specifically of the concept of Darstellung (presentation) and its central role in Rickert's postmetaphysical theory of historical research (which he characterizes as exclusively concerned (...) with the Kantian quid juris). It shows that Rickert develops a speculative but practical theory of value recognition, which nevertheless leaves the status of value itself undetermined. Contra Rickert, Benjamin returns to the ignored quid facti, or origin of value, and shows that a metacritical, postmetaphysical approach such as Rickert's ultimately limits possible experience rather than grounding it. This basic insight, it is argued, is the cornerstone of Benjamin's concept of critique. (shrink)

Maimon’s theory of the differential has proved to be a rather enigmatic aspect of his philosophy. By drawing upon mathematical developments that had occurred earlier in the century and that, by virtue of the arguments presented in the Essay and comments elsewhere in his writing, I suggest Maimon would have been aware of, what I propose to offer in this paper is a study of the differential and the role that it plays in the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790). In (...) order to do so, this paper focuses upon Maimon’s criticism of the role played by mathematics in Kant’s philosophy, to which Maimon offers a Leibnizian solution based on the infinitesimal calculus. The main difficulties that Maimon has with Kant’s system, the second of which will be the focus of this paper, include the presumption of the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, i.e. the question quid facti, and the question of whether the fact of our use of a priori concepts in experience is justified, i.e. the question quid juris. Maimon deploys mathematics, specifically arithmetic, against Kant to show how it is possible to understand objects as having been constituted by the very relations between them, and he proposes an alternative solution to the question quid juris, which relies on the concept of the differential. However, despite these arguments, Maimon remains sceptical with respect to the question quid facti. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende indagar en la concepción de la locura desarrollada por el filósofo Immanuel Kant a lo largo de su trayectoria intelectual. Para llevar a cabo esta indagación el autor adopta una interpretación naturalizada del transcendentalismo kantiano desarrollada por Eugenio Moya Cantero en sus trabajos sobre el pensador alemán. Se pretende con ello conciliar dos planos de la investigación kantiana que han sido tradicionalmente contrapuestos: facticidad y transcendentalidad, quid facti y quid juris. Este planteamiento ofrece una (...) razón humana situada en el seno de la naturaleza y de su historia y constituida como entidad compleja, heterogénea y dinámica, concepción desde la que la locura aparece como un conflicto de la propia razón consigo misma. El artículo concluye exponiendo el concepto kantiano de sinrazón positiva como la forma más grave de locura y mostrando la influencia y utilidad que dicho concepto ha tenido en otras disciplinas científicas como la psiquiatría contemporánea. (shrink)

The author takes the interdisciplinary seminar on Evolutionary Epistemology at the 7th International Wittgenstein Symposium as the occasion to discuss the question of the status, achievements and limits of Evolutionary Epistemology. She comes to the conclusion that neither its critique of the quid juris question in traditional epistemology nor its own philosophical pretensions can be justified. But it is a new science which is relevant and a challenge to traditional epistemology and philosophy of science in that it opens (...) up a horizon of new questions which they will have to take seriously. (shrink)

The philosophy of Solomon Maimon is usually considered an important link between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and German idealism. Highly praised during his lifetime, over the past two centuries Maimon’s genius has been poorly understood and often ignored. Meir Buzaglo offers a reconstruction of Maimon’s philosophy, revealing that its true nature becomes apparent only when viewed in light of his philosophy of mathematics. This provides the key to understanding Maimon’s solution to Kant’s _quid juris_ question concerning the connection between intuition and (...) concept in mathematics. Maimon’s original approach avoids dispensing with intuition while reducing the reliance on intuition in its Kantian sense. As Buzaglo demonstrates, this led Maimon to question Kant’s ultimate rejection of the possibility of metaphysics and, simultaneously, to suggest a unique type of skepticism. (shrink)

Derrida et Bergson ne se sont jamais rencontres, et l'oeuvre du premier ne refere qu'avec circonspection a celle du second. Un dialogue entre eux n'en est pas moins possible, portant entre autres sur la delicate question du fondement de l'intuition. Une connaissance immediate, non langagiere, integrale et certaine est-elle envisageable? Le probleme en est un de droit plutot que de fait: quid juris? a ce probleme lourd d'implications epistemologiques, Derrida et Bergson ont repondu de facons distinctes: l'un a (...) mis en doute la possibilite de l'intuition, l'autre a defendu les droits de la methode intuitive. Le present ouvrage est le premier a serrer de pres la relation entre ces deux philosophes, dont les pensees refletent a elles seules certains des tournants qu'a connus le xxe siecle. Son objectif est triple: circonscrire etroitement l'objet du litige entre Derrida et Bergson, trop peu souligne par les commentateurs, et dont ce livre montre qu'il n'est pas annule par un accord partiel; tirer au clair les diverses raisons qui amenent l'un a s'en prendre a l'intuition, l'autre a embrasser la methode intuitive; etablir que certains arguments de Bergson, bien qu'ils connaissent un regain d'interet et engagent la pensee dans des voies prometteuses, complementaires de celles du realisme speculatif, semblent meriter un nouvel etayage. (shrink)

Kant thought that the central question of the transcendental deduction, and perhaps of the entire Critique of Pure Reason, is what he calls the quid juris of categorial concepts. The quid juris is for him the question of the legitimate right of categories, that is, of non-empirical concepts like ‘substance’ and ‘cause’, to be employed in cognition.

Recent publications (Henrich, Seeberg) claim that Kant has been profoundly influenced by contemporary publications on juridical deductions. I try to show, that this cannot be right. The introductory note of the “Transcendental Deduction” (Critique of Pure Reason A 84) poses two questions: “quid facti?” and “quid juris?”. The first is answered by the demonstration of the possibility of relations between pure concepts and pure intuition und sensations, the second by the implicit refutation of David Hume. Kant and (...) his interpreters sustain the possibility of using juridical concepts, that are neither related to real juridical facts nor are only metaphers, but have a special philosophical signification. But what should that be? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in QuestionG. Felicitas MunzelRichard L. Velkley. Being after Rousseau: Philosophy and Culture in Question. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp. x + 192. Cloth, $40.00. Paper, $18.00.In this collection of essays Velkley realizes a dual achievement: a penetrating scholarly analysis of a familiar topic, modern philosophy's on-going criticism of rational Enlightenment as a "project aiming at progressive rational mastery of nature (...) and the human situation" (60, 3), and an exemplary presentation of philosophizing as a self-reflexive activity in which the "know thyself" is posed to philosophy itself. The focus is on the German Idealist tradition, taking its origins from Rousseau and Kant to "reform, not simply to reject," but still to "overcome earlier modern accounts of scientific reason as abstract, mechanistic, and narrow, and as failing to do justice to the concrete wholeness or richness of nature and human experience, thus impoverishing our conceptions of morality, political life, and human aspirations toward the noble, the sacred, and the beautiful" (93). Velkley's scholarly interpretation identifies Rousseau as the pivotal figure who is the source both of the modern philosophical effort to achieve "human wholeness" by recovering an "original prediscursive or prerational unity" (an account that is the further source of the distinction between culture and civilization [12]) and of the "bifurcation in the ways to reach such wholeness," the ways of "citizenship" and "natural freedom" (13-14). The essays argue for an "important connection between Rousseau and Heidegger, through Kant and Schelling" (6). [End Page 345]While other thinkers are treated (for example, Pufendorf and Nietzsche), the essays primarily examine the writings of these four thinkers to elucidate "the persistence of a set of problems and a way of questioning" particular to modern philosophy (8).Velkley points out that Rousseau's critique of modern rationality is far more subtle than it is usually read. Granted, "through its introduction of self-reflectiveness into the previously 'innocent' and prereflective human situation," reason is perceived as the "true origin" and not the means for overcoming human ills (53). However, the "prereflective origin is nowhere to be found," it is an "imaginative construction," and it is a "mistake to take at face value any apparent assertion that natural man was merely an animal with only instinct and sensation" (37, 41). Because of his distinctively human awareness of time, natural man, "far from being mere animal," is "the only being whose openness to being exposes him to the nonbeing of death" (48). In short, "some 'bondage' to reason" is inescapable and "Rousseau's various plans for the reform of politics, education, the family, and the philosophical life" should be read as "ways of making the most of that bondage" (33).In the case of Kant, Velkley's emphasis is on the critical effort to resolve the dialectic, to correct the rational self-ignorance "so that the striving of reason for totality will not turn into a nihilistic rejection of reason" (112); or put another way, Rousseau inspires Kant's quid juris question, the issue of the "justification of reason as a whole," specifically the legitimacy of the categories (50-61, 101). Schelling, together with Kant's other Idealist successors, seeks a "greater unity, integration, wholeness, and concreteness than Kant provides" (113). The two main aspects of Schelling's project that Velkley discusses are (1) the discovery of the true human self in nature, the "hidden infinite unconscious self beneath the apparent finite conscious self," a "self whose objectification by the finite categories of discursive reason is quite impossible" and which thus discloses an "infinite contradiction" (115); and (2) the affirmation of the error of earlier philosophizing as belonging "essentially to philosophical inquiry" and being the very "precondition for finding truth" (125). From the philosophical attempt to correct reason's fundamental error, to its reading of "being in error" as an ineliminable step in the historical progress of reason and philosophy, Velkley turns to Heidegger's effort to step behind traditional metaphysics altogether and to move "forward into a new thinking beyond metaphysics" (142), from speech about Being to language as a power of disclosure of Being that overpowers the... (shrink)

Cet article expose la critique de Maimon du principe kantien de causalité. Pour ce faire, nous considérerons les deux niveaux sur lesquels cette critique se développe, l’un formel et l’autre matériel. Au premier niveau, Maimon soulève trois objections au jugement hypothétique, relativement à son origine, sa fonction et sa modalité. Selon le deuxième, Maimon développe deux objections, dont la première concerne en général la démonstration kantienne de la validité des catégories, tandis que la seconde concerne en particulier celle du principe (...) de causalité. Cela nous permettra de mieux comprendre le sens de ses deux objections fondamentales contre la philosophie kantienne, formulées à travers les questions quid juris? et quid facti? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Kant's Tribunal of Reason: Legal Metaphor and Normativity in the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 208. Hardback, $105.00. -/- Even those with a passing knowledge of Kant's system will recognize his sustained use of legal metaphor and his appeal to lawfulness as a beacon of philosophical progress. He famously begins one of the most important (and impermeable) sections of the Critique of Pure (...) Reason with the juridical distinction between quid juris (what is the law) and quid facti (what is the fact) (A 84/B 116), insisting—against the empiricists—that the critique of our cognitive faculty must speak to the former and requires a Transcendental Deduction of the categories. In her book, Sofie Møller delves into the historical context and philosophical significance of such legal metaphors to reveal that their roots spread to the deepest foundations of Kant's project. In doing so, she contends that we should understand "philosophical systematicity as legal systematicity" (15). According to Møller, to accept this reading of Kant is to acknowledge that the legal system provides not just one helpful type of metaphor to be appreciated alongside many others, but the only proper symbol of the abstract nature of reason itself (173).For those interested in Kant's engagement with the natural-rights theory that prevailed during his lifetime, or in his familiarity with the concrete legal practices of eighteenth-century European courts, Møller's book proves to be thoroughly researched and informative. As the first English-language book-length study providing a comprehensive account of the legal aspects influencing Kant's system, it should serve as a valuable catchall resource. There are limits to its accessibility, however, as familiarity with basic legal distinctions—e.g. between civil and criminal codes—is assumed, and Latin terms and phrases often go untranslated. At times, this makes for a difficult intersection between the arduousness of Kant's own prose and the equally technical legal terminology that is meant to explain it. However, this barrier is mitigated by Møller's own interpretive work, which cautions that we should not let indeterminate legal terminology fix too much in our reading of Kant's texts, especially when considering the Transcendental Deduction and its reliance on the quid juris/quid facti distinction. As she concludes at the end of chapter 3, the procedure of legal deduction that Kant invokes "could be an investigation, an exposition, a thorough consideration, a review, explanation, description, account, dispute or procedure" (64). Thus, despite Kant's historically demonstrable familiarity with legal-deduction writings, on their own, they "do not present a sufficiently uniform argument structure to settle the question of the structures of the two versions of the transcendental deduction" (64). This observation serves both as a general warning as well as a criticism of Dieter Henrich's approach to Kant's system, which popularized attention to legal metaphor in Kant scholarship in the twentieth century. For Møller, little philosophical insight is won through Henrich's approach, since it "places too much weight on the importance of an origin" (60), taking its cue from a particular type of legal deduction whose assumption is unsupported, and which cannot be accurately projected onto Kant's text. As Møller argues, "The validity of the categories is not only grounded in their origin in pure apperception but in their being the necessary structures in the synthesis which creates objects of experience, which is an act of pure apperception" (60). Møller's suggestion, instead, is to read the Deduction as adopting the twofold structure of "judicial imputation," which does a more faithful job of capturing the structuring activity that Kant accords to the understanding. With the latter reading, emphasis shifts from whether the categories' application to objects of experience is valid because of their a priori origin, to the spontaneous activity of the judging subject as the originator of experience (75). Part of what is unique about this approach is that it does not read the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 (2002) 406-408 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment Henry E. Allison. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 424. Cloth, $69.95. Paper, $24.95. In his new book, Henry Allison provides a study of the two introductions (...) and the first half of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment to stand alongside his previous books on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1983) and Kant's Theory of Freedom (1990). Those books showed Allison's commitment to the unity and coherence of Kant's thought, and it is the aim of the present book to demonstrate the connections between the two halves of Kant's third Critique, that is, Kant's aesthetics and his teleology, as well as to demonstrate the connections between Kant's aesthetic theory and both his theoretical and his practical philosophy. In order to defend the unity of the third Critique, Allison defends Kant's characterization of the judgment of taste as a species of reflective judgment, and argues that our judgments of beauty depend upon the principle of the purposiveness of nature that is also the basis for judgments about the systematicity of natural laws. To display the connections between Kant's aesthetics and his theoretical philosophy, [End Page 406] Allison uses the first Critique's distinction between the quid facti and the quid juris to explicate the relation between Kant's "analytic of the beautiful" and his "deduction of pure aesthetic judgment"; he then defends the success of Kant's strategy for the deduction of judgments of taste by grounding them in the general conditions of the possibility of cognition. Finally, in order to explain Kant's connection between aesthetics and morality, Allison interprets Kant's theory of the "intellectual interest" in the beautiful as evidence of nature's amenability to our achievement of the ends of morality, an assurance that we need not be motivated in the first place to act as morality requires, but rather to prevent our motivation to be moral from being undermined by our own predisposition to radical evil. He then defends Kant's thesis that all beauty, and thus natural as well as artistic beauty, can be seen as an expression of aesthetic ideas, and specifically of the morally requisite idea of nature's amenability to the achievement of our moral objectives.There is much in this approach with which I can agree, and some with which I cannot. I agree that there is much in Kant's general conception of reflective judgment that illuminates his conception of judgments of beauty, yet I do not think that the principle of taste is analogous to the principle of the purposiveness of nature, because it does not play a role in making particular judgments of taste analogous to the role the latter principle plays in the conduct of scientific inquiry. My own interpretation of Kant's model for making particular judgments of taste is not fundamentally different from that which Allison offers under the rubric of the quid facti, although we disagree about which of the four "moments" of the "Analytic of the Beautiful" are part of the meaning of a judgment of beauty and which function more as grounds for making judgments with such a meaning. But I am not persuaded by Allison's defense of Kant's deduction of pure judgments of taste, that is, his answer to the quid juris, from the objections that I and others have raised to it. Finally, although there are large areas of agreement between our interpretations of Kant's theory of intellectual interest in the beautiful, the claim that aesthetic experience is evidence of nature's amenability to the realization of the ends that we adopt in the name of morality is only part of the story that Kant develops in the Critique of Aesthetic... (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Møller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows (...) that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity. (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza el comentario de Maimon al intento kantiano de vincular sensibilidad y entendimiento. En la Crítica de la razón pura, Kant distingue dos facultades de conocimiento, que deben ser unidas para que el conocimiento objetivo sea posible. Maimon cuestiona que la vinculación sea realizable. Luego de exponer el punto de partida kantiano, se analizan los argumentos maimonianos, planteando dificultades sistemáticas que afectarían al intento de vinculación kantiano.

This paper argues that Maimon’s metaphilosophy presents a distinctive view on what the scientific role and method of philosophy should consist in: in the production of fictions of systematicity. It shows how Maimon’s philosophy of science links to metaphilosophical views, and ultimately leads him to adopt the so-called “method of fictions” to transform philosophy into a proper science. By connecting his remarks on scientific fictions and their methodological role with Kant’s doctrine of regulative ideas and the latter’s conception of systematicity, (...) the paper develops a systematic account of the method of fictions, its employment in theoretical philosophy and the scientific image resulting from this view. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement that the European Union is presently suffering from a lack of social justice. Yet there is significant disagreement about what the relevant injustice consists in: Federalists believe the EU can only remedy its justice deficit through the introduction of direct interpersonal transfers between people living in separate states. Intergovernmentalists believe the justice-related purpose of the EU is to enable states to cooperate fairly, and to remain internally just and democratic in the face of increased global pressure (...) on welfare states. I suggest that despite their fundamental differences, many of the most reasonable and prominent philosophical accounts of social justice in the EU nonetheless converge in their institutional prescriptions. In particular, they may each serve as a justificatory basis for introducing the European social minimum, an EU-wide income support scheme. (shrink)

This article by Juri Lotman from the third volume of Trudy po znakovym sistemam (Sign Systems Studies) in 1967, deals with the problem of artistic modelling. The general working questions are whether art displays any characteristic traits that are common for all modelling systems and which could be the specific traits that can distinguish art from other modelling systems. Art is seen as a secondary modelling system, more precisely, as a play-type model, which is characterised simultaneously by practical and conventional (...) behaviour and constant awareness of the possibility of alternate meanings to the one that is currently being perceived. At the same time art has play-like elements but is not the same as play, since play is inherently rule-bound, whereas art is a more flexible model thepurpose of which is truth. Art is a special type of modelling system, since it is on one hand suitable for storing very large amount of complex information, but onthe other hand it can increase the stored information and transform the consumer. (shrink)

This article, first published in Russian in 1984 in Sign Systems Studies, introduces the concept of semiosphere and describes its principal attributes. Semiosphere is the semiotic space, outside of which semiosis cannot exist. The ensemble of semiotic formations functionally precedes the singular isolated language and becomes a condition for the existence of the latter. Without the semiosphere, language not only does not function, it does not exist. The division between the core and the periphery is a law of the internal (...) organisation of the semiosphere. There exists boundary between the semiosphere and the non- or extra-semiotic space that surrounds it. The semiotic border is represented by the sum of bilingual translatable “filters”, passing through which the text is translated into another language (or languages), situated outside the given semiosphere. The levels of the semiosphere comprise an inter-connected group of semiospheres, each of them being simultaneously both participant in the dialogue (as part of the semiosphere) and the space of dialogue (the semiosphere as a whole). (shrink)

It is shown to be consistent that the reals are covered by ℵ1 meagre sets yet there is a Baire class 1 function which cannot be covered by fewer than ℵ2 continuous functions. A new cardinal invariant is introduced which corresponds to the least number of continuous functions required to cover a given function. This is characterized combinatorially. A forcing notion similar to, but not equivalent to, superperfect forcing is introduced.

Should we be worried that the concept of trust is increasingly used when we assess non-human agents and artefacts, say robots and AI systems? Whilst some authors have developed explanations of the concept of trust with a view to accounting for trust in AI systems and other non-agents, others have rejected the idea that we should extend trust in this way. The article advances this debate by bringing insights from conceptual engineering to bear on this issue. After setting up a (...) target concept of trust in terms of four functional desiderata (trust-reliance distinction, explanatory strength, tracking affective responses, and accounting for distrust), I analyze how agential vs. non-agential accounts can satisfy these. A final section investigates how ‘non-ideal’ circumstances—that is, circumstances where the manifest and operative concept use diverge amongst concept users—affect our choice about which rendering of trust is to be preferred. I suggest that some prominent arguments against extending the language of trust to non-agents are not decisive and reflect on an important oversight in the current debate, namely a failure to address how narrower, agent-centred accounts curtail our ability to distrust non-agents. (shrink)

Nakba is ignored in Western philosophy encyclopedias, and the notion of genocide is rarely explained. In turn, there is much talk about the Holocaust.

The role of intellectuals in the reconciliation between Latvians and Russians in postcommunist Latvia is analysed in the context of the traditional philosophicalproblem of the social role of philosophers and based on the ideas of Plato, Kant and Foucault. In accordance with Kant's understanding of the political role of philosophers, the main political functions of the intellectuals a repointed out. Despite the important role played by Latvian intellectuals in the so-called "singing revolution," they did not fullill their critical potential in (...) opposition to the mass consciousness after the renewal of independence. Nowadays the establishment of dialogue between Latvian and Russian communities, based on mutual understanding and respect for otherness, is a crucial presupposition for the long-term stability of Latvian society. Whether this dialogue arises is to a great extent a question of moral choice made by intellectuals from both sides. (shrink)

It is shown that the product of finitely many sequential, CLP-compact spaces is CLP-compact.

Claims about coercion play a significant role in some of the most important questions in political philosophy: most ordinary citizens as well as philosophers think that the exercise of power by the state and other political institutions is coercive, and as such requires special justification. Political philosophy, it has been assumed, must assess both the truth of that claim and its relevance for whether or not states, in general, can be justified. Whether the state is always or necessarily coercive is (...) a central question in the philosophy of law. Under what conditions a state exercising coercive power can be justified is the question that informs all major works in the social contract tradition since Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. (shrink)