Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics controversially claims that the A deduction is superior to the B deduction because the imagination, as the“common root” of understanding and sensibility, opens the first Critique to metaphysical ground. Drawing on Dieter Henrich, this paper reinterprets Heidegger’sreading by moving beyond the Analytic and taking the Dialectic into account. This suggests a continuity between the A and B deductions, namely that the imagination, as more than an ontic faculty, remains a basic power that keeps (...) open a metaphysics of being in Kant—a metaphysics whose site is a radicalized unity of transcendental apperception. Revisiting Heidegger in this way shows how Kant is both linked to and differentiated from German Idealism’s debate about the imagination, a position suggested in both Heidegger and recent scholarly discussion. (shrink)

In his recent work, Leonard Lawlor draws attention to the problem of “violence,” which is the “problem that provides the most food for thought.” This emphasis on the problem of violence and its connections to metaphysics understood as philosophy has been remarkably consistent over his career, and thinking through responses to “violence” has sustained Lawlor’s continued effort to think about what he calls “violent” relations between event and repeatability and ground these upon a critical phenomenology. This contribution to the discussion (...) of Lawlor’s work focuses on his most recent book, From Violence to Speaking Out (2016), so as to suggest three important directions for this project and for philosophy’s response to violence. I first briefly trace the theme of violence in From Violence to Speaking Out, contextualizing it against the rest of his work, so as to draw out what he means by violence and its provocation to philosophy, with special attention to the way that the violence in question is figured as disrupting the transcendental and confronting philosophy with what Lawlor calls the “ultratranscendental.” Second, I link it to the theme of time by tracing Lawlor’s point about violence in relation to the breaking up of the transcendental subject from Kant into Heidegger. Third, I link these points to the negative movement of the dissolution of modes of repeatability. This dissolution is captured in a kind of “speaking‐out” that Lawlor detects in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, involving an excess over and above expression, which Deleuze calls “hyperbologic.”. (shrink)

Reading Kant’s Geography, edited by Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta, State University of New York Press, 2011, 382 pp., pb. $34.95, hb. $90.00, ISBN-13: 9781438436050. This review of an edited collection, Reading Kant’s Geography, discusses a series of critical essays on Kant’s physical geography, a topic to which he devoted many years of intellectual energy. The volume is the first of its kind for it appears in anticipation of the first ever publication into English of Kant’s own lectures on physical (...) geography, which lectures he held for over forty years, alternating with lectures on anthropology. This volume together with the publication of the lectures thus constitute an important event in the English language reception of Kant. (shrink)

To-be being-with, that is, to be co-constitutive of the world of spirit and as well of the world of the social: this is how Jean-Luc Nancy reformulates Hegel’s question of Being’s identity with thought. Nancy’s preoccupation with the Thought-event of being offers a transformative reading of Hegel, one which calls for a move beyond the political tradition of Being’s identity with representational thought. Hegel contributes to a renewal of the idea of thinking that moves beyond representation by introducing a movement (...) into thought as driven by a force that is not simply the negativity of Kant’s “thing-in-itself.” It is received orthodoxy that Hegel understood representation as representing thought as dialectical movement. Yet as Nancy argues, Hegel grasps that under the force of development of a necessary transcendental illusion thought no longer can remain at the level of representation, and the principle that drives it is rather ontic-ontological. I will introduce a three-point approach to reconstructing the shift to an ontology of Being-with, but first, I will sketch this perspective more generally. (shrink)