The book addresses the debate on whether the representational content of perceptual experience is conceptual or non-conceptual, by bringing out the points of comparison between Kant s conception of intuition and contemporary accounts of non-conceptual content. It is argued that intuition provides the most basic form of intentionality pre-conceptual reference to objects, which underlies the acts of conceptualization and judgment.".

The authors revisit the idea that Enlightenment spearheaded secularization. This book invites all to look at the Enlightenment religiosity as founded on a merger of religious criticism and heterodoxy.

This introduction is divided into two parts. First, drawing on Paul Guyer’s suggestion that we should turn to Kant to reinvestigate the foundations of religious liberty, I outline Kant’s views on the relations between the ethical and the political community, as presented in Part Three of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, focusing in particular on his arguments for separation between religion and the state. Examining critically the idea to employ Kant in contemporary debates, I claim that Kant’s (...) account of pure moral faith and the church as its ‘vehicle’ may pose difficulties for any argument for religious liberty that appeals to his thought. For Kant is better equipped to offer resources to overcome rather than to accommodate the fact of so-called “moral pluralism,” i.e. the condition in which the principle of religious liberty can find its application. In the second part, I summarise the arguments of the authors who contribute to this volume: D. Jakušić, W. Kozyra, S. Lo Re, G.E. Michalson Jr., and S.R. Palmquist. (shrink)

In recent publications on the Enlightenment, Baruch Spinoza is often associated with the radical “fringe,” advocating against Christianity and giving rise to the incipient process of secularization. In this paper, it is argued that we should look for Spinoza’s influence on the Enlightenment in his ideas inspiring heterodox theologians: radical reformers aiming to “rationalize” revelation but not to dismiss it altogether. Several cases of such thinkers are adduced and shortly discussed: Jarig Jelles, Johan Christian Edelmann, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt and Immanuel (...) Kant. Finally, three ways of conceptualizing the relation between Enlightenment and religion are sketched to address the question whether the sources of secularization can indeed be traced back to the Enlightenment. (shrink)

The paper focuses on a discussion about McDowell’s "conceptualist" interpretation of Kant’s theory of experience, as one in which all representational content is identified with conceptual content. Both in Mind and WorldM and in his Woodbridge Lectures, McDowell furthers a reading on which the "picture of visual experiences as conceptual shapings of visual consciousness is already deeply Kantian", supporting it with Kant’s famous claim from the A51/ B75 passage of the Critique of Pure Reason, which can be called a Cooperation (...) Thesis. However, much indicates that McDowell’s reading is, if not altogether false, then at least one-sided. In the "Transcendental Aesthetic", as well as in some of the pre-Critical writings , Kant presented a range of arguments for a subjective, non-discursive character of space and time, i.e. the forms of sensible intuition and pure intuitions themselves, underlying all conceptual cognition, and providing a non-conceptual basis for a special kind of synthetic a priori cognition . This allows us to conclude that he would rather take the side of the contemporary “nonconceptualists”, and could be regarded as their predecessor, to use R. Hanna’s formulation. On this reading of the Kantian theory of empirical cognition, intentionality is independent of and prior to any application of concepts to the objects of experience. (shrink)

In Mind and World, John McDowell appeals to Kant’s dictum that thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind as encapsulating the idea of conceptualism about the content of perceptual experience. I argue that the appeal is inadequate, and this for a variety of reasons, one of them being that if Kant endorsed conceptualism along the lines of McDowell, he would be committed to returning to positions which he explicitly criticized, i.e. those of rationalist metaphysics; alternatively, he (...) would lapse into an idealism very much akin to Hegel’s. This is because McDowell’s conceptualism ultimately neglects the role of sensibility in mediating the relation between “mind” and “world”, which is crucial to recognizing the limits on cognition which Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism imposes upon subjects. (shrink)

John McDowell claims that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs. Perceptual reasons, according to the author of Mind and World, can be identified with passively “taken in” facts. Concepts figure in the acts of acquiring perceptual reasons, even though the acts themselves do not consist in judgments. Thus, on my reading, McDowell’s account of reasons-acquisition can be likened to Descartes’ account of the acquisition of ideas, rather than to Kant’s theory of judgment as an act by means of which one’s (...) cognition comes to be endowed with objective validity. However, unlike Descartes, McDowell does not acknowledge the skeptical challenge which his conception of reasons-acquisition might face. He contends that perception is factive without arguing for the background assumption on which it rests. Hence, as I suggest in my article, the McDowellian claim that perception provides reasons for empirical beliefs is not sufficiently warranted. (shrink)

Review of a book: Matthew C. Altman, Kand and Applied Ethics. The Uses and Limits of Kant’s Practical Philosophy , Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford 2011.

SPINOZA AND KANT ON THE NATURE OF HUMAN MIND In the paper I try to compare the Spinozian and the Kantian accounts of the mind, underlining their relevance to contemporary debates in the area. I also discuss the problem of the nature of consciousness, in particular whether, on the basis of both Spinoza’s and Kant’s theories, one can claim that consciousness, or mentality, can be regarded as specifically distinctive of human beings. My suggestion is that one cannot. Keywords: SPINOZA, KANT, (...) MIND, NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. (shrink)

In Secularism and Freedom of Conscience Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor distinguish two models of a secular state: a republican and a pluralist-liberal one. Whereas the former displays a tendency to relegate religious beliefs from the public sphere for the sake of its postulated neutrality, the latter emphasizes the importance of freedom of conscience and, consequently, the right of individuals to manifest their religious commitments also in public. In this paper, I argue that Kant’s views on religion cannot provide a (...) general framework that would warrant the pluralist-liberal kind of secularism. To that effect, focusing on Kant’s distinction between the private and the public use of reason, introduced in his 1784 essay on enlightenment, I claim that the public sphere construed along the Kantian lines could not provide a space in which a plurality of different, heteronomously grounded beliefs, could coexist with one another. Comparing Kant’s theory with Spinoza’s—particularly with regard to their critique of revelation and the proposal to reinterpret the Scripture in the light of universal moral principles—I also suggest that, as a rationalist about religion, Kant comes close to the secularizing tendency of the ‘radical Enlightenment.’. (shrink)

Foreword from the Guest Editor to the special issue of Diametros – “Enlightenment and Secularism.”.

The article makes an attempt at comparing two perspectives from which philosophical cognition starts – a perspective which can be encountered in Spinoza’s Ethics and a perspective which can be encountered in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In the first case, a finite subject of the philosophical cognition embarks on the cognition of the substance, that is, reality in its comprehensiveness; in the second case, a finite subject of philosophical cognition reflects upon the totality of the field of possible experience, (...) uncovering the conditions of its possibility. Both kinds of cognition consist in a pursuit to comprehend what is necessary and strictly universal. I claim that as much as the source of the cognition at stake is, on Spinoza’s account, provided by the intuitive grasp of the ontological identity of the subject and the whole of the reality, on Kant account, indicating the source or the ground of the transcendental cognition proves more difficult, even though it might be granted that as in Spinoza’s cognition of the substance, also in the cognition which furnishes the judgments of the Critique of Pure Reason, intuition plays the decisive role. (shrink)

The article presents the views of Benedict Bornstein, formulated in his early writings, such as The Pre-established Transcendental Harmony as the Foundation of Kant’s Theory and The Basic Problem of Kant’s Theory of Cognition. These views pertain to the Kantian dualism of concepts and intuitions and they are presented against the background of the contemporary debate about the contents of perceptual experience. Recognizing the rightness of Bornstein’s claim about the non-conceptual character of the Kantian intuitions, I criticize Bornstein’s solution to (...) the problem of dualism, which necessitates an appeal to the conception of transcendental harmony, established by an act of God’s will. (shrink)

This book examines the importance of the Enlightenment for understanding the secular outlook of contemporary Western societies. It shows the new ways of thinking about religion that emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries and have had a great impact on how we address problems related to religion in the public sphere today. Based on the assumption that political concepts are rooted in historical realities, this collection combines the perspective of political philosophy with the perspective of the history of ideas. (...) Does secularism imply that individuals are not free to manifest their beliefs in public? Is secularization the same as rejecting faith in the absolute? Can there be a universal rational core in every religion? Does freedom of expression always go hand in hand with freedom of conscience? Is secularism an invention of the predominantly Christian West, which cannot be applied in other contexts, specifically that of Muslim cultures? Answers to these and related questions are sought not only in current theories and debates in political philosophy, but also in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Collins, Adriaan Koerbagh, Abbé Claude Yvon, Giovanni Paolo Marana, and others. (shrink)

This book examines the importance of the Enlightenment for understanding the secular outlook of contemporary Western societies. It shows the new ways of thinking about religion that emerged during the 17th and 18th centuries and have had a great impact on how we address problems related to religion in the public sphere today. Based on the assumption that political concepts are rooted in historical realities, this collection combines the perspective of political philosophy with the perspective of the history of ideas. (...) Does secularism imply that individuals are not free to manifest their beliefs in public? Is secularization the same as rejecting faith in the absolute? Can there be a universal rational core in every religion? Does freedom of expression always go hand in hand with freedom of conscience? Is secularism an invention of the predominantly Christian West, which cannot be applied in other contexts, specifically that of Muslim cultures? Answers to these and related questions are sought not only in current theories and debates in political philosophy, but also in the writings of Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Anthony Collins, Adriaan Koerbagh, Abbé Claude Yvon, Giovanni Paolo Marana, and others. -/- . (shrink)

Introductory chapter, 'Comparing Kant and Sartre' (ed. Baiasu).

This brief “Introduction” to the volume discusses the general idea of the special edition of the journal, which is dedicated to the radicalism of the Enlightenment in the context of Jonathan Israel’s recent work on the Enlightenment, and highlights the topics of the articles contained in the edition.

Review of Anna Tomaszewska's _The Contents of Perceptual Experience: A Kantian Perspective_, De Gruyter Open, Warsaw/Berlin 2014.

This special issue aims to spotlight the individual, lived experiences of caregivers and those receiving care–areas often overshadowed by clinical and medicalized narratives within clinical ethics. Our aim is to enrich the discourse by incorporating stories and narratives of medical care and challenge existing clinical practices by emphasizing patient and practitioner experiences. Through a blend of clinical and academic insights, this issue provides phenomenological narratives, highlighting the importance of lived experiences in understanding and improving clinical caregiving practices. The contributions, ranging (...) from theoretical analyses to personal narratives, explore various aspects of caregiving. Each article contributes to a deeper understanding of the phenomenologies of care, advocating for a more inclusive, patient-centered approach in clinical ethics and practice. (shrink)

This article studies an illuminated manuscript of St. Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos: Vat. lat. 451 (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana). The manuscript was commissioned by the bishop Giovanni Capogallo, when he was in Lombardy in close contact with the court of the duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. The article examines the cultural milieu of Pavia in the early 15th century, highlighting the role of the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine in the monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. (...) The two incipit pages ff. 1r and 239r, illuminated by Michelino da Besozzo, are an example of the International Gothic style and this article analyses not only their stylistic aspect, but also their allegorical meaning, as an interesting case of decoration of a patristic text. (shrink)

_Being Human _examines the complex connections among conceptions of human nature, attitudes toward non-human nature, and ethics. Anna Peterson proposes an "ethical anthropology" that examines how ideas of nature and humanity are bound together in ways that shape the very foundations of cultures. Peterson discusses mainstream Western understandings of what it means to be human, as well as alternatives to these perspectives, and suggests that the construction of a compelling, coherent environmental ethics will revise our ideas not only about (...) nature but also about what it means to be human. (shrink)

This study belongs to the ethnomethodological tradition of identifying the everyday practices accounting for the oiled machinery of social organization and applies this approach to understanding direction light usage. We observe a set of episodes videorecorded in North-East Italy in the urban traffic. We first unpack the meaning of direction light usage from a pragmatic perspective and then test our interpretation against the cases in our collection that seem to deviate from it. We argue that direction lights’ usage works as (...) an announcement to some road users and a request to a subset of them; in both cases, direction lights convey contextualized (indexical) coordinates about the vehicle’s prospective trajectory. We then explain the cases in which signaling is omitted and draw some implications for traffic coordination and safety. (shrink)

O manuscrito clandestino Jordanus Brunus redivivus ou Traité des erreurs populaires foi publicado em 1771, não trazendo indicação alguma de sua autoria. Entretanto, a despeito do anonimato da obra, ela tornou-se um dos textos mais famosos dentre a filosofia clandestina do século XVIII, aludindo a um filósofo que foi uma das maiores vítimas da superstição e do fanatismo de sua época: Giordano Bruno. O título do escrito é uma espécie de homenagem ao pensador italiano, mas não há no decorrer da (...) obra uma menção sequer que comprove que o autor anônimo tenha lido uma linha de suas obras, mesmo que seja considerado o elo filosófico de união entre o brunismo da primeira metade do século XVII e o da segunda metade do século XVIII. É em um encadeamento de ideias progressivo no Jordanus Brunus que nos permite encontrar o fio condutor das reflexões do autor: a sua formulação do ateísmo caracteriza-se por sua abordagem não dogmática, dissimulada, preparando o solo para o racionalismo ateu que estaria por vir. O presente artigo limitar-se-á à terceira e quarta partes do manuscrito, nas quais o autor anônimo vai tratar diretamente da questão da existência de deus e fazer diversas objeções às provas de sua existência. (shrink)

Johann Heinrich Tieftrunk has a place among the early Kantians in Halle as both a theologian and a philosophical thinker. After situating Tieftrunk within this intellectual history and determining his theological and philosophical position, this paper provides a chronological account of the concept of hope—which lies at the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy—in Tieftrunk’s writings on philosophy of religion. In particular, the discussion centers on the relationship between the foundation of hope in the moral law and the exclusion of a (...) legalistic fulfilment of hope. The “love of the law,” which emerges especially in Tieftrunk’s work, takes a prominent position in the interpretation. The investigation is accompanied by an evaluation of Tieftrunk’s role in the early reception of Kant. (shrink)

Analyzing the rate at which languages change can clarify whether similarities across languages are solely the result of cognitive biases or might be partially due to descent from a common ancestor. To demonstrate this approach, we use a simple model of language evolution to mathematically determine how long it should take for the distribution over languages to lose the influence of a common ancestor and converge to a form that is determined by constraints on language learning. We show that modeling (...) language learning as Bayesian inference ofnbinary parameters or the ordering ofnconstraints results in convergence in a number of generations that is on the order ofn log n. We relax some of the simplifying assumptions of this model to explore how different assumptions about language evolution affect predictions about the time to convergence; in general, convergence time increases as the model becomes more realistic. This allows us to characterize the assumptions about language learning (given the models that we consider) that are sufficient for convergence to have taken place on a timescale that is consistent with the origin of human languages. These results clearly identify the consequences of a set of simple models of language evolution and show how analysis of convergence rates provides a tool that can be used to explore questions about the relationship between accounts of language learning and the origins of similarities across languages. (shrink)