Avant de rédiger son Discours de la méthode, véritable coup d'Etat dans la pensée philosophique du XVIIe siècle, le jeune Descartes avait fait trois songes dans une nuit de novembre 1619. Le cerveau en feu de M Descartes revisite ces rêves, où le jeune philosophe entrevoit le fondement matriciel qui relie tous les êtres, et propose un quatrième songe dont il ne serait pas revenu. Nous avons voulu comprendre comment, à l'issue de cette nuit, Descartes entreprend de fonder le cogito (...) contre tous les vertiges entrevus. Un délire philosophique a décidé du destin de l'Occident, a provoqué un durcissement de la raison. Aujourd'hui, alors que la raison de la technologie et de la finance est remise en cause, que nous remettons en doute la Raison des raisons, il importe de revisiter cette vision fondamentale et d'établir un dialogue avec l'écologie intuitive des cultures autochtones : c'est le cinquième songe. (shrink)

"We must turn to the Euthydemus if we are to understand both Plato's earlier and his more mature work. Thomas Chance's book is an indispensible tool for penetrating to the sources of Plato's thinking on the nature of philosophy. This is the most impressive treatment of the dialogue so far available to scholars, and the interpretations offered will surely be the starting point for all future discussions."--G. B. Kerferd, Emeritus, University of Manchester "A sensitive and well-informed study of an (...) important and much neglected dialogue."--R. E. Allen, Northwestern University "A sensitive and well-informed study of an important and much neglected dialogue."--R. E. Allen "Chance's book [will be] an indispensable tool for penetrating to the sources of Plato's thinking.... The interpretations offered will surely be the starting point for all future discussions."--George Kerferd. (shrink)

Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue (...) that its goal is to establish a set of rules for the use of pure reason that, if followed, will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate our tendency to make judgments about supersensible objects. Since Kant's justification for these rules relies crucially on claims he has defended in the Doctrine of Elements, I argue further that, far from being a dispensable part of the Critique as commentators have tended to claim, the Discipline is, in fact, the culmination of Kant's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)

This article aims to highlight the extent to which Kant’s account of belief draws on the views of his contemporaries. Situating the non-evidentialist features of Crusius’s account of belief within his broader account, I argue that they include antecedents to both Kant’s distinction between pragmatic and moral belief and his conception of a postulate of pure practical reason. While moving us closer to Kant’s arguments for the first postulate, however, both Crusius’s and Meier’s arguments for the immortality of the soul (...) fail to anticipate the most important aspect of their Kantian counterparts. Developing the non-evidentialist features of Basedow’s account of belief, I distinguish it from its Pascalian and Jamesian relatives and argue that it is the clearest antecedent to Kant’s arguments for the first and second postulates. Finally, I consider the development of Kant’s account of belief after the first Critique in light of the foregoing, and discuss the broader implications of my analysis. (shrink)

Kant's response to scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason is complex and remarkably nuanced, although it is rarely recognized as such. In this paper, I argue that recent attempts to flesh out the details of this response by Paul Guyer and Michael Forster do not go far enough. Although they are right to draw a distinction between Humean and Pyrrhonian scepticism and locate Kant's response to the latter in the Transcendental Dialectic, their accounts fail to capture two important aspects (...) of this response. The first is that Kant's response to Pyrrhonian scepticism is also a response to Hume. The second is that aspects of this response are decidedly positive. In particular, I argue (1) that Kant believed Hume's scepticism manifested important elements of Pyrrhonian scepticism and (2) that both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Hume had a significant positive influence on the development of the Transcendental Dialectic. (shrink)

Hume’s account of causation is often regarded a challenge Kant must overcome if the Critical philosophy is to be successful. But from Kant’s time to the present, Hume’s denial of our ability to cognize supersensible objects, a denial that relies heavily on his account of causation, has also been regarded as a forerunner to Kant’s critique of metaphysics. After identifying reasons for rejecting Wayne Waxman’s recent account of Kant’s debt to Hume, I present my own, more modest account of this (...) debt, an account that seeks to unite the two very different pictures of Kant’s relationship to Hume sketched above. (shrink)

Eric Watkins has argued on philosophical, textual, and historical grounds that Kant’s account of causation in the first Critique should not be read as an attempt to refute Hume’s account of causation. In this paper, I challenge the arguments for Watkins’ claim. Specifically, I argue (1) that Kant’s philosophical commitments, even on Watkins’ reading, are not obvious obstacles to refuting Hume, (2) that textual evidence from the “Disciple of Pure Reason” suggests Kant conceived of his account of causation as such (...) a refutation, and (3) that none of Hume’s early German critics provided responses to this account that would have satisfied Kant. Watkins’ reading of Kant’s account of causation is thus more compatible with traditional views about Kant’s relationship to Hume than Watkins believes. (shrink)

In both his published works and lecture notes Kant distinguishes between Transcendental and Natural Theology, associating the former with Deism and the latter with Theism. The purpose of this paper is to explore these distinctions, particularly as they are shaped by Kant’s engagement with Baumgarten’s Philosophical Theology.

The importance of the pure concepts of the understanding (i.e. the categories) within Kant’s system of philosophy is undeniable. As I hope to make clear in this essay, however, the categories are also an essential part of Kant’s critique of Christian Wolff. In particular, I argue that Kant’s development of the categories represents a decisive break with the Wolffian conception of the understanding and that this break is central to understanding the task of the Transcendental Analytic. This break, however, is (...) not merely that Kant affirms while Wolff and his followers deny a sharp distinction between sensibility and the understanding, which is the aspect of Kant’s rejection of Wolff that scholars most frequently note. Rather, this break concerns differences in their views about the understanding itself. For while Wolff conceives of the understanding as a mental capacity to extract and make distinct content already present in the senses, Kant conceives of the understanding in its “real use” as a capacity to produce purely intellectual content. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on three sets of issues that bear directly on our understanding of Locke and Kant. The first is whether Kant believes Locke merely anticipates his distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments or also believes Locke anticipates his notion of synthetic a priori cognition. The second is what should we as readers of Kant and Locke should think about Kant’s view whatever it turns out to be, and the third is the nature of Kant’s justification (...) for the comparison he draws between his philosophy and Locke’s. I argue (1) that Kant believes Locke anticipates both the analytic-synthetic distinction and Kant’s notion of synthetic a priori cognition, (2) that the best justification for Kant’s claim draws on Locke’s distinction between trifling and instructive knowledge, (3) that the arguments against this claim developed by Carson, Allison, and Newman fail to undermine it, and (4) that Kant’s own justification for his claim is quite different from what many commentators have thought it was (or should have been). (shrink)

It is often claimed that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is modeled on the Wolffian division of logic textbooks into sections on concepts, judgments, and inferences. While it is undeniable that the Transcendental Logic contains elements that are similar to the content of these sections, I believe these similarities are largely incidental to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In this essay, I offer an alternative and, I believe, more plausible account of Wolff’s influence on the structure of the (...) Transcendental Logic, one that puts the focus on his empirical psychology rather than his logic. In particular, I argue that the structure of the Transcendental Logic is deeply indebted to a conception of purity that Wolff introduces in his empirical psychology and that this conception sheds more light on the overall structure of the Transcendental Logic than the accepted view. In section one, I outline two conceptions of purity found in Kant and trace them to similar views in Wolff. In section two, I turn to Kant’s views about logic as they are expressed in the Critique and argue that it is best to interpret Kant’s taxonomy of logic on its own terms rather than reading it through its terminological similarities to aspects of the Wolffian tradition. In section three, I argue that the second of the two conceptions of purity identified in section one is central to the structure of the Transcendental Logic. In doing so, I argue against the widespread view that this section of the Critique is modeled solely on what Kant calls pure general logic as opposed to both pure and applied general logic. I then conclude by briefly reviewing my account and considering some of its broader implications for our understanding of Kant. (shrink)

Chez Foucault le pouvoir est d'abord pensé comme déploiement de la visibilité et comme inscription des corps. On voit dans une première partie comment les figures de l'autorité disparaissent, laissant place à un espace de dispersion où s'estompe la figure de l'homme comme effet passager d'une discontinuité entre le savoir et le pouvoir. Si le pouvoir est invisible lorsqu'il se confond avec l'adéquation à soi du savoir, c'est dans un effet de résistance que se constituent nos expériences qui sont à (...) la fois événements et significations : dans une deuxième partie nous reprenons la question du pouvoir à partir de l'impuissance du sujet à fonder son expérience, la perte de l'intériorité, la difficulté de la contestation, la perte de la profondeur, la perte du corps comme « propre » qui est aussi perte de l'excellence inhérente à tout être humain et du sexe comme affirmation de la différence . Nous croyons toujours opposer une nature intacte au déploiement du pouvoir. Nous examinons comment nous croyons trouver cette nature dans ce que nous caractérisons comme sujet de la contestation, peuple-substrat, corps-rebelle ou sexe-nature. Mais - nous le voyons dans la troisième partie - ces natures sont toujours « informées » par le pouvoir. C'est pourquoi, dans ce qui oppose une résistance au pouvoir, tels les expériences de la contestation sociale, de la sexualité et aussi du redoublement et de la transgression dans le langage, on retrouve les mêmes figures de déploiement qui caractérisent un pouvoir qui se redouble en lui-même et se dissémine dès qu'il rencontre des résistances, pour informer celles-ci. Car chez Foucault, l'expérience est une structure tripartite qui met en relation savoir, pouvoir et subjectivité.In Foucault's first writings, power was the spreading-out of visibility and an inscription of bodies. In the first part of this paper we examine how the figures of authority slowly faded, as power became very dispersed and diffused, only to give a last glimpse of the figure of man, a mere discontinuity between knowledge and power. If power remains invisible when it merges completely with a self-sufficient knowledge, our experiences take shape as effects of resistance to power. This is why experiences are simultaneously events and meanings : in a second part we reconsider the query on power in the light of Foucault's commentary on the difficulty of the subject to give foundation to his experiences, the loss of inferiority and profoundness, the challenge of true subversion, the loss of the body as one's "own", the loss of belief in a core of goodness in all human beings and the loss of sex as being decisive in recognition of a difference . We believe we ultimately can oppose an untouched and profound quality in human nature to the dispersion of power. We examine the different forms of such a belief in what we caractérise as the subject of subversion, the people as substratum, the body as rebel and sex as nature. But - as we can see in the third part - these natures are always "informed" by power. This is why we can find in most forms of resistance to power, as in the experiences of social subversion, sexuality, redoubling and transgression in language, the same forms of scattering which are specific to power itself, to a power which redoubles itself and in itself and is disseminated wherever he meets some resistance, to inform the latter. As with Foucault, experience is a tripartite structure which relates knowledge, power and subjectivity. (shrink)

Notre culture est atlantidienne par deux aspects : elle se veut insulaire, elle voue un culte au spectacle. Atlantide était aux Athéniens ce qu'Hollywood, Disney & Co sont au monde occidental. La crise relève d'une tension entre le spectacle et la vie, nous multiplions les tentatives de camoufler la crise dans un grand discours pseudo-culturel spectaculaire, par une pléthore de " créations " ou d'" événements " superficiels et dérisoires. Pendant des siècles, l'art et la science ont travaillé de concert (...) dans une même exigence de découverte. Aujourd'hui, l'art joue un rôle secondaire, tandis que le discours sur la consommation et le divertissement fait d'une société dominée par la science le meilleur des mondes possibles. Quelles en sont les conséquences pour l'art? Critiques, médias, artistes, publics : chacun des rouages de la machine est ici analysé avec brio. Il en résulte un essai indispensable à une meilleure compréhension du rôle de l'art dans une société prompte à envisager l'avenir en se persuadant d'avoir toujours " déjà " existé. (shrink)

This essay develops a Kantian approach to the permissibility of biomedical physical, cognitive, and moral enhancement. Kant holds that human beings have an imperfect duty to promote their physical, cognitive, and moral perfection. While an agent’s individual circumstances may limit the means she may permissibly use to enhance herself, whether biomedically or otherwise, I argue (1) that biomedical means of enhancing oneself are, generally speaking, both permissible and meritorious from a Kantian perspective. Despite often being equally permissible, I also argue (...) (2) that enhancing oneself by more traditional means is, generally speaking, more meritorious (and involves the display of more virtue) than enhancing oneself by biomedical means. Nevertheless, since Kant does not fault agents for acting less meritoriously (or for displaying less virtue) than they otherwise could, I also argue (3) that those who opt for permissible biomedical enhancement over more traditional forms are not blameworthy for doing so. I also consider and reject several objections to these claims, including that biomedical enhancements (1) are too passive to count as actions by the agent who enhances herself, (2) involve a failure of the agent to treat her humanity as an end in itself or to show proper respect for her dignity, (3) might be undertaken on the basis of motives that undermine their permissibility, (4) are likely to exacerbate existing social and economic inequalities in ways that do the same, and (5) in their moral form are incompatible with Kant’s conception of duty and human freedom. (shrink)

I raise three questions relevant to De Boer’s overall project in Kant’s Reform of Metaphysics. The first is whether Kant’s 1799 open letter to Fichte supports or threatens her contention that Kant had an abiding interest in developing a reformed metaphysics from 1781 onwards. The second is whether De Boer’s conception of the pure intellect and its place in Kant’s projected system of metaphysics captures the role of pure sensibility in the Analytic of Principles, rational physics and rational psychology. The (...) third is whether one might accept the outline of this system as De Boer develops it while still holding that it is more accurate to characterize it as revolution rather than reform. (shrink)

In this chapter we explore the importance of the Pantheism Controversy for the evolution of Kant’s so-called “Moral Argument” for the Highest Good and its postulates. After an initial discussion of the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, we move on to the relationship between faith and reason in the Pantheism Controversy, Kant’s response to the Controversy in his 1786 “Orientation” Essay, Thomas Wizenmann’s criticisms of that essay, and finally to the Critique of Practical Reason. We argue that while (...) Kant used the Pantheism Controversy to reset his account of the Highest Good, its treatment in the Orientation Essay was susceptible to the objections raised by Thomas Wizenmann, and thus in need of the further advances found in the Critique of Practical Reason. (shrink)

In recent years, I have developed an endurance running art-practice as part of a larger inquiry into the performative nature of human physical activity. In the Absence of Running is series of artworks made using images from medical arthroscopic interventions following the diagnosis of medial meniscus tears to the cartilage and osteoarthritis in both my knees. Faced with not being able to run or to make artworks using running in the long-term, I turned to the tools of medical intervention. If (...) a camera was going inside my knee for the purpose of surgery, I would use it for the purpose of art. The resulting videos and photographs led to a contemplation on the image and viewing practices not previously anticipated, not least on the now endemic uses of advanced imaging technologies as integral parts of surgical operations. Their reassembly as a stop-frame animation and artist’s book in physical and electronic form enabled a process of slowing down and re-engagement with the image and physicality of the book itself and processes and with practices of viewing. This was important in reasserting the sense of human agency in our relationship to images in a world where this appears to be increasingly absent. (shrink)

The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. By Michael Emmerich. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. xv + 494. $95, $35.

Recently academic freedom and academic tenure have been in the media spotlight because of concerns that academic freedom is being misused and that academic tenure provides job security to a select few. First, this paper provides a brief history of these two institutions and follow with an analysis using Stone’s (2002) policy analysis format. Second, this paper examines the university through two lenses: (a) an economic market lens; and (b) a community lens. These two lenses offer contrasting views of the (...) university and help explain the different views of academic freedom and tenure. The authors suggest that faculty make use of the economic model to increase their chances of maintaining tenure in a university atmosphere frequently characterized by a business approach rather than a collegial one. Recommendations for future research are also provided. (shrink)