In “Raymond Ruyer and cybernetics”, Alix Veilhan sheds light on Ruyer’s reading of cybernetic theories, and especially on how a dialogue with the views of Norbert Wiener allows Ruyer to support the hypothesis of a “trans-spatial” origin of the information, and to demonstrate once again the inadequacy of mechanism in the explanation of the living world. Ruyer thus calls for the development of a renewed cybernetics, in conformity with his “neo-finalism”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:604 Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Alix Genter Appearances Can Be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New York City, 1945–1969 The 1956 image of Sunny and Doris (figure 1) is a typical one when conjuring images of butch-femme lesbianism in the post-World War II era: a femme looking glamorous in a dress, makeup, and heels, and a dapper butch sporting (...) a man’s suit and tie and a slick D.A. haircut with a pompadour and one casual curl in front.1 The butch’s masculine appearance and the sharp gendered contrast between the two make their queerness highly legible, a standard feature in images of postwar butch-femme lesbians in both the public and scholarly imagination.2 Indeed, lesbian visibility at midcentury was almost entirely dependent on gender transgressions in the form of “mannishness,” demarcating butches as the public face of lesbianism—a role that scholars such as Joan Nestle, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline Davis, and Donna Penn argue had powerful political implications. Butches not only challenged normative conceptions of gender and claimed lesbian social space, they also defiantly announced their queerness through their looks, thereby expressing women’s sexual autonomy and acting as vehicles for introducing others to gay life. Alongside them, femmes, while generally undetectable by 1. D.A. refers to “duck’s ass,” a popular hairstyle from the 1950s. The hair was slicked back into a point at the nape of the neck that resembled a duck’s tail. 2. In addition to dress and appearance, postwar butch-femme lesbianism was defined by gendered behaviors and mannerisms, and by roles in courtship, relationships, and sex. Alix Genter 605 themselves, proclaimed their own lesbianism and contributed to these modes of visual resistance.3 In these analyses, femmes are incorporated into lesbian rebellion by association with butches—their willingness to stand beside butches and be read as queer and to provide love and support for their partners who bore the brunt of homophobic abuse because of their overt gender expression. Butch visibility remains the foundation of butch-femme resistance, and legible butch masculinity remains an idealized icon of subversive lesbian power. But what if butches in postwar America were not as visible as commonly believed? Consider Miriam Wolfson and May Brown, for example (figure 2), both butches in New York City in the 1950s. Wolfson sees herself as a shy-but-aggressive butch who has always felt masculine, and she sees her friend May Brown as “the butch of the century.”4 Yet, the image shows two women in skirts with feminine hairdos and hints of lipstick. Photographs such as this one demonstrate the visual disconnect between what one might expect butchness to look like and what it did look like for some women during this era. While New York City’s butches certainly employed the classic suit-and-tie and jeans-and-T-shirt looks, they also conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions. In doing so, they offered a range of ways of interpreting butchness in their everyday lives that did not necessarily rely on the men’s clothing and styling that made lesbians visible in larger US culture. This article interrogates the relationship between masculine style and lesbian self-presentation during the postwar period. Queer legibility could enable entrance into lesbian communities and attract one’s next lover as well as provoke hostility, violence, and arrest. In this context, appearance carried tremendous significance, and butches and femmes employed diverse strategies to both convey and conceal their queerness, 3. See Joan Nestle, “Butch-Femme Relationships: Sexual Courage in the 1950s,” in her A Restricted Country, 3rd ed. (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 92–102; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); Donna Penn, “The Meanings of Lesbianism in Postwar America,” in Gender and American History since 1890, ed. Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), 106–24. 4. Miriam Wolfson, interview with author, New York, NY, July 1, 2010. 606 Alix Genter knowing that the consequences varied by time, place, and... (shrink)

This is a descriptive and detailed revision of qualitative investigations of coping styles and strategies; academic performance of adolescent students. It considered both, independent and correlational studies among the two variables. Different data bases were revised like Dialnet, Redalyc, Scielo y Science Direct. 479 articles were obtained from these, 46 of these responded to the selection criteria that entailed (research article, indexed journal, adolescents). Alongside this search there was a prevalence of the studies related to different variables and their relationship (...) with coping styles and strategies. The studies present common results in terms of positive correlations between active coping styles and well being. (shrink)

This article discusses the revival of Polish national thought from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I demonstrate how the so-called Jewish question influenced the debate and the vision of Jewry in Poland after 1989 and how it was used to create a new national identity. I outline why the so-called Jewish question was so crucial in Polish national debates. Furthermore, I demon- strate how the Polish Jewish past was portrayed and commemorated in the Third Polish Republic. This research focuses (...) upon the period of Aleksander Kwasniewski’s presidency, during which the famous debate about the pogrom in Jedwabne took place. The original version of this article was presented as a paper in January 2019 at a conference in Stockholm entitled ‘Jews in Middle Eastern Europe after the Downfall of the Wall in 1989’, organised by Paideia, The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden. (shrink)

When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women's consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women's civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This (...) was the women's liberation movement, and writing--powerful, personal, and prophetic--was its beating heart. Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works--many long out-of-print and hard to find--that catalyzed and propelled the women's liberation movement. Ranging from Friedan's Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi's Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life--changes too often taken for granted today--but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved"--Back cover. (shrink)

En France, Lukács est considéré aussi bien comme un représentant de l’orthodoxie marxiste que comme un auteur subversif fondateur de la tradition du marxisme hétérodoxe. Cet article revient sur la genèse de cette appréciation ambivalente, qui trouve ses sources dans les années 1940 et 1950. C’est durant ces années que s’élaborent les cadres et présupposés de la réception française de son œuvre, à travers une série d’épisodes dont les enjeux sont à la fois théoriques, éditoriaux et politiques : l’intervention de (...) Lukács en France dans la bataille idéologique de la Guerre froide en 1948-1949 et sa polémique menée avec l’existentialisme français, l’éclatement international de « l’affaire Lukács » en 1949-1950 et ses retombées hexagonales, enfin le changement de statut de Lukács au cours des années 1950. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to bring to light the anthropological dimension of Kant’s account of cognition as it is developed in the Lectures on Anthropology. I will argue that Kant’s anthropology of cognition develops along two complementary lines. On the one hand, it studies Nature’s intentions for the human species – the “natural” dimension of human cognition. On the other hand, it uses this knowledge to help us realise of our cognitive purposes – the “pragmatic” dimension of human (...) cognition. Insofar as it is intended for us as embodied human agents whose cognition takes place in the empirical world, it is concerned with the knowledge of the natural subjective conditions that help or hinder our cognition. Yet the idea that Kant’s anthropology of cognition has a pragmatic dimension turns out to be problematic. For whilst pragmatic anthropology is defined as ‘the investigation of what he as a free-acting being makes of himself, or can and should make of himself’ (A 7:119), by contrast with acting, cognising seems to be beyond the realm of voluntary action. However, I will show that Kant’s account of cognition makes room for a form of epistemic control that is sufficient to account for the possibility of its pragmatic dimension. Therefore, far from portraying human beings as disembodied pure minds, Kant’s account not only acknowledges the empirical, contingent and messy features of our cognition, it helps us become better, more efficient knowers by recommending how we can improve upon the subjective features that further or hinder our cognitive perfection. I will conclude by drawing the implications on my interpretation for our overall understanding of Kant’s account of cognition. (shrink)

À travers la présentation clinique du cas de Caroline, une jeune femme sourde suivie en psychothérapie, ce texte réfléchit à la question de la triangulation, à ses spécificités et achoppements. Du fait des besoins spécifiques de l’enfant, la situation de handicap peut accentuer la situation de dépendance de l’enfant et prolonger la préoccupation maternelle. De même, le handicap sensoriel risque d’engendrer un retard dans l’adaptation des parents à leur enfant et de créer une vulnérabilité dans le lien aux autres, notamment (...) lors des séparations. Ces spécificités intensifieraient la menace de castration, fantasmatiquement attribuée au père, et favoriseraient la fixation à la mère. Une approche psychodynamique permet d’être attentif à la dimension défensive en jeu dans la mise au premier plan d’imagos parentales clivées, avec d’un côté une mère idéale, de l’autre un père qui focalise l’agressivité. (shrink)

Recent scientific advances in the field of gene editing have led to a renewed discussion on the moral acceptability of human germline modifications. Gene editing methods can be used on human embryos and gametes in order to change DNA sequences that are associated with diseases. Modifying the human germline, however, is currently illegal in many countries but has been suggested as a ‘last resort’ option in some reports. In contrast, preimplantation genetic diagnosis is now a well-established practice within reproductive medicine. (...) Both methods can be used to prevent children from being born with severe genetic diseases. This paper focuses on four moral concerns raised in the debate about germline gene editing and applies them to the practice of PGD for comparison: Violation of human dignity, disrespect of the autonomy and the physical integrity of the future child, discrimination of people living with a disability and the fear of slippery slope towards immoral usage of the technology, e.g. designing children for specific third party interests. Our analysis did not reveal any fundamental differences with regard to the four concerns. We argue that with regard to the four arguments analyzed in this paper germline gene editing should be considered morally as acceptable as the selection of genomes on the basis of PGD. However, we also argue that any application of GGE in reproductive medicine should be put on hold until thorough and comprehensive laws have been implemented to prevent the abuse of GGE for non-medical enhancement. (shrink)

Kant often seems to suggest that a cognition – whether an everyday cognition or a scientific cognition – cannot be beautiful. In the Critique of Judgment and the Lectures on Logic, he writes: ‘a science which, as such, is supposed to be beautiful, is absurd.’ (CJ 184 (5:305)) ‘The expression "beautiful cognition" is not fitting at all’ (LL 446 (24:708)). These claims are usually understood rather straightforwardly. On the one hand, cognition cannot be beautiful since on Kant’s account, it is (...) all about concepts whilst beauty is defined by its non-conceptual nature. On the other hand, beauty cannot contribute to cognition since the former is grounded on subjective feelings whilst cognition is all about objective knowledge. However, I will argue that Kant’s view of the relationship between cognition and beauty is not as straightforward as it may seem, and that both of these claims are in fact false. As I will show, cognition can be beautiful, and the feeling of beauty is cognitively valuable. Yet it is not because beauty is a sign of the truthfulness of a theory. Nor is it because the process that gives rise to the feeling of beauty, the free play, furthers scientific progress. Rather, it is because the experience of beauty stimulates our cognitive powers and thereby enhances our cognitive activity. On this basis, contrary to what is usually thought, cognition can, and in fact should, be beautiful for Kant. (shrink)

À travers la présentation clinique du cas de Caroline, une jeune femme sourde suivie en psychothérapie, ce texte réfléchit à la question de la triangulation, à ses spécificités et achoppements. Du fait des besoins spécifiques de l’enfant, la situation de handicap peut accentuer la situation de dépendance de l’enfant et prolonger la préoccupation maternelle. De même, le handicap sensoriel risque d’engendrer un retard dans l’adaptation des parents à leur enfant et de créer une vulnérabilité dans le lien aux autres, notamment (...) lors des séparations. Ces spécificités intensifieraient la menace de castration, fantasmatiquement attribuée au père, et favoriseraient la fixation à la mère. Une approche psychodynamique permet d’être attentif à la dimension défensive en jeu dans la mise au premier plan d’imagos parentales clivées, avec d’un côté une mère idéale, de l’autre un père qui focalise l’agressivité. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to extract from Kant's writings an account of the nature of the emotions and their function – and to do so despite the fact that Kant neither uses the term ‘emotion’ nor offers a systematic treatment of it. Kant's position, as I interpret it, challenges the contemporary trends that define emotions in terms of other mental states and defines them instead first and foremost as ‘feelings’. Although Kant's views on the nature of feelings have (...) drawn surprisingly little attention, I argue that the faculty of feeling has the distinct role of making us aware of the way our faculties relate to each other and to the world. As I show, feelings are affective appraisals of our activity, and as such they play an indispensable orientational function in the Kantian mind. After spelling out Kant's distinction between feeling and desire, I turn to the distinction between feeling and cognition and show that while feelings are non-cognitive states, they have a form of derived-intentionality. §4 argues that what feelings are about, in this derived sense, is our relationship to ourselves and the world: they function as affective appraisals of the state of our agency. §5 shows that this function is necessary to the activity of the mind insofar as it is orientational. Finally, §6 discusses the examples of epistemic pleasure and moral contentment and argues that they manifest the conditions of cognitive and moral agency respectively. (shrink)

Kant famously identified 'What is man?' as the fundamental question that encompasses the whole of philosophy. Yet surprisingly, there has been no concerted effort amongst Kant scholars to examine Kant's actual philosophy of man. This book, which is inspired by, and part of, the recent movement that focuses on the empirical dimension of Kant's works, is the first sustained attempt to extract from his writings on biology, anthropology and history an account of the human sciences, their underlying unity, their presuppositions (...) as well as their methodology. In exploring his philosophical and epistemological foundation of the human sciences, it reveals an unexpected picture of Kant, a picture of a thinker who is profoundly attentive to the diversity, detail and complexity of the human world. (shrink)

Cet article entend montrer que le travail biographique de Sartre s’inscrit dans son projet d’unification des sciences humaines, et que la notion de génération constitue dans ce cadre une médiation centrale de l’analyse. Non seulement l’œuvre et la vie d’un individu s’éclairent mutuellement, mais l’une et l’autre sont inséparables de l’époque et de la situation dans lesquelles elles s’inscrivent ; et parce que la prise en compte de la génération aide à comprend le lien entre l’individu et la société, elle (...) fait de la biographie un complément nécessaire à l’étude historique et sociologique. (shrink)

As has been noted in the recent literature on Kant’s ethics, Kant holds that although natural drives such as feelings, emotions and inclinations cannot lead directly to moral worth, they nevertheless play some kind of role vis-à-vis morality. The issue is thus to understand this role within the limits set by Kant’s account of freedom, and it is usually tackled by examining the relationship between moral and non-moral motivation in the Groundwork, the Critique of Practical Reason, and more recently, the (...) Anthropology. In this respect, the aim of this paper is to argue that the Observations is a peculiar work, for by contrast with later works, its focus is not on the ways in which nature helps human beings become more moral, or better moral agents, but rather on how it ensures that the human species survives and flourishes independently of its morality, and in particular despite its lack thereof. In this sense, the Observations emphasizes first that the human species can, and does, function independently of its moral worth; and second, that it is intended to function beautifully has a whole in spite of its lack of moral worth. On this basis, I will conclude that the Kant of the Observations is more akin to a Mandeville than a Rousseau – he describes the functioning of the species, spelling out its survival mechanisms through natural drives, rather than explains that and how it ought to perfect itself. (shrink)

Le lexique du « processus », lorsqu’il est mobilisé pour penser la manière dont la société se transforme, semble difficilement compatible avec la perspective d’un changement social radical, et plus encore avec la défense d’une stratégie révolutionnaire : marqué par le développement des théories évolutionnistes, il est associé à un changement continu, progressif et lent. Cependant, à la croisée des héritages de la philosophie hégélienne et des théorisations de Marx et Engels, l’approche processuelle de la réalité sociale a également été (...) présentée par certains philosophes du xxe siècle comme le corrélat théorique indispensable à tout projet de transformation sociale radicale. Cet article examine quelques-uns des principaux philosophes qui se sont appuyés sur l’approche processuelle dans cette perspective et ont repensé grâce à elle l’alternative entre réforme et révolution : John Dewey, Georg Lukács et Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg est un philosophe américain dont l’œuvre est essentiellement consacrée à une réflexion sur la technique. Ancien élève de Herbert Marcuse, il a par ailleurs étudié à de nombreuses reprises les différentes pensées que l’on regroupe sous l’appellation d’« École de Francfort ». Dans Philosophie de la praxis, troisième de ses livres faisant l’objet d’une traduction française, Feenberg articule en neuf chapitres une reconstruction historique et critique de ce qu’il nomme « philosoph...

In this paper, I explore the possibility of developing a Kantian account of the ethics of belief by deploying the tools provided by Kant's ethics. To do so, I reconstruct epistemic concepts and arguments on the model of their ethical counterparts, focusing on the notions of epistemic principle, epistemic maxim and epistemic universalizability test. On this basis, I suggest that there is an analogy between our position as moral agents and as cognizers: our actions and our thoughts are subject to (...) the same rational norm. (shrink)

La defense d'un profond humanisme dont les racines puisent dans la Renaissance ainsi que le souci permanent d'une pedagogie exemplaire ont guide Genevieve Giudicelli-Delage durant toute sa carriere. Professeur emerite de l'Universite Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, ou elle a notamment dirige pendant de nombreuses annees le DEA devenu Master II de droit penal et politique criminelle en Europe, redactrice en chef de la Revue de science criminelle et de droit penal compare pour les editions Dalloz, presidente de l'Association de recherches penales (...) europeennes (ARPE), directrice de l'Ecole du Centre Ouest des avocats a Poitiers, Genevieve Giudicelli-Delage n'a cesse d'oeuvrer pour un depassement des frontieres disciplinaires et geographiques dans l'approche du phenomene criminel, ce dont temoignent en particulier son engagement en faveur du developpement du droit compare et son attachement a repousser les lignes d'horizons juridiques. Son regard sur le droit penal a profondement marque des generations d'etudiants et de doctorants. Par ses recherches individuelles, comme par les recherches collectives qu'elle mene admirablement, elle a egalement contribue au rayonnement doctrinal du droit penal en general, et de certaines de ses disciplines telles que le droit penal des affaires, le droit international penal, le droit penal europeen ou la procedure penale. C'est donc au chercheur comme au pedagogue que nous avons souhaite rendre hommage par ces Melanges regroupant une soixantaine d'auteurs, anciens eleves/collegues/amis, universitaires et/ou praticiens reunis autour du theme Humanisme et justice, que le Professeur Giudicelli-Delage a, par un soin constant, nourri et questionne durant toutes ses annees d'exercice. (shrink)

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is considered by many to have made the most sweeping changes affecting corporate governance since the Securities and Exchange Acts of 1933 and 1934. About 4 years after its passing, however, many governance experts question whether the time and expense of compliance engender any real reforms. This article examines whether corporations have restructured their boards in response to the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley and finds evidence that companies are implementing changes that should strengthen the monitoring ability (...) of their boards. (shrink)

Kant's lectures on anthropology, which formed the basis of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, contain many observations on human nature, culture and psychology and illuminate his distinctive approach to the human sciences. The essays in the present volume, written by an international team of leading Kant scholars, offer the first comprehensive scholarly assessment of these lectures, their philosophical importance, their evolution and their relation to Kant's critical philosophy. They explore a wide range of topics, including Kant's account (...) of cognition, the senses, self-knowledge, freedom, passion, desire, morality, culture, education and cosmopolitanism. The volume will enrich current debates within Kantian scholarship as well as beyond, and will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of Kant, the history of anthropology, the philosophy of psychology and the social sciences. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to argue that Kant’s philosophy of education should be interpreted as showing that education can be morally relevant despite the fact that it cannot make the child moral. To support this claim, I suggest that it is necessary to focus on the connection between Kant’s account on education and his views on moral anthropology. For it brings to light that education cannot but work with nature (and in particular human nature, natural feelings and predispositions) (...) rather than against it in order to realize the vocation of humanity. I then go on to argue that the moral dimension of education is best described as enabling the child to use his freedom in the right way, that is to say, autonomously. On this basis, I conclude that whilst education can prepare him for the universal command of duty, nothing can relieve him of the essential burden of the task morality demands of him—having a good will. (shrink)

En tant qu’idéologie, le communisme promeut l’égalité entre femmes et hommes. Cependant celles-ci sont régulièrement un objet de méfiance de la part des cadres des partis communistes parce qu’elles sont considérées comme plus proches des traditions religieuses et difficiles à intégrer dans les rangs des partis. Elles ne représentent jamais la moitié des effectifs de ceux-ci. En Europe de l’Est et à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la création des Démocraties Populaires permet aux partis...

This collection of essays is unlike others in the field of African studies, for it is based on three very precisely delineated focal points: a particular geographical region, the sub-Sahara; specific modes of cultural production, literature and cinema; and a focus on works of French expression. This three-fold approach to exploring the relationships between power and culture in a non-Western environment greatly contributes to making this book unique from a variety of perspectives: African, Francophone and postcolonial studies, as well as (...) cross-disciplinary, cultural, transnational and diasporic studies. Moreover, the book offers deft and innovative analyses that move beyond the rhetoric of crises on the African continent we so very often hear of, so as to present a critical reflection on the subject at hand that is specific to the sub-Sahara and at the same time intimately linked to global culture, economy and politics. The authors' three-fold approach also presupposes that disciplinary compartmentalization increases power conflicts in academia. If only in part, compartmentalization is the result of antagonistic and competitive relations between specialization and multidisciplinary education. This book is thus a modest attempt at presenting an alternative to excessively fixed and homogeneous academic frontiers while considering that disciplinary expertise remains a must. Keeping in mind that an increasing number of scholars in Anglophone Postcolonial studies and Francophone African studies have been attempting for quite some time now to open interstices and build crossroads that can better connect them to each other, keeping in mind that these scholars work at revealing mechanisms by which any antagonistic discourses can mix, influence, act upon or react to one another, this book seeks to take a constructive step in establishing enduring grounds for multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and transnational academic research and collaboration. (shrink)

In the recent literature on the issue, a number of commentators have argued that Kant’s aesthetic theory commits him to the position that nothing is ugly. For instance, in ‘Why Kant finds nothing ugly’, Shier argues that ‘within Kant’s aesthetics, there cannot be any negative judgments of taste’ (Shier (1998): 413). And in ‘Kant’s problems with ugliness’, Thomson claims that ‘Kant’s aesthetic theory precludes […] ugliness’ (Thomson (1992): 107). In other words, as it is presented in some of the literature, (...) Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment seems to preclude him from accounting for the possibility of ugliness. A number of reasons have been put forward to explain why there can be no ugliness for Kant. Some have to do with his account of experience in general. Others have to do with the very nature of the free play between imagination and understanding. Of course, the real source of the problem is that the Critique of Judgment does not actually discuss ugliness, so commentators are left with the task of filling in the gaps. This paper aims to argue that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment commits him not only to the existence of the ugly, but to the distinction between two kinds of ugliness. To support this claim, I will start from the premise that if there is to be room for ugliness, it should be defined as the contrary of beauty. However, I will suggest that Kant’s account of beauty can be negated in two ways, one that gives rise to impure ugliness and the other to pure ugliness. I will examine them in turn, first by showing that impure ugliness is the contrary of beauty insofar as it contravenes our interests and produces a desire to dispose of it, whereas beauty is necessarily disinterested for Kant. In the second section, I will use Kant’s definition of judgments of pure beauty to carve a space for an account of pure ugliness. For, it should present all the characteristics that make it “pure” whilst replacing the characteristics that make it beautiful with the ones that make it ugly. On this basis, I will define pure ugliness as the disinterested displeasure caused by the experience of what I will call “foul play” between the imagination and the understanding. (shrink)

In line with familiar portrayals of Kant's ethics, interpreters of his philosophy of education focus essentially on its intellectual dimension: the notions of moral catechism, ethical gymnastics and ethical ascetics, to name but a few. By doing so, they usually emphasise Kant's negative stance towards the role of feelings in moral education. Yet there seem to be noteworthy exceptions: Kant writes that the inclinations to be honoured and loved are to be preserved as far as possible. This statement is not (...) only at odds with Kant's general claim that education should not encourage feelings, but more importantly, it encourages a feeling that is in many ways paradigmatically un-Kantian. How are we to understand the fact that of all feelings, the love of honour should be preserved? To answer this question, I begin by clarifying the reasons behind Kant's negative stance towards feelings in moral education. I then turn to his account of the feeling of love of honour. After distinguishing between its good and its bad forms, I consider two ways of making sense of the positive role Kant assigns to it. The first, modest reading will suggest that the feeling of love of honour is morally useful because it has two functions: an epistemic one, and a motivational one. The second, more ambitious reading will suggest that the feeling of love of honour enables the child to experience her inner worth as bearer of value. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore Kant’s account of normativity through the prism of the distinction between the natural and the human sciences. Although the pragmatic orientation of the human sciences is often defined in contrast with the theoretical orientation of the natural sciences, I show that they are in fact regulated by one and the same norm, namely reason’s demand for autonomy.

The aim of this paper is to show that for Kant, a combination of epigenesis and monogenesis is the condition of possibility of anthropology as he conceives of it and that moreover, this has crucial implications for the biological dimension of his account of human nature. More precisely, I begin by arguing that Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species is based on two premises: firstly the biological unity of the human species (monogenesis of the human races); and secondly (...) the existence of ‘seeds’ which may or may not develop depending on the environment (epigenesis of human natural predispositions). I then turn to Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions and show that far from being limited to the issue of races, it encompasses unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. These predispositions, I argue, are means to the realisation of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. This allows me to conclude that man’s biological determinism leads to the species’ preservation, cultivation and civilisation. (shrink)

By combining new cutting-edge essays and reprints by leading Kant scholars and Kantian philosophers, this volume offer the first comprehensive assessment of Kant's account of the emotions and their connection to value, whether in his philosophy of mind, ethics, aesthetics, religion and politics. Through a mixture of interpretation and critical discussion, the essays in this volume illuminate the various aspects of Kant's distinctive approach to the emotions and demonstrate its continuing relevance to philosophical debates. This collection will enrich current debates (...) within Kantian scholarship as well as beyond, and will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of Kant, value theory, philosophy of emotion and aesthetics. (shrink)

While it is well known that Kant’s transcendental idealism forbids the transcendent use of reason and its ideas, what had been underexplored until the last decade or so is his account of the positive use of reason’s ideas as it is expounded in the “Appendix” of the Critique of Pure Reason. The main difficulty faced by his account is that while there is no doubt that for Kant we need to rely on the ideas of reason in order to gain (...) knowledge of the empirical world, the justificatory grounds for our use remain unclear. Commentators have suggested various ways of addressing this worry. Some emphasize that reason’s demand for systematicity is purely methodological; others that the assumption that nature itself is systematically unified is transcendentally necessary. Some simply deem Kant’s account “extremely self-contradictory.” What is clear is that if neither the presupposition of nature’s systematic unity nor the command to seek this unity have any justification, reason’s regulative function, which plays a crucial role in Kant’s account of cognition, also lacks justification. This would be a disastrous result, for it would threaten the very possibility of cognition and its progress. This chapter proposes to tackle this problem from a new angle by exploring the role of reason’s feelings in Kant’s account. While the relationship between practical reason and feeling has been explored at length in the literature, the relationship between theoretical reason and feeling has not, and my aim is to suggest that doing so can shed new light on reason’s cognitive activity. For focusing on the fact that theoretical reason’s need manifests itself as a feeling will enable me to reassess how this need is met through reason’s regulative use of its ideas. (shrink)

This paper argues that contrary to what is often thought, virtue for Kant is not just a matter of strength of will; it has an essential affective dimension. To support this claim, I show that certain affective dispositions, namely moral feelings and desires, are virtuous in the sense that they are constitutive of virtue at the affective level. There is thus an intrinsic connection between an agent’s practice of virtue and the cultivation of her affective dispositions.

This paper sets out to show that Kant’s account of cognition can be used to defend epistemic responsibility against the double threat of either being committed to implausible versions of doxastic voluntarism, or failing to account for a sufficiently robust connection between the will and belief. To support this claim, I argue that whilst we have no direct control over our beliefs, we have two forms of indirect doxastic control that are sufficient to ground epistemic responsibility: first, the capacity to (...) judge and doubt; and second, the ability to choose our epistemic maxims. It is because we have direct control over our capacity to judge as well as the epistemic principles that govern belief-acquisition that we have indirect control over the beliefs we thereby acquire. The interpretation of Kant I defend here thus allows us to account for the possibility of epistemic responsibility by providing a robust account of indirect doxastic voluntarism and thereby rendering direct doxastic voluntarism unnecessary. (shrink)

As one would expect, Kant believes that there is a tension, and even a conflict, between our bodily humanity and its ethical counterpart: ‘Inclination to pleasurable living and inclination to virtue are in conflict with each other’ (Anthropology, 185-86 [7:277]). What is more unexpected, however, is that he further claims that this tension can be resolved in what he calls an example of ‘civilised bliss’, namely dinner parties. Dinner parties are, for Kant, part of the ‘highest ethicophysical good’, the ultimate (...) resolution of the conflict between our physical body and our moral powers, which consists in finding the right proportions for the ‘mixture’ between our partly ‘sensuous’ and partly ‘ethicointellectual’ nature. The aim of this paper is not only to explain Kant’s account of the ideal proportions of ethicophysical good in dinner parties, but also, and more importantly, to argue that dinner parties are in fact the ultimate experience for us, human beings. (shrink)