Translation of Kleist’s Short Story On the Marionette Theatre.

This article will offer an alternative understanding of managerial decision-making drawing from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason rather than simply Being and Nothingness. I will begin with a brief explanation of Sartre’s account of freedom in Being and Nothingness. I will then show in the second section how Andrew West uses Sartre’s conception of radical freedom from Being and Nothingness for a managerial decision-making model. In the third section, I will explore a more robust account of freedom from Sartre’s Critique (...) of Dialectical Reason. I will attempt to show that freedom is not simply a matter of choosing (or not choosing) to perform an action, but entails external constraints—including other people. Finally, I will provide the implications of this account of freedom for managerial decision-making. I will show that it’s unreasonable to place full responsibility and/or blame on managers given their constraints. This does not absolve them from responsibility, but better accounts for the way in which we ought to hold them responsible. (shrink)

An inverse akratic act is one who believes X, all things considered, is the correct act, and yet performs ~X, where ~X is the correct act. A famous example of such a person is Huck Finn. He believes that he is wrong in helping Jim, and yet continues to do so. In this paper I investigate Huck’s nature to see why he performs such acts contrary to his beliefs. In doing so, I explore the nature of empathy and show how (...) powerful Huck’s empathic feelings are. Drawing from Martin L. Hoffman, I show the relationship between empathy and a principle of justice. This relationship leads to Huck acting virtuously, as Rosalind Hursthouse maintains. (shrink)

This paper will begin with an explication of the central tenets of Nussbaum’s capabilities theory. The next section examines Nussbaum’s two-fold justification of capabilities; namely, the substantive good approach (or intuitionism), which serves as the primary justification, and a version of Kantian proceduralism, which provides ancillary support. The following section focuses on Jaggar’s critique of Nussbaum. Here, I will discuss three criteria of adequacy for a global ethic and their importance, why we should accept them and how both of Nussbaum’s (...) justification strategies fail to satisfy them. In the fifth section, I propose a version of discourse ethics as an alternative justification for capabilities that can satisfy the adequacy discerned from Jaggar’s critique. This account of discourse ethics reveals that intersubjective dialogue under certain conditions is more likely to provide adequate justification of capabilities, and those engaged in dialogue are also likely to develop practical reason and affiliation. So this method of justification does not merely ground the capabilities, but helps people realize them. Finally, the sixth section presents an example from the Self-Employed Women’s Association as a real-life case illustrating how this version of discourse ethics can be manifested. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment accounts for the sharing of a common world, experienced affectively, by a diverse human plurality. In order to appreciate Kant's project, Judging Appearances retrieves the connection between appearance and judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Kleist emphasizes the important but neglected idea of a sensus communis, which provides the indeterminate criterion for judgments regarding appearance. Judging Appearances examines the themes of appearance and judgment against the background of Kant's debt to Leibniz and Shaftesbury. Drawing upon (...) treatments by Husserl, Sartre, Ricoeur and Arendt, Kleist delineates the proto-phenomenological method through which Kant uncovers the idea of a sensus communis. Kleist shows that taste is a discipline of opening oneself to appearance, requiring a subject who dwells in a common world of appearances among a diverse human plurality. This volume will prove valuable for anyone interested in a fresh approach to themes at the heart of Kant's aesthetics. (shrink)

A problem arises in Schopenhauer’s claim that each individual person’s will, or intelligible character, is timeless. The principium individuationis depends upon spatio-temporal determinations governing the world as representation. As individual, one’s individual character would seem to depend upon spatio-temporalconditions. Yet, Schopenhauer adopts the Kantian distinction between empirical character and intelligible character, with the individual’s intelligible characterremaining the timeless Ding-an-sich, or will. In response to this problem, I proceed in four stages. First, I examine why Schopenhauer appropriated the Kantiandistinction between intelligible (...) and empirical character. Secondly, I argue in favor of the solution which indicates that, for Schopenhauer, each individual’s intelligible character is related to the Platonic Idea unique to that individual. In the third stage, I determine how the teleological claims in Schopenhauer’s doctrineof Ideas bear on the problem. In the fourth stage, I suggest how Schopenhauer’s account presents a phenomenology of the unity of consciousness. (shrink)

The Critique of Judgment aims to account for the affective sharing of a common world of appearance. To accomplish this project, Kant retrieves a connection between contemplation and judgment which had lain dormant in the philosophical tradition since the time of Plato. Kant rescues the theme of contemplatio or $\theta\varepsilon\omega\rho\acute\iota\alpha$ from the Neo-platonist tradition culminating in Leibniz and Shaftesbury. This tradition took beauty as the motivation for an intuitive assimilation to the order of ideas, which are understood as principles for (...) the determination of natural form. Discovering imagination as a power through which human beings may escape the tyranny of determinate objectivity, Kant insists that taste demands an openness towards appearance, outside of cognitive and conative determination. The attitude of disinterestedness suspends objectivity and looks toward the idea of a sensus communis, which implies a human plurality. In the first two Critiques, Kant subjectivizes the Leibnizian principle of determining ground. In the third Critique he suspends this principle, while retrieving and retaining the significance of humanitas latent in the idea of sensus communis which forms the indeterminate ground for aesthetic judgments. ;The first two chapters develop a phenomenological interpretation of Kantian aesthetics. Operating with an unthematized method of phenomenological reduction, Kant uncovers features indicating the primacy of appearance over determining ground within aesthetic contemplation. The third chapter traces Kant's response to Leibniz from the pre-critical period up to the Critique of Judgment. Kant's rehabilitation of appearance emerges in opposition of the Leibnizian principle of determining ground. The fourth chapter resumes the phenomenological interpretation, now directed to illuminating Kant's apology for sensibility and his advance beyond Shaftesbury's Platonist aesthetics. Sensibility compels think to relinquish its power to determine objectivity. ;A tension emerges between the subject's powers of determination and the freedom within sensibility which escapes determination. Despite its indeterminancy, the regulative idea of a sensus communis orients a disciplined sensitivity to appearance. Beauty testifies to a fractured human subject who cannot determine its own ground and must dwell in a world of appearance among a plurality in the sharing of perspectivally situated voices. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to preserve the central tenets of a global moral theory called “the capabilities approach” as defended by Martha Nussbaum, but to do so in a way that better realizes its own goals of identifying gender injustices and gaining cross-cultural support by providing an alternative defense of it. Capabilities assess an individual’s well-being based on what she is able to do (actions) and who she is able to be (states of existence). Nussbaum grounds her theory in the intuitive (...) idea that each and every person is worthy of equal respect and dignity. The problem with grounding a theory in a version of intuitionism is that it runs the risk of authoritarian moral reasoning. I argue Nussbaum, in fact, is the final arbiter who decides which intuitions are mistaken, which are not, and how to interpret what people say to fit into her own framework. This method of justifying capabilities is most problematic in cases of social inequality whereby dominant group members do not feel they need to check their intuitions against non-dominant group members, and even if they did, they are not forced to take the non-dominant group’s intuitions seriously. I find capabilities as a global moral theory to be very promising, and I agree with Nussbaum that a list of capabilities is beneficial for identifying people who are not able to live a truly dignified human life. However, I am also sympathetic to the criticism of defending capabilities using a version of intuitionism. So, I offer an alternative method of justifying the capabilities rooted in the discourse ethics tradition. This method seeks all persons that are affected by the outcome to freely and equally share their opinion. This avoids the charge of authoritarian moral reasoning, because (1) it seeks perspectives other than simply one’s own, but unlike traditional ethics, it (2) pays special attention to the ways in which power relations shape dialogue. Ultimately, I hope to have preserved the central tenets of the capabilities approach while better realizing Nussbaum’s commitment to defending a theory that is gender sensitive and has gained cross-cultural support. (shrink)

Hume remarked on how our moral value-commitments set limits for what we are willing to imagine. Moral values also guide imagination when we envision variant scenarios and options for action. How do values reveal themselves through imagining? What does the manner through which values appear tell us about the nature of values? Imagination furnishes a non-perceptual manner of arriving at moral determinations anchored to the irreducibly first-person experience of moral approval and disapproval. The commitment to one’s values, surviving through every (...) willingly imagined alteration of perspective, indicates a subjective necessity to values. At the same time, the values leaving their trace in what we imagine, direct imagination to furnish reasons which necessitate belief and action. This subjective necessity generates an ideal of affective moral consistency and a criterion of suitability for proposed action. (shrink)

I provide a phenomenological response to Quentin Meillassoux’s “realist” criticism of phenomenology and I explore the resources and limits of phenomenology in its own attempt to grapple with the paradox Meillassoux believes sinks it: subjectivity has priority over the physical reality it constitutes despite the anteriority and posteriority of that physical reality to subjectivity. I first offer a corrective to Meillassoux’s interpretation of Husserl. Then, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on the philosophy of nature, where he addresses the paradox by (...) interpreting Husserl in the light of Schelling. I argue throughout that the correct understanding of Husserl’s concept of constitution, and particularly, passive constitution, defangs this realist criticism of phenomenology and suggests phenomenology to be capable of a Naturphilosophie intimating pre-reflective being. The prime instance of this pre-reflective being is subjectivity’s entanglement with a reality that encompasses it. (shrink)

I provide a phenomenological response to Quentin Meillassoux’s “realist” criticism of phenomenology and I explore the resources and limits of phenomenology in its own attempt to grapple with the paradox Meillassoux believes sinks it: subjectivity has priority over the physical reality it constitutes despite the anteriority and posteriority of that physical reality to subjectivity. I first offer a corrective to Meillassoux’s interpretation of Husserl. Then, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on the philosophy of nature, where he addresses the paradox by (...) interpreting Husserl in the light of Schelling. I argue throughout that the correct understanding of Husserl’s concept of constitution, and particularly, passive constitution, defangs this realist criticism of phenomenology and suggests phenomenology to be capable of a Naturphilosophie intimating pre-reflective being. The prime instance of this pre-reflective being is subjectivity’s entanglement with a reality that encompasses it. (shrink)

Kant’s attempts to formulate a conception of the harmony of nature and freedom have two logical presuppositions. The first presupposition is separation of ought and is, which provides a logical formulation of the separation of freedom and nature. Kant might well have settled on the view that the separation between nature and freedom cannot be bridged. Why did Kant attempt to overcome said separation? The second presupposition of Kant’s project to bridge nature and freedom involves an ought→can inference, stating that (...) moral obligation implies the possibility of its fulfillment. There are at least two ways this inference can be understood. There is a weak sense of the inference, stating that no one is obliged to do the impossible. There is also a very strong sense of the inference, stating that if a moral obligation is found to obtain, it must then be possible to fulfill it. Kant interprets the ought→can inference in this strong as well as in the weak sense. Nature, the law-governed totality of what exists, must be understood as able to provide a suitable field for moral realization. The isomorphism between the lawfulness of nature and that of moral freedom animate Kant’s account of moral judgment, and will provide the main focus of the current investigation. Kant conceives of nature and freedom as twin kingdoms, thus providing a theoretical model validating this ought→can inference. The weaker sense of this ought→can inference does justice to moral judgment without requiring the awesome task of bridging nature and freedom. Why, then, should we maintain the strong ought→can inference in our post-Kantian situation? I suggest that Kant’s insistence on the strong ought→can inference may yield an ethical approach to the ever more powerful ways in which human beings technologically transform nature, including human nature itself. (shrink)

Kant’s attempts to formulate a conception of the harmony of nature and freedom have two logical presuppositions. The first presupposition is separation of ought and is, which provides a logical formulation of the separation of freedom and nature. Kant might well have settled on the view that the separation between nature and freedom cannot be bridged. Why did Kant attempt to overcome said separation? The second presupposition of Kant’s project to bridge nature and freedom involves an ought→can inference, stating that (...) moral obligation implies the possibility of its fulfillment. There are at least two ways this inference can be understood. There is a weak sense of the inference, stating that no one is obliged to do the impossible. There is also a very strong sense of the inference, stating that if a moral obligation is found to obtain, it must then be possible to fulfill it. Kant interprets the ought→can inference in this strong as well as in the weak sense. Nature, the law-governed totality of what exists, must be understood as able to provide a suitable field for moral realization. The isomorphism between the lawfulness of nature and that of moral freedom animate Kant’s account of moral judgment, and will provide the main focus of the current investigation. Kant conceives of nature and freedom as twin kingdoms, thus providing a theoretical model validating this ought→can inference. The weaker sense of this ought→can inference does justice to moral judgment without requiring the awesome task of bridging nature and freedom. Why, then, should we maintain the strong ought→can inference in our post-Kantian situation? I suggest that Kant’s insistence on the strong ought→can inference may yield an ethical approach to the ever more powerful ways in which human beings technologically transform nature, including human nature itself. (shrink)

BackgroundEthics review is the process of assessing the ethics of research involving humans. The Ethics Review Committee (ERC) is the key oversight mechanism designated to ensure ethics review. Whether or not this governance mechanism is still fit for purpose in the data-driven research context remains a debated issue among research ethics experts.Main textIn this article, we seek to address this issue in a twofold manner. First, we review the strengths and weaknesses of ERCs in ensuring ethical oversight. Second, we map (...) these strengths and weaknesses onto specific challenges raised by big data research. We distinguish two categories of potential weakness. The first category concerns persistent weaknesses, i.e., those which are not specific to big data research, but may be exacerbated by it. The second category concerns novel weaknesses, i.e., those which are created by and inherent to big data projects. Within this second category, we further distinguish between purview weaknesses related to the ERC’s scope (e.g., how big data projects may evade ERC review) and functional weaknesses, related to the ERC’s way of operating. Based on this analysis, we propose reforms aimed at improving the oversight capacity of ERCs in the era of big data science.ConclusionsWe believe the oversight mechanism could benefit from these reforms because they will help to overcome data-intensive research challenges and consequently benefit research at large. (shrink)

La Kantkrise (« crise kantienne ») est un des aspects les plus étudiés de la pensée de Heinrich von Kleist, aussi bien par les historiens de la philosophie que par les germanistes. Au cours de presque un siècle de recherches sur ce thème 2, les interprètes ont identifié différemment l’œuvre de Kant – ou l’auteur, autre que Kant 3 – qui aurait déclenché cette crise 4. Pour la première fois, le présent article cherche à identifier le motif déterminant de (...) la crise dans un concept et permet de réviser l’idée même d’une « crise », entendue comme un événement ponctuel et isolé, pour lui restituer son sens d’événement intérieur, appartenant à un itinéraire intellectuel déjà engagé. Il s’agit d’un concept central pour la réflexion théologique et philosophique de la seconde moitié du XVIII e siècle, qui se trouve aussi en plusieurs textes littéraires : la « destination de l’homme » ( Bestimmung des Menschen ). (shrink)

In this paper we deal with the work of the german poet Heinrich von Kleist, specifically with his reading of the knowledge theory of Immanuel Kant. We intend show how the reception of Kantian philosophy mark the life and work of the poet, who saw his higher plans – “gather truth and acquire formation” – ruined by a type of thinking that would denied the access to the truth and to the world.

Kleist viewed anew as a major contributor to the tradition of post-Kantian thought.

In this essay I analyze citational practices around Heinrich von Kleist in Italian postmodern theater and Italian feminist biopolitics. In this realm, the reference to Kleist performs a gesture of interruption of traditional eroticism (Catholic, modern, based on women’s sexual slavery), in particular, by using and rewriting Kleist’s narrative of the Amazons, the legendary tribe of women who would cut their breast to embrace the art of war. Postmodern citations of Kleist introduce a new language around (...) sexuality instead of reenacting the ferocious narrative embedded in the ancient icon. The essay conducts a contrastive reading of two postmodern versions of the Kleistian Amazon in Italy: the first version is Lina Mangiacapre’s and Angela Putino’s philosophical conversation in “Androgina/Amazzone” as well as in Mangiacapre’s stage plays; the second version is Carmelo Bene’s cycle of performances on Achilles’s “necrophilia.” While intellectuals like Laura Mulvey in the UK and Gilles Deleuze in France tend to condemn Kleist for his necrophiliac account of romantic love, in Italy Kleist’s pessimistic image of romantic relationships offers a queer standpoint to develop a sustained critique of violent forms of desire. (shrink)

This chapter examines the concepts of expression and affect in the works of Heinrich von Kleist, Samuel Beckett, and Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that Kleist, Beckett, and Edward Gordon-Craig belong a minor tradition of acting and explains that this minor tradition is one that aims to create a theatre which moves away from the inner world of an actor in favour of developing affects which express an external composite world. It also analyses Kleist's short story ‘On the (...) Marionette Theatre’ and Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. (shrink)

Les personnages tragiques de Heinrich von Kleist composent toute une théorie de la conscience totale, installée simultanément dans l’ambivalence du jugement et la quête de l’inconditionné, qui devient le véritable objet d’une critique de la raison pratique cohérente. Dans ce contexte, les figures du Prince de Hombourg et de Michael Kohlhaas représentent deux voies vers la découverte de cette vérité pratique difficile à supporter par le sujet, qu’on pourrait considérer comme la sortie que Kleist trouve pour sa célèbre (...) Kantkrise. Les deux exemples encouragent à conclure que l’exploration de la raison pratique conduit chez Kleist à une théorie du désir pur, propulsé par une pulsion de réalité pure, dont la densité ontologique renvoie plus au monde (sans restrictions pragmatiques) des songes qu’au territoire fini des phénomènes. (shrink)

The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant asks how the literary works of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist might be considered a critique and elaboration of Kantian philosophy. In 1801, the twenty-three-year-old Kleist, attributing his loss of confidence in our knowledge of the world to his reading of Kant, turned from science to literature. Kleist ignored Kant's apology of the sciences to focus on the philosopher's doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves. From that (...) point on, Kleist's writings relate confrontations with points of hermeneutic resistance. Truth is no longer that which the sciences establish; only the disappointment of every interpretation attests to the continued sway of truth. Though he adheres to Kant's definition of Reason as the faculty that addresses things in themselves, Kleist sees no need for its critique and discipline in the name of the reasonableness of the experience of the natural sciences. Setting transcendental Reason at odds with empirical reasonableness, Kleist releases Kant's ethics and doctrine of the sublime from the moderating pull of their examples. (shrink)

_The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant_ asks how the literary works of the German writer Heinrich von Kleist might be considered a critique and elaboration of Kantian philosophy. In 1801, the twenty-three-year-old Kleist, attributing his loss of confidence in our knowledge of the world to his reading of Kant, turned from science to literature. Kleist ignored Kant's apology of the sciences to focus on the philosopher's doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves. From that (...) point on, Kleist's writings relate confrontations with points of hermeneutic resistance. Truth is no longer that which the sciences establish; only the disappointment of every interpretation attests to the continued sway of truth. Though he adheres to Kant's definition of Reason as the faculty that addresses things in themselves, Kleist sees no need for its critique and discipline in the name of the reasonableness of the experience of the natural sciences. Setting transcendental Reason at odds with empirical reasonableness, Kleist releases Kant's ethics and doctrine of the sublime from the moderating pull of their examples. (shrink)

Considering biblical, political, and literary intertexts (Las Casas, Shakespeare, Marino/Brockes, Schiller) with regard to the ideological correlation of sex, rule, and salvation, the paper reads Kleist’s Erdbeben in Chili as a subversive Passion narrative and salvation history following the Marian matrix of Chile’s colonial toponymy: St. Jago after the first visionary of Mary, St. Jacob, La Concepción according to the immaculate conception of Mary, and Valparaíso, Kleist’s »Tal von Eden« in the illusive utopian spirit of the Holy and (...) the whole human family. Starting from this toponomastic key inspiration of the novella, the paper tries to take the colonial setting literally in order to contour more sharply, against the background of Chile’s colonial history, the social and political conflicts around the tutor’s liaison with his pupil, their prosecution, the earthquake, the utopian communitarisation, and the lynchings. Located within the colonial power tussle between the archbishop, the vice-king, the local gentry, and the Spanish bourgeoisie, and staged according to iconographic models, Kleist’s salvation history features Josephe Asteron who, as a novice, incarnates the Body of Christ in an illegitimate child, and, after the earthquake, advances from a femina sacra to a (sexually attractive) Marian nursing mother. The massacre by the ruled, that she finally falls victim to, mimetically inverts, in René Girard’s terms, the colonial rulers’ force without giving up their ideological framework, Christian eschatology. As radical a subversion as it may be, Kleist’s novella itself proves fueled by the persuasive energies of the Christian promise of salvation. (shrink)

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature—Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten—in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. This is done primarily by tracing a variety of “simpletons” that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. These figures are not entirely ignorant, or stupid, but simple. Their simplicity is a way of thinking, (...) one that Birgit Mara Kaiser suggests is affective thinking. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting in their texts with an affective mode of thinking, and thereby continue a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. Through her analyses, she offers an outline of what thinking can look like if we take affectivity into account. (shrink)

Die Kant-Krise 1801 ist seit 200 Jahren Gegenstand der Kleistforschung. Der Autor systematisiert und testet alle bisher zum Thema vorgelegten Hypothesen. Im Zentrum steht Kleists Grüne-Gläser-Gleichnis als Zeugnis seiner Krise. Sowohl analytische Zugänge wie die Frage nach der logischen Struktur desselben als auch rezeptionsgeschichtliche Zugänge wie die Frage nach der Referenzschrift des Gleichnisses können die Qualität einer Hypothese bestimmen. Philosophiehistorische Untersuchungen zu Kleists Weltbild vor 1801 belegen die Hypothese von Kants transzendentaler Dialektik als Krisenschrift. Andere Hypothesen erweisen sich dieser als (...) unterlegen oder können widerlegt werden. Kleists poetologische und literarische Texte werden auf dieser Basis mit der transzendentalen Dialektik interpretiert. (shrink)