: The object of G. F. Meier's Vernunftlehre and its abridgement for courses, the Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, does not consist exclusively in the elaboration of the formal aspects of logic, but rather in the individuation of the elements of thought and language, which make human understanding possible. Instead of limiting himself to formal truth, Meier investigates the realms of epistemic, aesthetic, and historic truths, of horizons, and prejudices. Kant used both Meier's Vernunftlehre and its Auszug for about forty years (...) in his logic-lectures. Kant's Logik, and also his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, were thus strongly influenced by Meier. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 1 Seiten: 185-188.

A mistaken interpretation of Kant as an intellectual property advocate.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 110 Heft: 2 Seiten: 321-323.

This book collects nine papers on Kant’s philosophical theology written between 1975 and 1992 by Aloysius Winter, who teaches fundamental theology and philosophy of religion at Fulda’s Catholic Theological Faculty. Its object is clear and important. It aims at presenting a different reading of several Kantian texts in order to refute the common interpretation of Kant as an agnostic and highlight instead an overall theological orientation of his philosophy. As remarked by Norbert Hinske in his foreword to this volume, Winter (...) has been looking for “another Kant,” which eventually turns out to be the more authentic one. Indeed, Kant had been considered by most Catholic thinkers to be despicable, momentous, and dangerous. A wholesale evaluation took place that began with the two volumes of Benedikt Sattler’s Antikant, which appeared in 1788, and was sealed by the insertion of the Critique of Pure Reason in the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1827. The reason for this rejection, argues Winter, probably lies in certain formulations of the Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason that superficial readers may have regarded as offensive. However, this is not enough, says Winter, to dismiss a philosopher at once. In fact, Kant offers a number of positive suggestions and reflections that can, especially today, be of great help also to Catholic theology. The first essay deals with Kant and the confessions. One should not forget the cautious Renaissance of Kant’s transcendental philosophy initiated in the first half of the twentieth century by Joseph Maréchal, Emmerich Coreth, Bernard Lonergan, Johannes B. Lotz, André Marc, and Karl Rahner. It is true that Kant understood himself first and foremost as a scholar of “rational religion,” by this implying the legitimacy of his taking distance from all confessions, and it is also true that Kant’s positions on free will and God’s grace can be considered pelagian. Yet, this is Winter’s point, the fact of the matter is not so simple. We should rather remember that Kant, when dealing with free will, speaks only for the aspect of quoad nos, and that he does not deny that effects of grace could precede our efforts. The second essay proposes a reconstruction of the theological sources Kant was acquainted with from his student years to his mature age. The third essay deals with Kant’s elaborations on prayer and mass. The forth delves into the soul seen as a problem of transcendental philosophy. The fifth investigates the proof of God’s existence from the standpoint of practical reason. The sixth essay reads the Critique of Judgment from the perspective of Kant’s philosophy of religion. The seventh, entitled “Transcendental Theology of Cognition,” is dedicated to theological receptions of Kant’s Critiques, first and foremost to Rahner’s understanding of transcendental theology as a systematic doctrine that makes use of the tools of transcendental philosophy and thematizes the a priori conditions the believer refers to by the cognition of important truth of faith. Finally, the eighth and ninth essays propose a list of the sources of Kant’s philosophy of religion from the history of theology and from religious literature. (shrink)

This paper considers philosophical approaches that are relevant to the intertwinement of logic, metaphysics, and psychology proposed by the Aquinas commentator Tommaso de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, the humanist Petrus Ramus, the pure Aristotelian Cornelius Martini, the Semi-Ramist Bartholomaeus Keckermann, and the lexicographer Rudolf Goclenius. Mostly, however, it is about Ramus and his followers, the Ramists, because of the role they played in exacerbating a discussion on the constitution of objectivity during the Renaissance that was to have an impact on Cartesian (...) andpost-Cartesian theories of subjectivity. Finally, keeping in mind that Kant was familiar with the secunda Petri, i.e., with the second part of Ramus's logic, namely the theory of judgment, some common ground is recognizable between Ramus and Kant as well. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays, some of them unpublished, some of them published between 1986 and 1995. They represent Allison’s efforts to reply to the critiques he received on his books, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism and Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Given that the latter deals with Kant’s theoretical philosophy and the former with Kant’s practical philosophy, the book under review presents Allison’s interpretation of both Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy as it had been clarified, developed, and applied in the (...) wave of dialectical discussions with his critics. Although the book is a collection of essays, its contents possess nonetheless a systematic unity and advance the discussion in a significant way. What gives systematic unity to the volume is Allison’s constant interest toward reconstructing the role played by the concept of spontaneity in Kant’s philosophy. (shrink)

Bondeli starts his book with the following remark: “Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s philosophical viewpoint, with which he went public in 1800 in Jena, at the beginning of his academic teaching, is everything but presupposition-less. It is the result of a step by step appropriation, critique, and overcoming of Kant’s philosophy dating back ten years”. The goal of Bondeli’s book is to provide a new and comprehensive discussion of Hegel as a critical reader of Kant from 1790 to 1800. As is (...) well known, Hegel scholars are divided on this issue, particularly because we have no definite proof that Hegel ever read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before writing extensively about it in Faith and Knowledge, which appeared in 1802. Moreover, Bondeli reminds us that today it is still fairly common to characterize the foundation and methodology of new philosophical standpoints by referring to either Kant or Hegel. Also, many issues concerning the foundation of knowledge or of ethics can be identified as confrontations between Kantian or Hegelian positions. Bondeli shows, however, that there is a considerable deficit in Hegel’s arguments against Kant as we know them from Faith and Reason, the Encyclopedia, and the Lectures on History of Philosophy. In these texts Hegel deals with Kant from the rather hermetic standpoint of the system of absolute identity, while giving no proper charge to Kant but that of having remained within the realm of reflection. Bondeli tries to challenge this argumentative deficit of Hegel’s appropriation and critique of Kant by reconstructing its motives as well as the actual or the possible series of arguments. (shrink)

This book is a revised dissertation defended at Cologne in 1997 under the direction of Klaus Düsing. It concentrates on the problem of idealism, that is on the question whether anything exists besides ourselves. It is a question as old as philosophy itself and for this reason the author takes the approach of the “history of the problems”. It is, however, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which provides the axis around which this study rotates, because in it Kant succeeded in (...) formulating one of the most original answers to the question raised above, namely that yes, something exists besides ourselves, but this does not mean that we have to commit ourselves to the position of philosophical realism, which considers the existence of the external world beyond any doubt. Kant was clear in distinguishing between a critical investigation into the issue of idealism and a dogmatic acceptance of what he calls “metaphysical idealism,” adding that it is twofold, including Descartes’s skeptical or problematical idealism, that doubts about the existence of the external world, and Berkeley’s dogmatic idealism, that flatly denies it. Kant was not tender with metaphysical idealism. Heidemann quotes a salient passage from Kant’s Metaphysikvorlesung of Winter 1792/93, “[i]dealism is a kind of cancer in metaphysics that to date has been considered incurable”. (shrink)

This book has appeared in the Italian Literature and Thought Series of Yale University Press, and not by chance the cover bears the green, white, and red of the Italian flag. The book is on political philosophy, although its subject matter is restricted to the role of culture. Finocchiaro investigates two Italian thinkers: the conservative Gaetano Mosca, author of The Ruling Class, and the communist Antonio Gramsci, founding father of the Italian Communist Party and author of the Prison Notebooks. While (...) Mosca is a classic source for the elitist school in political sociology, Gramsci is the originator of a cultural version of Marxism that proved to be immune to the intellectual criticism and economic failures that have rendered other versions obsolete. The point Finocchiaro makes is that Mosca and Gramsci belong to the same tradition of political theory, namely “democratic elitism” and that their differences are eventually far smaller than assumed. According to Finocchiaro, Gramsci is much less of a political revolutionary, and Mosca much closer to the political center and Gramsci and Mosca are closer to each other than commonly supposed. Besides, Finocchiaro’s interpretation also implies that “theoretically, intellectually, and conceptually they are much more radical than is ordinarily believed because democratic elitism represents an extremely distinctive orientation in political theory”. Hence Finocchiaro’s interpretation “also undermines the viability of the dichotomy between the Left and the Right,” which also explains the reference to what is “beyond right and left” in the title. (shrink)

Hegel scholars have been waiting two and a half decades for this book to appear. It contains the historicocritical edition of all unpublished papers written by Hegel from the end of the Frankfort period through to the end of the Bamberg period. Most importantly, it contains the first edition of two sets of until now unpublished manuscripts that had been discovered by Eva Ziesche in the early seventies referring to the lectures given by Hegel at Jena on “Introduction to Philosophy” (...) and “Logic and Metaphysics,” in the 1801/02 Winter Term, and on “Philosophy of Spirit” in the 1803 Summer Term. These fragments are a very important piece in the rather complicated history of Hegel’s development, because they document the state of Hegel’s thought after the nonsystematic essays of the Frankfurt period and before the turn toward subjectivity beginning with the Jenese lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit of the 1803/04 Winter Term. In those years Hegel was working on a metaphysics of substance that he was to give up as soon as he became aware that the foundation of dialectic lies in the subjective structure of the self. The fragments had been last accounted for by Karl Rosenkranz in his Hegel’s Leben, and were misplaced in the manuscript section of the Berlin State Library sometime afterwards. The rediscovery of the fragments was made public by Eva Ziesche in 1975 in the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung; and some passages of the fragments were reported in a seminal paper by Baum and Meist which appeared in 1977 in the Hegel-Studien under the title “Durch Philosophie leben lernen,” that is, to learn to live through philosophy. Unfortunately, for twenty-two long years the paper by Baum and Meist has remained the only source of information about the content of this crucial stage of Hegelian thought; and this is too bad, because a lot of good research might have been produced had this edition appeared earlier. (shrink)

This volume follows Heidegger’s development chronologically and provides a wide contextualization of his philosophy within late nineteenth and twentieth century culture. Imagine that you take the book in your hands and you want to check how Safranski deals with Heidegger’s Being and Time. He does this relatively late, in chapter 9, because of the historico-genetic approach he has chosen, which is fine. Yet Safranski begins his exposition of Being and Time with some biographical remarks about Heidegger’s having been a Catholic, (...) goes forth with a hint to Dilthey’s position about history, summarizes events from Heidegger’s academic life between 1918 and 1927, recollects a testimony by Heidegger’s friend Hermann Mörchen, adds a reference to Salomon Mainonides’s Guides for the Perplexed, and eventually introduces the work itself by explaining a series of Lapalissian truths such as, “Man has a relationship with his own Being. This Heidegger calls ‘Existence.’... The term ‘ontic’ designates everything that exists. The term ‘ontological’ designates the curious, astonished, alarmed thinking about the fact that I exist and that anything exist at all”. Safranski closes the chapter by referring to Adolf Hitler’s writing of his Mein Kampf two years earlier, by quoting a poem by Walter Mehrig and the popular novel Grand Hotel as well as another poem by Gottfried Benn. Evidently, this book does not target scholars, it rather targets the learned public at large in so far as it may have an interest in a passionate and well documented intellectual biography. In a word, philosophy students will enjoy reading it as a way of being introduced to Heidegger’s philosophy, but will nonetheless be aware of the fact that the book’s aim reduces itself to summarizing the contents of Heidegger’s writings while putting them into the context of other summarized writings that were contemporary to them. (shrink)

This volume is part of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant and contains a new, annotated, state-of-the-art English translation of the texts in which Kant primarily dealt with religion. As a matter of fact, “rational theology and rational religious faith also figure prominently in all three Critiques” and were central to some of Kant’s first important writings, such as the Universal Natural History, the Nova Dilucidatio, and the Only Possible Ground of Proof. These texts have found their (...) place in other volumes of the Cambridge series. This volume presents the following writings in their chronological sequence : “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” ; “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” ; Religion within the Boundaries of Pure Reason ; “The End of All Things” ; The Conflict of the Faculties ; “Preface to Reinhold Bernhard Jachmann’s Examination of the Kantian Philosophy of Religion” ; and the Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion. (shrink)

The problem of subjectivity, based on the generalizing substantification of the predicate subiective occurs first in the discussions of the postulates of Kant’s theory of knowledge. At issue is that a human being has focused on a matter, and that his subjectivity has the responsibility of isolating a determinate domain.In fact, it is up to the human subject to focus on objects and to thematize them according to his operative conditions, which is how it expresses different epistemic standpoints. Kant’s philosophy (...) provides the most adequate answers to the question about the anthropological conditioning of philosophy. My thesis is thattranscendental subjectivity includes an epistemic approach, which does not imply any kind of subjective conceptualism as opposed to forms of realism supported and structured by categories, it implies instead that without considering the epistemic standpoint, the question of the supposed primacy of transcendental over general logic or vice versa is irresoluble. (shrink)

IT IS A MATTER OF FACT that logic in the modern age was concerned to a much greater extent with the workings of the mind, that is, with epistemic and even doxastic themes, than with formal problems.

This volume is the revised version of a Ph.D. dissertation at the Technische Universität Braunschweig under the direction of Claus-Heinrich Scheier. Like the one by Scheier, but not quite as large, this volume purports to provide a section to section commentary of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It follows another path, though. This path is already made clear by Falke in the title of his book, which is a famous quotation, “conceived history.” In fact, this interpretation relies on the following three (...) premises. First, “in all experiences of consciousness Hegel refers himself to determinate historical positions”. Second, “the criticism of the form of consciousness implies at the same time an exposition of the whole system”. Third, “the Phenomenology is a work in progress”. These premises may appear at first sight puzzling. Nevertheless, they show coherence. Falke does not maintain that the Phenomenology refers to a set of historical events or positions, he rather says that it should be read “as a systematic reconstruction of historical positions”. That a criticism by Hegel implies a positive account of his own system is something every reader of the Phenomenology knows too well. What one tends to ignore is, as suggested by Falke, that the arguments of the Phenomenology grew to their final shape while Hegel was at work. The evidence for this assumption is to be found in the oftentimes irritating ruptures in the historical or material development, which evidently point to systematic reinterpretations of already composed text parts. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 3 Seiten: 471-472.

Rather than as a philosopher, Zammito writes as a historian dedicated to contextual intellectual history. The book has nonetheless a conspicuous literary value, and it reminds one not incidentally of Thomas Pynchon’s historical novel Mason and Dixon, first and foremost because both focus on the friendship of scholars who were at their peak in the 1760s. In fact, just as Pynchon sets off his narrative account by reconstructing the Mason–Dixon expedition to the Cape of Good Hope for the transit of (...) Venus from 1761 to 1762, Zammito sets off with the notes Herder took in Kant’s classes at Königsberg between 1762 and 1764. Of course, those were astronomers and these were philosophers; those were Britons and these Germans; and I would rather stop looking for analogies here. According to Zammito, Kant and Herder “shared in a remarkable moment of intellectual discovery and growth associated with the penetration into Germany of the thought of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and in the endeavor to use these exciting new insights to revise the established philosophical views codified in the works of Christian Wolff and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten”. The method of contextual history, remarks Zammito, “is not causally unidirectional.” Kant and Herder were influenced by what was in the air at their time, and at the same time they were instrumental in shaping it. Eventually, they were to contribute to the “calving away” of anthropology from philosophy around the year 1772, when Ernst Platner published his Anthropologie für Ärtzte und Weltweise, Kant gave his first course in anthropology at Königsberg, and Herder published his prize-winning essay “Versuch über den Ursprung der Sprache”. Oddly, this book does not go into any aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy. It contains analysis of Kant’s Bemerkungen zu den Beobachtungen of 1764 and the Träume eines Geistersehers of 1766, and it stops with the already mentioned course of the year 1772, which is perfectly legitimate, given that in 1772 Kant and Herder parted and stopped working toward the same goal, namely, the constitution of philosophical anthropology. Besides, and this is also one of its great merits, Zammito’s book provides the reader with a faithful reconstruction of what Kant looked like between 1762 and 1772, that is, as a thoroughly representative figure of German Enlightenment thought who had not made the “critical turn,” and who, as Lewis W. Beck has argued, would have been worthy of perhaps a paragraph in the history of philosophy. Zammito suggests that the Kant of 1772 would not have been so insignificant after all, and he asks rather “whether he does not deserve a larger stature in the history of the German Aufklärung, not simply as a representative but as a dissident and even a transformer”. Zammito’s analysis is well documented in primary literature and in secondary literature. His main thesis about the mutual influence of Kant and Herder in getting their facts straight in the 1770s by pushing “the whole cultural shift toward ‘epistemological liberalization’ that constituted the emergence of anthropological discourse” is brilliant. (shrink)

This is a collection of articles written by Kenny on the Aristotelian tradition mostly during the 1990s. Three of them bear on moral philosophy, four on the philosophy of mind, and the last three on twentieth-century developments. Given the recent renewed breadth of research in the history of Aristotelianism and its impact, Kenny’s introductory essay on “The Aristotelian Tradition”, is obviously of the highest interest. Kenny’s point is simple. It is wrong to follow A. N. Whitehead’s hint that the European (...) tradition in philosophy consists “of a series of footnotes to Plato.” It is true that Aristotle indeed owed an enormous debt to Plato, and he showed the latter’s influence in almost everything he wrote. But it is also true, says Kenny, that in philosophy Aristotle’s “scope was broader and his judgment sounder than that of his master,” so that “it would be absurd to see him only as the first and greatest of history’s footnotes”. The stress on the opposition between Plato and Aristotle began during the Renaissance. The truth, is, however, that modern historians have proved to be less perceptive than the very many commentators in late antiquity who saw their duty to construct a harmonious concord between the two greatest philosophers of the ancient world. For instance, Byzantine scholars used to express their views in favor of Plato in the form of commentaries on Aristotle. This was because, says Kenny, “Aristotle took a large part of his philosophical agenda from Plato, and his teaching was often more a modification than a refutation of Platonic doctrines”. (shrink)

This book investigates the relation between mathematics and philosophy in Kant with special focus on the doctrine of the magnitudes. Without doubt, Moretto, who is himself both a mathematician and a philosopher, achieves final results on this matter, because not only does he provide an immanent interpretation of all parts of Kant’s systematic construction of magnitudes, he also provides a detailed history of Kant’s development. Kant gave courses on mathematics during the first eight years of his teaching at Königsberg and (...) warmly recommended the study of mathematics to his most gifted disciples. He himself expressed a profound admiration for it. He wrote in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God that infinitesimal analysis, or, as he calls it, “higher geometry... in its account of the affinities between various species of curved lines,” reveals many of “the harmonious relations which inhere in the properties of space in general.... All these relations, in addition to exercising the understanding by means of our intellectual comprehension of them, also arouse the emotions, and they do in a manner similar to or even more sublime than that the contingent beauties of nature stir our feelings”. In On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, Kant wrote that pure mathematics “provides us with a cognition which is in the highest degree true, and, at the same time, it provides us with a paradigm of the highest kind of evidence in other cases”. Besides, the mathematician-philosophers of the Leibniz-Wolff school, J. A. Eberhard, J. C. Schwab, J. G. E. Maaß at Halle, and A. G. Kästner at Göttingen, were among the very first to move critiques against the Critique of Pure Reason by focusing on the problem of the foundation of mathematics. They defended Leibniz against Kant, which prompted Kant to start a mathematical school of his own at Königsberg, and J. Schultz, J. G. K. C. Kiesewetter, and C. G. Zimmermann were Kant’s most notable defenders. Finally, one should not forget that it was in order to introduce a completely new set of ideas concerning the philosophy of mathematics that Kant laid out not only the distinction between analytical and synthetical judgments, but also the whole of the transcendental aesthetics. In fact, Kant proposed giving foundation to rational absolute numbers by means of synthetical a priori judgments; he also considered all arithmetical judgments as synthetical a priori; and by dedicating two antinomies to infinite series he suggested analogies to the representation of infinite series of irrational numbers. (shrink)

This book is a printed dissertation directed by Norbert Hinske and defended at Trier in 1996. It deals with the relationship between formal and transcendental logic from the standpoint of the history of Kant’s development, of Kant’s sources, and, more generally, of the history of concepts. In 1932, Klaus Reich summarized the status quaestionis thus, “Observing the destiny of Kant’s sketch on pure general or formal logic, which lies at the foundation of both the edifice and the realization of the (...) Critique of Pure Reason, one cannot help to marvel at the discrepancy of the opinions of the interpreters and of Kant himself”. Vázquez Lobeiras mentions three main Kant interpretations in the twentieth century: one based on the theory of knowledge, the second based on metaphysics, and the third based on the history of logic. She declares to follow the logical-historical interpretation. The first chapter is dedicated to a detailed reconstruction of the status quaestionis, beginning with Kant’s contemporaries, going through the famous controversy between Norman Kemp-Smith and Herbert Paton, the former maintaining the primacy of transcendental against formal logic, the latter the opposite, and ending with Gerold Prauss and Giorgio Tonelli. The second chapter explores the fate of the distinction between transcendental and formal logic in the history of Kant’s development. Vázquez Lobeiras concentrates her attention on a famous section of the Critique of Pure Reason, the “Introduction: Idea of a Transcendental Logic”. Her intention is to interpret it by relating it with pertinent passages from Kant’s Lectures on Logic, Lectures on Metaphysics, the program on the False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, and the dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis. “Form” is the concept she focuses on, on the basis of an impressive list of parallels she has found that connect the distinction between formal and transcendental logic with the distinction between usus logicus and usus realis of the dissertatio. She points to a telling argument Kant makes in Reflection 1599, that namely the subject of formal logic is “the usage of the understanding in general,” while that of metaphysics are “the objects of pure reason.” But what would these “objects of pure reason” be? Vázquez Lobeiras refers them to the rationis purae objecta of the dissertatio, which are free from sensible determinations while remaining subject to the laws on the intellectual world. In this reflection she sees the stage that immediately precedes the “Introduction: Idea of a Transcendental Logic” of the Critique of Pure Reason. The third chapter concludes by investigating the progressive establishment of new boundaries set by Kant to metaphysics. (shrink)

This clear and well-documented monograph is dedicated to the development of the interweaving of science and philosophy in Germany from the years following the French Revolution to Hegel’s death. The role played by chemistry has long been recognized as central and many studies have delved into it; and the same holds for the primacy of the “biocentric” standpoint, which was originally sponsored by Goethe. However, Poggi’s book has a much wider scope. It gives space to almost the whole scope of (...) science in those decades in Germany. It begins by dealing with the philosophical foundations of scientific investigation, as were provided, among others, by Kant in his Metaphysical Foundations of the Science of Nature. Goethe’s introduction of the notions of “form” and “polarity” is the subject of the second chapter. Chapters 3 and 4 are dedicated to animal physiology, chapter 5 to physics and cosmology, and chapter 6 to Schelling’s arguments for proving the existence of the infinite in the finite by means of the notion of the world’s soul. With chapter 7 the investigation shifts to the individual sciences starting with mathematics, chapter 8 is dedicated to medicine, chapter 9 to chemistry, and chapter 10 to biology. Finally, the eleventh and last chapter considers neurophysiology and psychology. Only one discipline is missing, which is geology, and missing too is the discussion of two major issues such as alchemy and the connection of romantic science to literature. Poggi had to draw a line to avoid his research going out of proportion. (shrink)

Hegel scholars have been waiting two decades and a half for this book to appear. It contains the historico-critical edition of all unpublished papers written by Hegel from the end of the Frankfort to the end of the Bamberg period. Most importantly, it contains the first edition of two sets of until now unpublished manuscripts referring to the lectures given by Hegel at Jena on “Introduction to Philosophy” and “Logic and Metaphysics” in the 1801/02 Winter Term, and on the “Philosophy (...) of Spirit” in the 1803 Summer Term that had been discovered by Eva Ziesche in the early 1970s. These fragments are a very important piece in the rather complicated history of Hegel’s development because they document the state of Hegel’s thought after the nonsystematic essays of the Frankfort period and before the turn toward subjectivity beginning with the Jenese lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit of the 1803/04 Winter Term. In those years Hegel was working at a metaphysics of substance that he was to give up as soon as he became aware that the foundation of dialectic lies in the subjective structure of the self. The fragments had been last accounted for by Karl Rosenkranz in his Hegel’s Leben, and were misplaced in the manuscript section of the Berlin State Library sometime afterward. The rediscovery of the fragments was made public by Eva Ziesche in 1975 in the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung; and some passages of the fragments were reported in a seminal paper by Baum and Meist that appeared in 1977 in the Hegel-Studien under the title “Durch Philosophie leben lernen,” that is, to learn to live through philosophy. Unfortunately, for twenty-two long years the paper by Baum and Meist has remained the only source to inform about the content of this crucial stage of Hegelian thought; and this is too bad, because a lot of good research might have been produced had this edition appeared more timely. (shrink)

The merit of this eminently historical book consists in the accurate rendering of possibly all critiques directed at the Science of Logic from its very appearance until Hegel's death in 1831. The subject-choice bears witness to the author's ability to skip the obvious remark--why another book on Hegel's Logic?--pointing out a set of arguments which are, at least in part, of noticeable theoretical interest. The historian of philosophy, while commenting a writing by a philosopher of the past, ought to occupy (...) himself with any of the following four perspectives: immanent interpretation; finding the sources; reconstruction of the immediate incidence; and reconstruction of the contemporary incidence. It is clear that by choosing the third, and without forgetting the first and the fourth perspective, Burkhardt did not undertake an easy task, but surely a task with great rewards. (shrink)

This volume contains a series of papers given in November of 1995 at a conference dedicated to Maritain’s ontology and gnoseology. In fact, as the editor remarks in the introduction, while Maritain is well known for his philosophy of politics, of history, of spirituality, of art, and of education, we are still lacking a clear picture of Maritain’s metaphysics. The core of Maritain’s metaphysics is to be found in an “integral cognoscitive realism... in which concrete individuals exercise on their own (...) and with incredible energy the act of existing”. Moreover, Maritain’s standpoint is highly welcome today, given that many discussions are focused on the need contemporary philosophy apparently has to attack ontology. (shrink)

In volume 4, L’età hegeliana II, on the first half of the nineteenth century outside of Germany and Great Britain, the team of researchers raised by Santinello has provided a comprehensive investigation of the French Joseph-Marie Degérando and Victor Cousin ; of the Italians Baldassarre Poli, Vincenzo Gioberti, Pasquale Galluppi, and Antonio Rosmini ; of the Spaniards Tomás Lapeña, Sebastián Quintana, Victor Arnau y Lamea, Tomás García Luna, and Jaime Balmes, of the Austrians Michael Klaus, Eduard Job, Gottfried Immanuel Wenzel, (...) and Johann Pleithner, of the Ungarian historians of philosophy between 1740 and 1840, and finally of the Russians Aleksandr Ivanoviè Galiè and Gavriil the Archimandrite. (shrink)

‘Social and Cultural Innovation’ is a syntagma that is receiving increased usage among researchers since it was the title chosen by the European Strategy Forum Research Infrastructures for the working group that deals with research infrastructures primarily connected with Social Sciences and the Humanities. Innovation refers to the creation of new products and services by bringing a new idea to the market. Economic growth turns on infrastructures, which provide access to services and knowledge, e.g. by overcoming the digital divide. The (...) current migrant and refugee crisis has made it clear with extraordinary effectiveness that a most urgent objective is to work out policies of social and cultural innovation to the advantage of new citizens – policies that will make them feel welcome in full dignity. (shrink)

In this book, Bäck dedicates himself to the logical properties of the qua connective, that is, to put it as does the Leibniz scholar Benson Mates, to “that treacherous little word ‘as’”. This connective is represented in ordinary language by expressions such as “insofar as,” “in virtue of,” “in the sense that,” translating the Greek ᾗ, and the Latin ut, prout, inquantum. Bäck reminds us that, traditionally, “a use of this connective was called reduplication”. The goal of the book is (...) thus to “trace the development of the theory of reduplication... [which] has its roots in various passages where Aristotle discusses qua propositions. Islamic and Latin medieval philosophers then contributed to the topic. From all this there arose a theory of qua propositions, or a theory of reduplication, in the high medieval period ”. Bäck adds that the views of the different philosophers who dealt with reduplication in that period are extremely similar, so that “it makes sense to talk of the rise of a single theory of reduplication”. In fact, quite correctly, he points out that the similarity of these views is due to the use of Aristotle’s work as a common reference point. All these authors “heed what Aristotle says about qua propositions, and attempt to offer analyses that demonstrate the truth of those qua propositions that Aristotle asserts and the validity of inferences involving qua propositions that he maintains”. The problem lying at the heart of all this is that of determination, that is, of the qualification of a sentence by a modifier. Among its applications are the fallacy of secundum quid et simpliciter, the ἔκθεσις of reduplicative propositions, the conversion of reduplicative propositions, the reduplicative syllogistic, and the supposition of terms in qua propositions. (shrink)

This book is the revised version of a dissertation defended at the University of Chicago. It is also volume 3 of the series “North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy.” Its impressive title refers backward to Laywine’s purpose of showing “why Kant came to the view that sensibility and pure understanding are radically different faculties of knowledge governed by different principles—a view of central importance to the Critique of Pure Reason”. Such a research object is in itself not new. What (...) is new, however, is Laywine’s seeing Kant’s late elaborations on sensibility and understanding as an attempt to provide an answer to the problem of the commercium between body and soul, a problem that was the subject of many discussions within post-cartesian philosophy and received a great deal of attention by Kant too, especially at the beginning of his scientific career, as testified by the presentation of a system of real interaction in his 1755 writing, Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio, whose details are investigated in chapter 2 and in chapter 3. But it is in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, published in 1766, that Laywine sees the “key moment” that gives momentum to her interpretation and are thus made the subject of chapter 1. Laywine dismisses some of the most renowned interpretations of this satirical and at the same time enigmatic writing of Kant’s. She maintains that most interpretations have been failures, and that we can understand the Dreams in a more fruitful way only if we understand the reason for this failure. The reason of the failures, says Laywine, is not having been able to “explain why Kant associates the question of spirits and spirit-seeing with the status and future of metaphysics”, and the more fruitful understanding of the Dreams centers in their connection to Kant’s earlier work in metaphysics, in particular to “his efforts during the mid-1750s to lay the foundation of a credible system of real interaction to supplant the system of pre-established harmony favored by Wolff and Leibniz”. Chapter 4 contains some remarks on the source of Kant’s Dreams, for example, Swedenborg’s Arcana coelestia, while chapter 5 provides a careful analysis of the Dreams, which, according to Laywine, contains not only a critique to Swedenborg, but also a critique to Kant’s Nova dilucidatio in so far as both falsely represent the realm of intelligible substances as though it were subject to the conditions of the sensible world. Chapter 6 is dedicated to Kant’s 1770 dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, which, Laywine remarks, contains the method for correcting the error of Kant’s early metaphysics, namely a method for avoiding false representation of immaterial substances as determined by the conditions of sensibility. Detailed conclusive remarks round out the volume by indicating the direction toward the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Bondeli delves into Ith’s philosophic production with great detail. Ith delivers a psychologistical interpretation of Kant. In fact, he places the contents of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before the exposition of the logic itself. He considers Kant’s critical philosophy as a prodeutic, because cognition comes before thinking. As a matter of fact, Ith follows very closely post-Kantian logicians such as Carl Leonhard Reinhold, Johann Heinrich Abicht, and Johann Gottfried Carl Christian Kiesewetter. Ith is also the author of an anthropology (...) that shows Kantian influences. Bondeli then considers Ith’s direct disciple and fellow disseminator of Kantian doctrines, Philipp Albert Stapfer, who was the author of a philosophy of history occasioned by the rebirth of the Helvetian Republic in 1797. Connected to Ith and Stapfer is also the question of the contacts that the young Hegel might have had during his stay at Berna and Tschugg in 1793 and 1794. While the question regarding Hegel’s contacts is still open, we know much more about Fichte’s stay in Zürich in the Spring of 1794, when he delivered the lectures of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo in the house of Johann Kasper Lavater. In Bern, Fichte was welcomed by his German friend, Jens Baggesen, a Fichtean in philosophy, and from his disciple, Johann Rudolf Steck, also a Fichtean. This is a very learned book. Bondeli provides a very instructive contribution to the understanding of the essence and development of Swiss philosophy.-Riccardo Pozzo, University of Verona. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 108 Heft: 3 Seiten: 457-459.

This volume contains nine essays published between 1980 and 1997 by Klaus Düsing, the director of Cologne’s Husserl-Archiv. It is divided in four parts: theoretical philosophy in transcendental idealism; theory of subjectivity and metaphysics in speculative idealism; ethics and theory of freedom; and idealistic aesthetics. It is, however, focused in its entirety on the notion of subjectivity from Kant to Heidegger. Philosophical discussions about subjectivity or self-consciousness are enjoying a renewed success, as Düsing notes in his introductory essay on the (...) notion of subjectivity in classical and contemporary German philosophy. But this comes after a long period of dearth, during which it was mainstream to decompose the unity of the self-consciousness into a complex of conscious or preconscious lived experiences. Düsing does not question the nature of the brain; his wish is to take a stance on what separates consciousness from self-consciousness or spirit, which English speakers might want to think of also in terms of mind. Obviously, Kant and Hegel come handy for such an endeavor. In fact, the basis of all contemporary theories of self-consciousness and subjectivity is provided by Kant’s theories of apperception and imagination. Kant does not conceive of thinking as an anonymous process. He insists on the “I think,” namely, on the unity of self-consciousness. Kant did not, however, specify how is it possible for logical forms and categories to think through this “I think,” which is their constitutive center of origin. In other words, how can both pure logic and the theory of pure subjectivity claim to be founding elements, if they cannot be opened up by thought itself? The young Fichte and the young Schelling based their philosophical attempts on an interpretation of the theory of subjectivity in terms of transcendental idealism, which, however, leaves unexplained how one should provide a scientific treatment for transcendental idealism that implies those determinations and laws of pure logic that transcendental idealism cannot do without. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant : La polímica sobre la Crítica de la razón pura. Introducción de Claudio La Rocca. Edición y traducción de Mario Caimi. Boadilla del Monte , Mónimo Tránsito y Antonio Machado Libros, 2002, 203 S. ISBN 84-7774-758-X. Kant verstehen. Understanding Kant. Über die Interpretation philosophischer Texte. Hrsg. von Dieter Schönecker und Thomas Zwenger. Darmstadt 2001, 344 S., ISBN 3-534-15207-7 2. unveränd. Auflage 2004. Maria Antonietta Pranteda: Il legno storto. I significati del male in Kant. Torino: Leo S. Olschki, 2002. (...) 377 S. ISBN 88-222-5084-2. Beatrice Centi : Coscienza, etica e architettonica in Kant. Uno studio attraverso le Critiche. Biblioteca di Studi Kantiani, Bd. 16. Pisa u. Rom: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali 2002, 286 S. ISBN 88-8147-307-0. (shrink)