Kant's philosophy of geometry rests upon his doctrine of the "schematism" which I argue is formally identical to the ability to grass the middle term of an Aristotelian syllogism. The doctrine fails to avoid obscurities which were already present in Plato, Aristotle, and Hume.

This paper argues that kant's general epistemology incorporates a theory of algebra which entails a less constricted view of kant's philosophy of mathematics than is sometimes given. To extract a plausible theory of algebra from the "critique of pure reason", It is necessary to link kant's doctrine of mathematical construction to the idea of the "schematism". Mathematical construction can be understood to accommodate algebraic symbolism as well as the more familiar spatial configurations of geometry.

Paul Ricoeur sharply distinguishes his hermeneutics from Heidegger’s ‘ontological’ hermeneutics. An ontological hermeneutics, Ricoeur claims, is bound to be insufficiently critical. Yet this cannot be the whole story, since Ricoeur himself engages in ontological hermeneutics. What really distinguishes Heidegger’s hermeneutics from Ricoeur’s? I seek an answer to this question in the two thinkers’ appropriations of Kant. More specifically, I examine their appropriations of Kant’s view of the productive imagination, as conveyed in the Transcendental Schematism. Heidegger sees the productive imagination (...) as a ‘third basic faculty’ prior to sensibility and understanding. Conceived in this way, the imagination is so primordial that it must be characterized in a highly abstract way. Ricoeur sees this move as dangerous, and tries to avoid it by reinterpreting the imagination as a faculty that requires the mediation of concrete symbols. In doing so, he hopes to preserve Kant’s insights while leaving room for critique. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur sharply distinguishes his hermeneutics from Heidegger’s ‘ontological’ hermeneutics. An ontological hermeneutics, Ricoeur claims, is bound to be insufficiently critical. Yet this cannot be the whole story, since Ricoeur himself engages in ontological hermeneutics. What really distinguishes Heidegger’s hermeneutics from Ricoeur’s? I seek an answer to this question in the two thinkers’ appropriations of Kant. More specifically, I examine their appropriations of Kant’s view of the productive imagination, as conveyed in the Transcendental Schematism. Heidegger sees the productive imagination (...) as a ‘third basic faculty’ prior to sensibility and understanding. Conceived in this way, the imagination is so primordial that it must be characterized in a highly abstract way. Ricoeur sees this move as dangerous, and tries to avoid it by reinterpreting the imagination as a faculty that requires the mediation of concrete symbols. In doing so, he hopes to preserve Kant’s insights while leaving room for critique. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the role of the principle of causality in Cassirer’s account of the coordination of concepts and spatio-temporal objects. We shall see that, in contradistinction to Kantian schematism, Cassirer maintains that this coordination is not achieved by means of a third element, which albeit intellectual is nevertheless also sensible. Rather, in Cassirer’s view, the coordination will take place through a specification of the concepts that should be sought “within the domain of concepts itself.” We shall show that (...) the principle of causality is the ultimate condition upon which the possibility of the coordination of concepts and spatio-temporal objects depends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 425-426 [Access article in PDF] Martin Heidegger. The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Translated by Ted Sadler. London: Continuum, 2002. Pp. xiv + 216. Paper, $29.95.Of the recently translated volumes comprising Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, perhaps the volume whose importance is most underestimated contains his lectures from the summer semester of 1930 (Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit), (...) which now appears in English under the title On the Essence of Human Freedom. In this work, Heidegger complements his other attempts to retrieve Kant's transcendental philosophy—which primarily focused on reinterpreting the Critique of Pure Reason—by offering the fullest treatment of practical reason to be found in the Gesamtausgabe. As such, this translation of Band 31 of the Gesamtausgabe proves invaluable because it (1) provides another side to Heidegger's critical exchange (Auseinandersetzung) with Kant (198) and (2) yields some tantalizing clues as to a vestige of a Heideggerian ethic which can be developed by examining human freedom.In a lecture course from the winter semester of 1925-26 (Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit), Heidegger turned to Kant's doctrine of schematism in order to distinguish finitude as the key dimension of temporality. From that point until the publication of "Kants These über das Sein" (1961), the importance of retrieving transcendental philosophy surfaces at strategic places in Heidegger's thought, although he devotes most of his attention to unraveling the issue of temporality couched in the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique. What sets The Essence of Human Freedom apart, however, is that it identifies freedom as a new locus from which to address the possibility of being's disclosure through time, which remains unthought in the Greek concept of ousia as "permanent presence": "The question of human freedom is the fundamental question of philosophy, in which is rooted even the question of being" (203). Human freedom, and the questioning of its finite origin in human existence (Dasein), thereby yields a wider topography within which to re-ask the question of being in light of its connection to time. The topography takes this form: the traditional, or "leading question of philosophy" (what are beings as such?), gives way to the "fundamental question of philosophy" (why is being disclosed through time?), which can be developed only by addressing freedom as the ground of human existence (23).In Part I of The Essence of Human Freedom, Heidegger shows how Kant's modern effort to define freedom epistemically as a form of causation must be recast in light of the ontological concern of the ancients to define movement as a determination of the dynamism of being. In Part II, Heidegger outlines Kant's attempt to establish the possibility of freedom in the Transcendental Dialectic, the enigma of how two apparently incompatible forms of causation—the determinism of nature and the spontaneity of will—can stand in a "double [End Page 425] relation to the same effect" (172). Heidegger offers his own resolution of the third antinomy. He argues that the apparent incompatibility of the preceding causalities can be resolved when reason reconciles itself with its own finitude: leaving open its possibility of serving as a spontaneous cause in the intelligible realm of morality, while restricting the scope of natural causality to the sensible realm of appearances. The need to establish the possibility of freedom must then give way to establishing its actuality as the self-legislative power of the will in the practical domain. "Pure willing is the willing of one's own essence as will.... Thus the fundamental law of a finite pure willing, i.e., of a pure practical reason, is a categorical imperative (190-1). Having then distinguished the occurrence of freedom in its practical domain, Heidegger identifies ethical praxis as the source of actuality for the spontaneous causality of a will, the self-legislation of the categorical imperative. "The factuality corresponding to the idea of freedom is that of praxis" (185). In one of the strongest statements to be found anywhere in his writings in... (shrink)

Although Kant had a high regard for Jesus as a moral teacher, interpreters typically assume that his philosophy disallows belief in Jesus as God. Those who regard Kant as a moral reductionist are especially likely to offer a negative construal of the densely-argued subsection of his 1793 Religion that relates directly to this issue. The recent “affirmative” trend in Kant-scholarship provides the basis for an alternative reading. First, theologians must regard Jesus as human so that belief in Jesus can (...) empower believers to become good. Second, theologians may refer to Jesus as divine by identifying his disposition as exemplifying the “archetype of perfect humanity.” Third, Judeo-Christian history poses an empirical problem that theologians can solve by interpreting Jesus’s divinity according to the schematism of analogy. While this does not constitute a robust (identifiably Christian) doctrine of Jesus’s divinity, it does provide clear guidelines for formulating such a tenet of historical faith. (shrink)

Although Kant had a high regard for Jesus as a moral teacher, interpreters typically assume that his philosophy disallows belief in Jesus as God. Those who regard Kant as a moral reductionist are especially likely to offer a negative construal of the densely-argued subsection of his 1793 Religion that relates directly to this issue. The recent “affirmative” trend in Kant-scholarship provides the basis for an alternative reading. First, theologians must regard Jesus as human so that belief in Jesus can (...) empower believers to become good. Second, theologians may refer to Jesus as divine by identifying his disposition as exemplifying the “archetype of perfect humanity.” Third, Judeo-Christian history poses an empirical problem that theologians can solve by interpreting Jesus’s divinity according to the schematism of analogy. While this does not constitute a robust (identifiably Christian) doctrine of Jesus’s divinity, it does provide clear guidelines for formulating such a tenet of historical faith. (shrink)

The paper examines the influence of Kant's theoretical philosophy on formation of phenomenological interpretation of temporal issues in Heidegger's thinking, both in terms of his positive perception of Kant's recent approaches, as well as in terms of negative repulsion. The paper emphasizes specificity and even "arbitrariness" of Heidegger's interpretation of Kantian theoretical philosophizing. This interpretation fits into the strategy of destruction of Western metaphysics, but significantly differs the Neo-Kantianism interpretations in focusing not so much on limited cognitive capacity, but (...) rather on the limitations of human existence as such. Finally, it is shown that Heidegger attempted to demonstrate the structuring of the sense of being via schematism of ecstatic-horizontal temporariness inspired by Kant's influence. (shrink)

It is in Sein und Zeit that Heidegger decrees the end of the Geisteswissenschaften and their tradition, when, as he is commenting on the Briefwechsel [exchange of letters] between Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg, he pays homage to the latter for “his full understanding of the fundamental character of history as virtuality [...] [which he] owes to his knowledge of the character of being of human Dasein itself.” Consequently, Heidegger continues, “the interest of understanding historicality” is confronted with the (...) task of an elaboration of the “generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” But he must part ways with Yorck when the latter, after having clearly established that difference, moves from virtuality to mysticism. If, on the other hand, once separated from the ontic, “the question of historicality shows itself to be an ontological question which inquires into the constitution of being of historical being”, it is once again towards Dilthey that one must turn, in spite of his confused vitalism. Heidegger effects two operations at once. On the one hand, he expels the Geisteswissenschaften from the position they occupied at the heart of metaphysics, as the inheritors of the Enlightenment and the outcome of Hegelianism. On the other hand, he brings to fulfillment the critical labor which had precisely shown its value in Dilthey’s historicism —acritical labor which develops the search for the meaning of historicity and allows one to move from the theory of objectivity to that of expression, from the acknowledgment of historiography in the context of the critique of cognition to its definition at the heart of the transcendental schematism. Historicity is then posited as an ontological dimension and leaves only its ontic residue for historiography. (shrink)

The book offers an ethical interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason by establishing the historical connection between the problematic of Temporality in the philosophies of Heidegger and Levinas on the one hand, and the ground-laying of metaphysics in the schematism of Kant's critical philosophy on the other. Drawing on Levinas' ethical critique of the Heideggerian problematic of Temporality together with his destructive proposal to carry out the deformalization of the Kantian notion of time in a manner consistent (...) with Rosenzweig's philosophy, the book argues that this historical connection should be established at the point where Kant determines the ethical status of the schematism according to the regulative schemas of the ideas of pure reason, and not, as in Heidegger's ontological destruction, at the point of his determination of the sensible schemas of the pure concepts of understanding alone. (shrink)

Setting itself at the heart of the problem of the schematism in Kant, Kant’s thing-in-itself problematic, and Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of metaphysics and morals, Blondel’s Nietzsche: The Body and Culture attempts to respond to a problem perhaps as old as philosophy itself: how is one to account for both the one and the many, both order and chaos, being and becoming, culture and nature, language and the body—especially if “accounting” is an act of reason, conceptualization, and language? Blondel (...) finds in Nietzsche a living thinking that refuses to give up on these conceptual oppositions altogether, but neither resolves them dialectically, nor simply remains a dualistic or oppositional thinking. (shrink)

Setting itself at the heart of the problem of the schematism in Kant, Kant’s thing-in-itself problematic, and Nietzsche’s genealogical critique of metaphysics and morals, Blondel’s Nietzsche: The Body and Culture attempts to respond to a problem perhaps as old as philosophy itself: how is one to account for both the one and the many, both order and chaos, being and becoming, culture and nature, language and the body—especially if “accounting” is an act of reason, conceptualization, and language? Blondel (...) finds in Nietzsche a living thinking that refuses to give up on these conceptual oppositions altogether, but neither resolves them dialectically, nor simply remains a dualistic or oppositional thinking. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s “Schema” and J. G. Fichte’s “Bild” are parallel figures of activity that serve as bridges. For both Kant and Fichte, it is not the image/schema taken as product that is primary, but the act of imaging. I show how Fichte leans on the Kantian argumentation of the schematism in order to attempt bridging the gulf critical philosophy leaves between theoretical and practical philosophy. My broader purpose is to indicate how two German Idealists emphasize activity as (...) a way of solving philosophical problems. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s “Schema” and J. G. Fichte’s “Bild” are parallel figures of activity that serve as bridges. For both Kant and Fichte, it is not the image/schema taken as product that is primary, but the act of imaging. I show how Fichte leans on the Kantian argumentation of the schematism in order to attempt bridging the gulf critical philosophy leaves between theoretical and practical philosophy. My broader purpose is to indicate how two German Idealists emphasize activity as (...) a way of solving philosophical problems. (shrink)

IN this paper I would like to suggest that by reconstructing the relationship between time and teleology --as this relationship might be implied by Kant's theory--one of the most complicated problems of this theory may be solved. This problem concerns a construction of time suitable to the particular needs of Kant's doctrines of the history of reason and philosophy, or of the history of mankind, which proceeds according to the total imperative of morality. Teleological time, a concept (...) which I shall attempt to present in this paper, has to do with the two employments of judgment, the determinant and the reflective. This teleological time is not merely a form of intuition, nor is it subject to the schematism of deterministic causality, and it is exempt from some impediments which render rational history, in the domains of theory and praxis alike, impossible, if indeed such a history requires time. Thus, I shall attempt in this paper to suggest a solution to the so-called Kantian "antinomy of history": Kant's theory employs time as a form of intuition, which, on the one hand, has mechanical-deterministic qualities and, on the other, a rational history, although it seems that these two are in antagonism. I attempt to suggest a solution to this antinomy without claiming that the history of reason is a "pure supra-temporal processuality." This is a crucial problem in Kant's theory and the possibility of solving it is necessary for the success of the theory. This is also a problem of systematization: How is it possible to solve the problem of the duality of time and reason? (shrink)

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the (...) Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur develops a hermeneutics of tradition centered on a threefold conception of tradition which involves the notions of traditionality, traditions, and Tradition. These refer to form, content, and truth-claims within the framework of the hermeneutics of historical consciousness. This hermeneutics of tradition is treated in a panchronic and ternary way. Both methods operate at the levels of past, future and present, while the ternary method also consists in the rhetoric of truth-claims, the dialectic of remoteness vs. de-distanciation and that (...) of question vs. answer. This article attempts to study three aspects of the panchronic and ternary approach: (1) a living and ternary tradition with an ongoing dialectic interweaving the ecstases of time; (2) tradition in relation to historical consciousness and the spatialization of historicity; (3) temporalizing history and historicizing schematism in threefold mimesis. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that although Kant’s account of empirical schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason is primarily used to explain the shared content of intuitions and empirical concepts, it is also informed by methodological problems in natural history. I argue that empirical schemata, which are rules for determining the spatiotemporal form of objects, not only serve to connect individual intuitions with concepts, but also concern the very features of objects on the basis of which they were (...) connected and ordered in taxonomic systems based on similarity of form. I then suggest that Kant likely had scientific illustrations in mind in his discussion of empirical images in the Schematism chapter and that his account of schemata can help explain the epistemic function of these images in early modern science. (shrink)

The Slovak sociologist Alexander Hirner has been practising in the 1940's and 1950's also philosophy . Thanks to him in the fisrt Slovak Catholic oriented philosophical journal the domination of the religious philosophy was overthrown and the journal became largely pluralistic, allowing for more discussion and criticism. In the history of philosophy Hirner focused on the Enlightenment in Slovakia. He paid special attention to the efforts of its main representatives, trying to articualte their own philosophical stands (...) and views. Due to his attempts a discussion of methodological problems of the history of Slovak philosophy began, in which he stood for objectivity in approaching historical facts, rejecting at the same time schematism, sociologism and nihilism in understanding and evaluation of the philosophical developments in Slovakia. In 1942 he published an essay on values, one of the first works in Slovakia introdu_cing this problematics. In the totalitarian period his views conflicted with those of the political authorities. As a conseqence in 1958 - 1966 he became a victim of a politically arranged trial. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:482 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY G. E. Michalson, Jr. TheHistoricalDimensions ofaRattonalFaith. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1977. Pp. 222. $8.65. The primary intentionof this work is to argue that historical or ecclesiastical religion plays a vital role in Kant's religious thought, because it is necessary to provide a sensible content for the purely formal doctrine of Kant's "moral" religion. But Michalson resists that this strategy cannot succeed, (...) because of the technical requirements of Kant's eplstmology, and that we must ultimately encounter an "impasse" in Kant's thought on history and religion (pp. 77, 134, 169). This is an area of Kant's thought that has not until recently received the attention it deserves. A careful consideration of all the related issued helps one to recognize, from perhaps the most beneficial standpoint, how all the various parts of Kant's philosophical scheme fit together. Michalson quite rightly maintains that we must remain within the epistemological framework Kant has established for the Critical Philosophy. But unfortunately he recognizes only the negative aspects of this framework. What he chooses to call "Kant's principle of human limitations" (mentioned thirtynine times) is the essential element in his interpretation. Secondly, Michalson is unwilling to follow the lead of other commentators (e.g., Michel Despland and Ylrmiahu Yovel) in broadening the context still further in order to take into account the full scope of Kant's philosophical project. These two defects persist throughout Michalson's analysis, and ultimately they prevent any fruitful conclusions. The approach employed, in its most simple form, ~sto point out that historical religion belongs to the phenomenal order and that morality (as the basis for Kant's technical rehgious position) belongs to the noumenal order. Kant's recognition of the need to bridge this gap is dealt with in terms of the "schematism of analogy" (pp. 95, 112-13) mentioned in Religion withinthe Ltmits ofReasonAlone. Michalson provides an interpretation of the schematism m Chapter 3 and concludes that "Kant's Religion is not altogether consistent with certain basic teachings of the critical philosophy" (p. 132). His attempt to deal with this problem carries him into a discussion of teleology and the highest good (Chapter 4), and it is only in this concluding chapter that his various interpretive errors crystallze and produce their Inevitable consequences. Rather than emphasizing the negative aspects of Kant's conception of man, Despland offers Kant's positive perspective on man and his destiny----drawing, for example, on the Anthropologyfrom a PragmaticPoint of View. Employing equally good judgment, Yovel provides an interpretation of the highest good which shows it as the culmination (in the indefinite future) of the concrete process through which man's social, political, educational, and religious development takes place. These perspectives permit the historical dimension (both religious and secular) to be gradually transformed by the imposition of moral designs--as men ~lowly and painfully assume responsibility for directing the blind laws of nature into patterns that serve moral ends. Such commentators help us to see more clearly what Kant was attempting to achieve and how the elements of his total philosophical scheme are to be understood as interconnected. Michalson, on the other hand, has only his impasse to offer us. Because history is phenomenal and religion (as morality) is noumenal, he maintainsthat no bridge is possible between the two realms. But this is simply a failure to recognize Kant's strategy. For Kant is very careful to restrict knowledge (in the strict sense) to the phenomenal order. But he is equally clear in asserting that it is legitimate (indeed, necessary) to postulate those conditions which alone make it possible for us to act in conformity with the moral law. Therefore, we must postulate not only God and immortality but the possibility of a worldly order which conforms both to the laws of nature and to the moral law. And for Kant these postulates have the full strength of rational truths, m that--like the postulates of mathematics -reason cannot reject them. Interpreting Kant's phenomenon-noumenon distinction strictly (but misapplying it), Michalson insists that such a projected ideal state of the world is inconsistent with Kant's epistemological commitment. For such... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The New Husserl: A Critical ReaderBob SandmeyerDonn Welton, editor. The New Husserl: A Critical Reader. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Pp. xxv + 334. Cloth, $75.00. Paper, $29.95.Donn Welton has put together a superb collection of twelve essays which "provide an alternative to the standard approach to Husserl by examining his method as a whole and by offering depth-probes into a number of issues, old and new, that (...) occupied [Husserl] during his exceptionally productive later period" (xi). Although classed under five subheadings by Welton, the essays are of three types generally. These are (1) essays which provide introduction to and overview of Husserl's philosophy, especially as expressed in his later works, (2) essays of comparison between aspects of Husserl's philosophy and other non-phenomenological or psychological theories, and (3) analytic essays which treat a particular thematic within (and transcending) Husserl's phenomenological philosophy.The book begins with Klaus Held's wonderfully coherent introductions to Husserl's phenomenological method and phenomenology of the life-world. Although these two essays are not new, they remain original and current overviews of Husserl's whole philosophy [End Page 122] translated into English for the first time. More importantly, they do not lapse into an obtuse jargon so typical of Husserlian scholarship. Both essays provide an excellent introduction to the major themes of Husserl's philosophy.Three essays within the collection are primarily comparative. Dieter Lohmar delves into a notoriously thorny issue within Kant's first critique, i.e., the schematism of concepts, in order to compare this against Husserl's concept of type. But he attempts herein to articulate something that "never really interested Kant" (97), i.e., the empirical genesis of the schemata. Apart from providing a clear account of the genesis of empirical schema within Kantian philosophy, Lohmar also clarifies the Husserlian conception of type as instituted in perceptual consciousness. Rudolf Bernet examines the appearing of Unconsciousness as presented by Freud in order to "show how it is possible that consciousness can bring to present appearance something unconscious... without thereby incorporating it into or subordinating it to the conscious present" (200). Bernet achieves two ends in this fine essay. He employs Husserl's theory of phantasy in inner-time consciousness in order to intimate a solution to the seeming aporia implicit in Freud's theory of unconscious consciousness. More importantly to Husserlian scholarship, however, Bernet also provides a fine articulation of Husserl's theory of phantasy as it develops from the "apprehension of a content of apprehension" schema to that of a non-positing, intuitive-reproductive presentification. Donn Welton's essay, "World as Horizon," attacks the semantic theory of claims and descriptions espoused primarily by Robert Brandom. What is lacking in Brandom's theory of claims and, by extension, in any abstracting semantic theory, Welton argues, is the proper starting point. Speech acts must be understood from within a theory of world "as a nexus of significance that situates not only our multiple discourses about different regions but also the regions themselves" (224).The bulk of the essays in this collection, however, are analytic in nature and range over themes as diverse as intentionality, inner-time-consciousness, self-reflection, intersubjectivity and the differing styles of phenomenological analysis within Husserl's philosophy. Perhaps the best essays in this collection, given its aim, are Lanei Rodemeyer's essay "Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness: an Analysis of Protention" and Anthony Steinbock's "Generativity and the Scope of Generative Phenomenology." Where Rodemeyer concentrates her attention on explicating the role of protention in all of Husserl's time-analyses—but most especially in the later Bernauer and C manuscripts, Steinbock looks from within Husserl's philosophy to a style of analysis that goes beyond Husserl to become "a communal effort, not just among contemporary phenomenologists, but as a project handed down and appropriated over the generations" (317 ff.). With the exception of David Carr's essay on subjectivity in the transcendental tradition, what is common to all these analytical essays is the dominant place of Husserl's late analyses of inner-time-consciousness and temporalization. These analyses play a major role in the two essays just... (shrink)

Gadamer’s hermeneutic project is an effort to rejoin what he called the “unbroken tradition of rhetorical and humanist culture” to its own thought. My focus here is on the distinctive hermeneutic schematism of persons and culture in conjunction with the Renaissance doctrine of prudence. The complex hermeneutic understanding of human community requires a balancing act that privileges the agency of language and culture by denying the dominion of the sovereign self. Further, it employs a reflux or interanimation that refuses (...) to diminish the dignity of the person. Classical and Christian humanism already had something of this complex notion of agency that served as a seedbed for the hermeneutic achievement. By reading that earlier conception through the lens of his own time, Gadamer’scomplex voicing of personhood expresses the dispersion and unity of human being as a unique balance of classical and modern insight. (shrink)

Kant suggests that moral metaphysics can be shown to be politically applicable by thinking of the analogically similar applicability of the principles of speculative reason to the external world of sense experience. Just as the categories of understanding, e.g., causality, substance, and so on must be schematized, i.e., given a temporal representation in order to be made applicable to the forms of sensuous intuitions, so also the principles of morality—most especially the idea of the autonomous will—must be schematized to be (...) made politically applicable. The paper shows how Kant employs his schematism in metaphysics to make the principles of morality applicable to political experience and concludes with observations on the moral and political implications of a politics that pays homage to Kantian morality. (shrink)

Kant suggests that moral metaphysics can be shown to be politically applicable by thinking of the analogically similar applicability of the principles of speculative reason to the external world of sense experience. Just as the categories of understanding, e.g., causality, substance, and so on must be schematized, i.e., given a temporal representation in order to be made applicable to the forms of sensuous intuitions, so also the principles of morality—most especially the idea of the autonomous will—must be schematized to be (...) made politically applicable. The paper shows how Kant employs his schematism in metaphysics to make the principles of morality applicable to political experience and concludes with observations on the moral and political implications of a politics that pays homage to Kantian morality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:284 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY traversing "the great Arabian Desert," as Paten has so justly described it. Ewing's commentary is too compact to satisfy even a beginner. Paton's monumental two volumes are too de= tailed. The interest of Kemp Smith's classic work in the historical problem of the Critique prevents the student from gaining an over=all view of the long and prolix argument of the Analytic. Wolff's Commentary (...) meets the insufficiencies of these works remarkably well. The author presents a strong case for the view that the Analytic from beginning to end is one closely reasoned argument that reaches its climax only in the Second Analogy where Kant justifies the principle of causality. The lucidity with which he describes this adventure is masterful. In his introduction Wolff frames the questions which Kant undertook to answer. Beginning with Kant's pre=Critical writings, that worked within the problematic set up by Leibniz and Newton, he shows the transformation in viewpoint that Kant underwent by his exposure to Hume. In his section on Kant's method, the author dwells upon the modes of logic employed by Kant in his arguments. He contrasts the synthetic me~hod which Kant usuaIIy adopts in the Analytic with the analytic procedure of the Prolegomena. Wolff's observations here are extremely useful. They serve to explain the mysterious transitions and apparent backtracking of the Analytic, while at the same time they show the paramount importance of the transcendental unity of apperception in Kant's chain of argument. The author then proceeds to a step-by=step analysis of the two deductions. Faced with the problem of explaining the development of Kant's thought through the two editions, he provides schematic outlines of four successive versions of the argument at the end of each section in his discussion. This is certainly one of the most valuable features of Wolff's book. These schemas clearly isolate the premisses and put into logical progression material that is often misplaced in the actual text from what we would expect to be its natural sequence. After short discussions of the Schematism and the First Analogy, the author moves on the Second Analogy (causality), which he treats as the real kernel of the Analytic. Wolff shows that Kant's definition of synthesis is stated in merely general terms in the deductions and needs the Second Analogy for adequate development. Wolff then recasts the four preliminary arguments in a fifth and final schema. Beginning with the unity of apperception and the temporal character of perception as his two premisses, he deduces the existence of a mental synthesis stated in terms equivalent to the principle of causality. In interpreting the five arguments of the Analytic, Wolff employs three chief guidlines. First, Kant develops his doctrine by taking the "epistemological turn," rejecting the attempts of earlier subjectivists to pass beyond their ideas to some kind of metaphysical statement about the reality beyond. Kant seeks the characteristics and bases of the knowledge of objects, rather than the characteristics of the objects in themselves. Secondly, Kant characterizes the knowledge of objects by the modes of necessity and universality. Finally, Kant grounds these characteristics by a dynamic analysis of the cognitive act; the mind, in its functioning, must conform to innate rules that govern the association of mental images. The author's discussion of Kant's notion of "rule" is probably the most illuminatingsection of his whole commen= tary. While the author does not gloss over the difficulties of Kant's text, the reader sometimes feels that Wolff sees logic and neatness in Kant's argument where there is none. This minor defect detracts but little, however, from the immense service which the author has done for the student of the Critique. CHARLESJ. RIECK, 0.P. Aquinas Institute, River Forest, Illinois Young Nietzsche and the Wagnerian Experience. By Frederick R. Love. (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1963.Pp. xi + 103.) Professor Love's little book differs from previous studies of Nietzsche's relation to Wagner by taking into account Nietzsche's compositions, including unpublished items in the BOOK REVIEWS 285 Nietzsche archives in Weimar.1 The author visited the archives, which are now... (shrink)

This article considers the significance of Kant’s schematized categories in the Critique of Pure Reason for contemporary metaphysics. I present Kant’s understanding of the schematism and how it functions within his critique of the limits of pure reason. Then I argue that, although the true role of the schemata is a relatively late development in Kant’s thought, it is nevertheless a core notion, and the central task of the first Critique can be sufficiently articulated in the language of the (...) schematism. A surprising result of Kant’s doctrine of the schematism is that a limited form of metaphysics is possible even within the parameters set out in the first Critique. To show this, I offer contrasting examples of legitimate and illegitimate forays into metaphysics in light of the condition of the schematized categories. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger closes his Winter Semester 1927–28 lectures by claiming that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, read through the lens of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, confirmed the accuracy of his philosophical path culminating in Being and Time. A notable interpretation of Heidegger’s debt to Kant, advanced by William Blattner, presents Heidegger as a temporal idealist. I argue that attention to Husserl’s adaptation of Kant’s critical philosophy shows that both Husserl and Heidegger are realists. I make my case by tracing a (...) unified philosophical problematic through three puzzling passages: the Schematism chapter of the first Critique, Husserl’s thought experiment of the destruction of the world in Ideas, and the passage in Being and Time that motivates Blattner’s idealist reading. Husserl and Heidegger give accounts, derived from Kant, of how the consciousness of time makes it possible for objects to be perceived as enduring unities, as well as ‘genealogies of logic’ that show how a priori knowledge, including ontology, is possible. These accounts are idealistic only in the sense that they concern the ideal or essential features of intentionality in virtue of which it puts us in touch with things as they are independently of the contributions of any mind of any type. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 115 analytical surveys of important Rousseau themes (though their connection with the main theme is sometimes weak) : Rousseau's attitude to love, his philosophy of language, his notion of a Golden Age and Terrestrial Paradise, and his views of personal immortality. Chapter 4 ("L'amour et le pays des chim~res") shows Rousseau recoiling from love fulfillment, "rejet6 dans I'imaginaire par l'~chec de sa passion," finding satisfaction only (...) in the imagination (hence his fear of "soiling the purity" of the beloved, with some strange consequences for his concept of personality). The chapter on Rousseau's philosophy of language is detailed and richly documented, as all these chapters are; it shows him struggling to free the theory from the grip of sensualism, and anticipating in intuitive flashes some very modern notions. Chapter 5 goes to the roots of Rousseau's almost delirious happiness when he finds Paradise in an isle that is both symbol and incarnation of attunement with vegetative nature (Freudians may see a good deal more in this). The last chapter brings together the texts on personal immortality, the certainty of which Rousseau derived from his personal need for compensatory justice, while admitting that there was no objective proof of it. Eigeldinger works strictly from the sources. Some naive expressions, an occasional lack of technique in handling the texts, a tendency towards poetic language and enthusiastic overstatement are easily compensated by his sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, and conscientiousness. His results are not unfamiliar, but it is good to have such rich material brought together and so well presented in these compact chapters. This is not an academic exercise but a work of love, and it is none the worse for it. GR~con SEBBA Emory University Kants These iiber das Sein. By Martin Heidegger. (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1962. Pp. 36. Paper, DM 3.80.) This little essay continues the "destruction of the history of ontology" which Heidegger originally projected as the second part of Sein und Zeit but never published under that title. The "destruction," as Heidegger readers are aware, is by no means an attempt to repudiate the metaphysical tradition of the West. Its aim instead is to re-think the question of being on a more fundamental level--to focus on the ground of being, being as such (Das Sein), rather than on this or that mode of being or on the totality of what is (Das Seiende). Hence Heidegger's claim that he is laying the groundwork for something that has never really been undertaken previously in Western thought, namely, "fundamental ontology." In Kant und alas Problem der Metaphysik (1929), Heidegger repudiated the NeoKantian interpretation of the Critique of Pure Reason by insisting that the thrust of that work is primarily ontological, not epistemological. Focusing his analysis on Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories and the doctrine of schematism in the first edition of the Critique, Heidegger argued that the transcendental imagination must stand at the center of ontological knowledge and that its subordination to the understanding in the second edition constitutes a "recoil" on Kant's part from his earlier and deeper insights. Moreover, Heidegger found in Kant the seeds of his own doctrine of temporality as the basis of human being, knowing, and acting--a doctrine from which once again Kant "recoiled." 116 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY These themes are echoed in the present essay, but a different portion of the Critique comes under scrutiny. In his discussion of the ontological proof for the existence of God, Kant writes: 'Being' is evidently not a real predicate, i.e., it is not a concept of something which could be added to the concept of a thing. It is simply [bloss] the placing [Position] of a thing, or of certain determinations in it. (A598,B626) Heidegger, armed with an impressive correlation of texts, finds in this passage a negative and an affirmative thesis. The negative thesis denies to being the character of a "real" predicate, but does not deny that it is a predicate in some sense. By "real" we are to understand, not actual, but having a reference to things. Thus interpreted, the negative thesis asserts that being is not... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to trace one of the deepest roots of Hegel's concept of history within Kant's doctrine of schematism. I propose to draw a line of continuity between Kant's Einbildungskraft and Hegel's Selbstbewusstsein. The concept of Selbstbewusstsein of the young Hegel is to be understood, in my view, as the moment when the extreme and radical consequences are drawn from the schematism of the first Critique, revised in the light of Kant's reflections on (...) teleology developed in the Critique of Judgment. In this sense, Hegel can be seen as the 'solution' to the rift that opened up in the heart of Western culture during the Enlightenment. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare Heidegger and Sellars’ respective responses to Kant’s Schematism section of the Transcendental Analytic, taking heed of how both philosophers motivate a criticism of representationalism in their respective renderings while also prodding their Kantian insights towards a holist conception of normativity. We begin with an overview and analysis of Heidegger and Sellars’ holism, comparing both thinkers’ systematic thought. We then turn to how both appraise Kant' Schematism section, first working through Heidegger’s analysis of Kant’s (...) understanding and imagination. We follow this up with Sellars’ naturalized Kantianism, taking particular interest in how Sellars emphasizes the basic foundational units, i.e., ‘this-suches’, grounding Kant’s theory of perception. We appraise both approaches, making the case that they offer a compatible productive misreading. (shrink)

in a late note, dated 1797, Kant refers to the schematism of the pure understanding as one of the most difficult as well as one of the most important issues treated in the Critique of Pure Reason.1 His treatment of this theme is indeed notorious for its obscurity.2 As I see it, part of the problem is caused by the fact that Kant frames his discussion in terms that he could expect his readers to be familiar with, while he (...) gradually develops ideas that breach any traditional account of cognition. This holds for his references to the power of judgment and the related view that cognition is a matter of subsuming intuitions under concepts3 as well as for the suggestion that there is an initial gap between categories... (shrink)

This paper argues that existence claims for theoretical entities must be based on more than their role in one theory. The supplementary evidence should be either observation, whether direct or indirect, or the possibility of detaching the existence claim from one particular theory. A logical schematism for the latter type of support is developed.

This paper considers a principal concept of metaphysics – the category of substance – as it figures in Kant’s critical program of establishing metaphysics as a science. Like Leibniz, Kant identifies metaphysical concepts through logical reflection on the form of cognitive activity. He thus begins with general logic’s account of categorical judgment as an act of subordinating predicate to subject. This categorical form is then considered in transcendental logic with reference to the possibility of its real use. Transcendental reflection reveals (...) that the categorical form, in its potential for such use, constitutes the category of substance and accident, representing a first real subject and a determination of its existence. But to qualify for objective, scientific employment, metaphysics’ concepts must admit of real definitions, which show their objects to be possible, and such possibility, pace Leibniz, can be established only in relation to possible experience. Thus, relying on his doctrine of the schematism, Kant shows the category to figure constitutively in experience, as the ground of the first law of nature, that in all change substance persists. (shrink)

I consider the relationship of Badiou’s schematism of the event to critical thought following the linguistic turn as well as to the mathematical formalisms of set theory. In Being and Event, Badiou uses formal argumentation to support his sweeping rejection of the linguistic turn as well as much of contemporary critical thought. This rejection stems from his interpretation of set theory as barring thought from the 'One-All' of totality; but I argue that, by interpreting it differently, we can understand (...) this implication in a way that is in fact consistent with the critical and linguistic methods Badiou wishes to reject. (shrink)