Angelica Nuzzo

This essay examines the presence of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. The perspective adopted here is methodological. Central to this is the choice of “transcendental phenomenology,” understood as a rehabilitation of the idealism and subjectivism proper to the transcendentalism of Kant and Fichte—the choice by which Merleau-Ponty refuses to abandon transcendental philosophy, like Hegel on the contrary did with his dialectical-speculative philosophy, and follows instead the phenomenological perspective suggested for the first time by Schelling.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 (2006) 577-597 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Kant and Herder on Baumgarten's AestheticaAngelica NuzzoWhile philosophers since antiquity have offered reflections and theories on subjects such as the beautiful, the sublime, art, and its appreciation, "aesthetics" as a discipline in its own right dates back only to the second half of the eighteenth-century. We owe to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) the introduction of 'aesthetics' into philosophical discourse. At the moment of its inception, however, this discipline had little to do with art and was not primarily concerned with the beautiful. It was instead a theory of the cognitive value of human sensibility—a doctrine of "sensible cognition." A general historical and systematic question presents itself at this point: How shall human sensibility be conceived in order for aesthetics as a theory of sensibility to gain an independence of its own in philosophical discourse? And accordingly: How shall the human being be conceived in order for our aesthetic experience to claim a philosophical value of its own?In this essay, I elaborate the results of the hypothesis that I submit in response to these questions. 1 My claim is that the mind/body dualism dominating the rationalist tradition of modern philosophy is the principal obstacle preventing aesthetics from becoming an independent science of human sensibility. 2 In the rationalist tradition within which Baumgarten's work is placed, truth concerns the higher cognitive faculty. Besides logic, the investigation of this faculty occupies the discipline of psychology traditionally divided into rational and empirical psychology. While rational psychology abstracts from sensibility in dealing with a disembodied metaphysical soul and its properties, empirical psychology is still viewed as a branch of metaphysics bound to the reduction of all faculties to the theoretical one. Such a view prevents the important results of empirical research from connecting to fields such as history, anthropology, and moral philosophy in a way that can positively defy the charge of materialism and the attacks of skepticism. [End Page 577] In other words, since empirical psychology is still metaphysica specialis, its results do not qualify it to the status of an independent empirical science.Kant and Herder are the crucial protagonists of the transformation of aesthetics after Baumgarten. In their intellectual itinerary, both philosophers dedicate important reflections and critical considerations to the new idea of "aesthetics" first introduced by Baumgarten. They both take up his heritage and work in the direction of overcoming its rationalistic presuppositions. For both philosophers, the confrontation with Baumgarten's theory of "sensible cognition" prompts a new understanding of the role that "sensibility" plays in constituting philosophical discourse and, in connection with this issue, a new understanding of what can be properly called a "philosophical" aesthetics. The critical reflection on Baumgarten's doctrine leads both Kant and Herder to a new view of the relation between logic, epistemology, psychology, and anthropology. It is precisely the different set of relations that Kant and Herder respectively establish among these disciplines that determines the different role that they attribute to aesthetics in their philosophy.In what follows, I offer a confrontation between Kant's and Herder's views of aesthetics that is mediated by their respective critiques of Baumgarten. The aim of this confrontation is not historical but systematic. The issue at stake is the positioning of aesthetics between epistemology, on the one hand, and psychology and anthropology, on the other. I am interested in the way in which Kant and Herder propose different models for integrating "sensibility" into the philosophical discourse by establishing ontological and epistemological conditions which radically break with the rationalist paradigm of mind/body dualism. I want to suggest that Kant's and Herder's starting point and first objective is the same, although the realization of the program differs significantly. Their general aim is to attribute to human sensibility a new central place in philosophy, thereby steering the philosophical focus from the metaphysics of a "disembodied soul" to the inquiry into an "embodied mind." With Kant and Herder, rational psychology yields...

: This essay analyzes the U.S. political situation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ties this conflict to the events of 9/11. The guiding thread of the discussion is the definition of “terrorism” that has led to George W. Bush's declared “war on terrorism.” By means of Hegel's dialectic logic, the essay exposes the problem offered by the category of causality involved in the definition of terrorism: Is terrorism the original “cause” of the war declared on it by the United States or is terrorism rather the very “consequence” of that war?

This essay reconstructs the argument of Kritik der Urteilskraft §§76 –77 by placing it in the context of the “Critique of Teleological Judgment”. What role does the problematic and historically so successful figure of the intuitive understanding play in the antinomy of teleological judgment? The answer is considered indispensable to address the issue of the reception of §§76 – 77. The claim is that these sections institute the “closure” of transcendental philosophy—a closure fundamentally misunderstood by the post Kantians. On the series of distinctions drawn to characterize the “peculiarity” of our human understanding and, by contrast, that of a non-human mind hinges the specific transcendental character of Kant’s philosophy. Once the condition that sustains those distinctions is abandoned transcendental philosophy is abandoned as well.

“The relation of a trillion to unity is very clearly understood, yet so far philosophers have not been able to make the concept of freedom comprehensible in terms of their unities, i.e., in terms of their simple and familiar concepts.” That this estimation of Kant’s, formulated as early as 1764, still holds true for the state of post-Kantian philosophy becomes evident when one attempts to reconstruct the discussion of the concept of freedom, which was initiated even among Kant’s contemporaries by his formulation of its problematic. The problem connected with this discussion can be understood historically as well as systematically. On the one hand, it is concerned with following the historical inheritance of the Kantian philosophy along the guiding thread of the concept of freedom in the debate between the followers and opponents of Kant. On the other hand, this historical investigation should serve to trace the systematic changes that the concept of freedom necessarily undergoes as soon as it enters a philosophical framework that is different from the Kantian. This dual perspective, under which the theme of “freedom” will be considered, offers the further possibility of marking off the temporal as well as the systematic limits of what is to be investigated here. The main philosophical interest in pursuing the modifications to which Kant’s concept of freedom was subjected in post-Kantian philosophy obviously lies in casting new light on the epochal course of thought that leads “from Kant to Hegel.” A claim to satisfy this interest is justified, however, only after one is clear about the philosophical discussion that had already begun among Kant’s contemporaries even while Kant himself was completing and working out his philosophical program. In short, the transition from the concept of freedom in Kant’s transcendental philosophy to the conception of freedom that is unique to the speculative idealism of Hegel can be explained only in light of a preceding analysis of the transformations that the Kantian theory of freedom underwent even as it was being worked out. These transformations, then, will appear at the same time as alternatives to the Kantian program.

This essay is a renewal of Hölderlin’s poetic question as raised again philosophically by Heidegger, and is an attempt to frame the issue anew bringing Hegel into the conversation. At stake, first, is the way in which poetry and philosophy respectively—or perhaps in conjunction—are able to address the chief question of the time as a question of “truth.” What is it that poetry and the poet properly and uniquely do in relation to their time? Does the poet think, and how does she think poetically in language? And, crucially, how does poetic thinking differ from philosophical thinking? But at stake is also, second, the way in which philosophy can—and should—itself speak of poetry. Significantly, both Heidegger and Hegel propose a thoroughly new way of addressing the question of poetry in philosophy.

Kant and the Unity of Reason is a comprehensive reconstruction and a detailed analysis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. In the light of the third Critique, the book offers a final inter­pretation of the critical project as a whole. It proposes a new reading of Kant's notion of human experience in which domains, as different as knowledge, morality, and the experience of beauty and life, are finally viewed in a unified perspective. The book proposes a reading of Kant's critical project as one of the most sophisticated attempts in the history of philosophy to articulate a complex notion of human "sensi­bility" as an alternative to both eighteenth-century empiricism and rationalism. The fun­damental contribution of rationality to human experience cannot be fully appreciated if the sensuous component of experience is not adequately taken into account. For Kant, "sensibility" includes functions as different as sensation, intuition, perception, emotion, passion, drive, moral feeling, and feeling of pleasure and displeasure. Kant's idea of "reflective" judgment is the peculiar discovery of the third Critique. Re­flective judgment articulates the interplay between sensibility and rationality, the world of nature and the human mind, in order to constitute human experience and the sphere of human intersubjective relationships. In the act of reflection, Kant's philosophy fi­nally comes to reflect upon itself and the meaning of its critical endeavor.