Ursula Renz

The present article proposes to revisit the “Neurath-Haller thesis” – i.e. the claim that Austrian philosophy is distinct from German philosophy because Kantianism did not play a major role in shaping it – by examining the development of Brentano’s dismissive attitude towards Kant through the lens of Brentano’s idea of immediate evidence. Its main point is that although the presuppositions of this idea are elaborated on in the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, it is in Brentano’s later epistemological writings that this idea is invoked in order to corroborate Brentano’s understanding of what grounds philosophical insight. The article concludes by comparing this account of the development of Brentano’s philosophy with the role Brentano’s Anti-Kantianism is assumed to play according to Haller’s conception of ‘Austrian philosophy’. I will argue that, while the Neurath-Haller thesis is not mistaken, there is a subtler story to be told about the role Kant played in Austria as well as about the reasons why Austrian philosophy “spared itself the interlude with Kant”.

This chapter argues that the human perspective is not fully reducible – that is, that something would indeed be lost in the absence of the human perspective. It shows that epistemic subjectivity itself is an irreducible, ineliminable feature of the human standpoint. Subjectivity goes along with substantiality, and to be an epistemic subject is to be a substance with a mind. In E2p13, Spinoza identifies the mind's object with the body, thereby specifying where the multiplicity of epistemic subjects comes from – how, that is, individual epistemic subjects are identified and differentiated. The chapter looks at how the three kinds of knowledge relate to the notions of epistemic subjectivity. These include: imaginative knowledge; reason, or knowledge from common notions; and intuitive knowledge. Imaginative knowledge works straightforwardly on the model of having ideas in the thick sense.

In the past few years, the philosophical debate about self-knowledge has presented itself in a strikingly ‘pre-Kantian’ manner. Some have claimed that all sorts of self-knowledge can be analysed in the manner of the empiricists, or in terms of cognitive psychology (to use a more contemporary label), whereas defenders of rationalism have not grown tired of voicing the claim that there must be some sort of self-knowledge present and underlying, as it were, all sorts of epistemic self-concerns. It is against this background that this essay advocates what I would call a ‘Kantian’ strategy to approach the problem of self-knowledge. Taking Kant as a model, it argues, we may come to see how the recent divide between empiricism and rationalism may be overcome through a philosophical theory of self-knowledge.

Among the most peculiar traits of Kant’s critical philosophy is the contention that, while we can know our moral maxims and can thus reflect on our actions from a moral point of view, we cannot really know whether in a given situation our actions are actually motivated by those maxims. This means that, although we have a firm sense of our moral duties, we can never be certain whether some particular action of ours is done from duty or simply in accordance with it. This view is voiced in several of Kant’s writings. Most prominent is its appearance in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, but we also find it in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and in The Metaphysics of Morals, and it is even present in smaller writings such as “On a Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” or “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice”. It is against this background that I revisit Kant’s remarks on the lack of self-knowledge regarding the motives of our proper actions. I suggest a reading of Kant’s views on this issue in the light of a tradition reaching back to Plato, in which man’s self-relation is shaped in an irreducible way by both self-consciousness and self-ignorance.

In this paper, we reconstruct the development of Spinoza’s theory of judgment against the backdrop of the development of his political views. In this context we also look at the difference between Descartes’ meta-act theory of judgment, which Spinoza criticises, and his own all-inclusive approach. By “meta-act theory” we understand the claim that content and judgment about the truth of the content are metaphysically really distinct mental items. By an “all-inclusive theory” we understand the claim that judgment and content constitute only one mental act. We show further how the core intuitions of this all-inclusive theory are developed by Spinoza in an increasingly radical manner and how the practical implications of his all-inclusive theory come to the fore in the Theological-Political Treatise: given that content and act are not really distinct, it is metaphysically impossible that human subjects can give up their ability to judge, which is why Spinoza can plausibly contend that everybody has an inalienable right to form their own judgment.

In the past few years, the philosophical debate about self-knowledge has presented itself in a strikingly ‘pre-Kantian’ fashion. Some claimed that all sorts of self-knowledge can be analyzed in the manner of the empiricists, or in terms of cognitive psychology, whereas defenders of rationalism have not grown tired of voicing the claim that there must be some sort of self-knowledge present and underlying, as it were, all sorts of epistemic self-concern. It is against this background that this paper advocates what I would call a ‘Kantian’ strategy to approach the problem of self-knowledge. Taking Kant as a model, it argues, we may come to see how the current divide between empiricism and rationalism may be overcome in philosophical theorizing about self-knowledge.

How can the conception of man in Spinoza’s metaphysical principles and concepts put forward in parts one and two of the Ethics be reconciled with the orientation towards the human good in Spinoza’s views on ethics and politics? This article sets out to dispel this tension by ascribing a kind of existentialism to Spinoza. This existentialism is characterised neither by an emphasis on human mortality, nor by the invocation of the idea of human possibility. Instead, Spinozistic existentialism uses a wholly positive notion of the finitude of human existence, and it is from this idea that the notion of humanity is derived. While this existentialist interpretation of Spinozism requires us to refrain from interpreting Spinoza’s famous conatus doctrine in essentialist terms, it does not deny that this notion is used by Spinoza to defend his incremental naturalism. It rather indicates that, in contrast to the existentialist approaches of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, Spinoza’s version of existentialism is not opposed to naturalism. The article concludes with the dual hypothesis that inherent in Spinoza’s rationalism is the notion of man’s having access to the fundamental properties of being, namely the intelligibility and perfection of all beings, and that that can be experienced in shared human emotional experiences.