Gregory Floyd

I argue that Jean-Louis Chrétien’s account of beauty and Bernard Lonergan’s account of art and aesthetic experience complement one another and, when taken together, offer an illuminating philosophical account of the ontological, ethical, intellectual, and transcendent aspects of art and aesthetic experience. Chrétien draws out with particular perspicacity the ontological dimension of aesthetic experience as that of ‘call and response’. His analysis of the evocative character of beauty helps thematise a foundation which is implied but not thematised in Lonergan’s account. The latter’s reflection on art and aesthetic experience is characterised by its distinct emphasis on the ethical, intellectual, and transcendental aspects of aesthetic experience. He introduces a set of distinctions that draw out these aspects with force and clarity.

This paper examines Kant’s metaphor of reason as an island in the Critique of Pure Reason in order to suggest an unresolved tension at the heart of his critical project, which is addressed in a different way in his Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. That tension is between the transcendental circumscription of pure reason and reason’s on persistent pretensions to transcendence. Kant’s model of transcendence is contrasted with two phenomenological models that attempt to articulate the desiderative nature of reason. Yet, precisely on this question of motivation differences between Husserl and Heidegger become clear and instructive. The paper concludes, in view of these differences, with a proposal for conceiving of transcendence in non-topological categories, but instead as the activity of questioning.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America by Jonathan StrassfeldGregory FloydSTRASSFELD, Jonathan. Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 363 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $30.00Recent years have witnessed an increase in scholarly attention paid to the intellectual history and development of socalled Continental philosophy. That attention has turned to not only key figures and philosophical schools but also to the historical factors, social conditions, and institutions that have aided, hindered, and otherwise directed its itinerary across the European continent and eventual migration to the “new world.” Edward Baring’s Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019) is a well-researched and intricate account of the European development of phenomenology’s growth from “a provincial philosophy of southwest Germany into a movement that spanned Europe.” Baring argues convincingly that European networks of Catholic scholars and institutions were essential to the dissemination of the ideas and works of early phenomenologists, and his work offers a salutary reappraisal of neoscholasticism as a vibrant, internally diverse, and philosophically sophisticated movement attentive to and engaged in the dominant questions of its day. The various contributors to the 2020 volume, The Catholic Reception of Continental Philosophy in North America (University of Toronto Press) take up the story as it begins again amid American and Canadian Catholic institutions of higher learning. They offer an extended account of the historical, institutional, and conceptual relationships between Catholicism and Continental philosophy on North American soil up to the present day.To these, Jonathan Strassfeld’s Inventing Philosophy’s Other: Phenomenology in America offers a necessary complement. Strassfeld tells another and essential side of the story focused on eleven “elite” universities—Harvard in particular—and the way in which American scholars in the first half of the century and European émigrés in the second half set the conditions for an at times fruitful at times fraught engagement with Continental thought in America. Key to that analysis is the contention that in the first half of the twentieth century, Harvard and other leading institutions that would later become bastions of analytic philosophy were the first to take interest in phenomenology sending scholars to study with its founders and engaging a tradition that they [End Page 366] “encountered as a work in progress” and as possessing natural points of contact with various strands of American philosophy such as new realism, critical realism, pragmatism, and the philosophy of language.Strassfeld then documents the reversal of that early philosophical pluralism and the foreclosure of the possibility of philosophical integration due to the rapid ascendancy of analytic philosophy between 1950 and 1969, showing that foreclosure to be neither a necessary outcome nor the triumph of a superior philosophical approach: “[B]oth the intra-university mandates of new interdisciplinary formations and changing inter-university dynamics of hiring and promotion after World War II transformed the ecosystem of philosophical reproduction catalyzing the rise of analysis and decline of humanistic pluralism in American philosophy.”The consequence of the decrease in faculty specializing in phenomenological and Continental areas from elite institutions was twofold. First, Continental philosophy increasingly “relied on a network of departments and organizations that were defined by the resistance to the practice and influence of mainstream American philosophy.” Second, it became of increasing interest to nonphilosophical disciplines such as sociology, psychology, geography, architecture, and anthropology, which sought to transcend culturally ascendant forms of scientific reductivism. In both ways, Strassfeld argues, Continental thought became “an unassimilated other” within the American academy.In telling this story, Inventing Philosophy’s Other uses a distinctive alphanumeric structure. One set of numbered chapters introduces the essential doctrines and early figures of phenomenology and chronicles its varied transpositions on American soil. These numbered chapters are punctuated by a set of shorter alphabetic chapters that present portraits of American-born or expatriated phenomenologists. The dual structure of the work tells the story of phenomenology in America along two axes: an intellectual history of ideas, institutions, and social practices as well as an interpenetrating history of constitutive figures.A major strength of Strassfeld’s work is that he brings a historian’s care...

This paper examines Kant’s metaphor of reason as an island in the Critique of Pure Reasonin order to suggest an unresolved tension at the heart of his critical project, which is addressed in a different way in his Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. That tension is between the transcendental circumscription of pure reason and reason’s on persistent pretensions to transcendence. Kant’s model of transcendence is contrasted with two phenomenological models that attempt to articulate the desiderative nature of reason. Yet, precisely on this question of motivation differences between Husserl and Heidegger become clear and instructive. The paper concludes, in view of these differences, with a proposal for conceiving of transcendence in non-topological categories, but instead as the activity of questioning. Keywords: Transcendence, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, Phenomenology.