Irmgard Scherer

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche.

KANT AND HEGEL FIND THEMSELVES ON SIMILAR PATHS toward their respective goals to give a total account of reality. They share a deep commitment to science, Wissenschaftlichkeit, and raise the question: Where does science begin? Similarly, they answer: It begins with sense knowledge yet it is not founded in the senses. This essay attempts to reflect on, with the aim of cautiously reassessing, the nonsensible, universal features of sense experience from an idealist perspective. A study of the “science of sensibility,” raised to new levels of interest in recent debates of how the mind works, seems to have lost nothing of its fascination, indeed urgency in contemporary discussions, in the Kant-Hegel scholarship, in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science as well as the natural and cognitive sciences in general.

Kant's theory of judgment establishes the conceptual framework for understanding the subtle relationships between the experimental scientist, the modern instrument, and nature's atomic particles. The principle of purposiveness which governs judgment has also a role in implicitly guiding modern experimental science. In Part 1 we explore Kant's philosophy of science as he shows how knowledge of material nature and unobservable entities is possible. In Part 2 we examine the way in which Kant's treatment of judgment, with its operating principle of purposiveness, enters into his critical project and underlies the possibility of rational science. In Part 3 we show that the centrality given to judgment in Kant's conception of science provides philosophical insight into the investigation of atomic substances in modern chemistry

Robert Greenberg offers an intricate, highly original reading of Kant’s first Critique on what constitutes the possibility of a priori knowledge. One of the book’s main features, ambitious in scope, is the author’s extensive polemic against mainstream Anglophone approaches to Kant’s position on a priori knowledge. Many of them have, according to Greenberg, fundamentally misunderstood Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism. In particular, Greenberg sees Peter Strawson’s epochmaking classic, The Bounds of Sense—An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a leitfaden for other similarly misguided interpretations. Most Anglo-American accounts hold that for Kant’s critical project to have any viability at all it cannot be taken as an attempt to show the possibility of a priori knowledge as such, but rather to spell out the conditions for empirical knowledge. Greenberg gives examples: Strawson believes that Kant’s transcendental idealism is unsustainable because the central “principle of significance” perishes from its own internal contradictions. Likewise, Henry Allison’s interpretations replace the dualism of transcendental idealism by a monism built around the empirical object. Greenberg faults other “ Customary Interpretations of Kant’s Ontology”, those of Karl Ameriks, Richard Aquila, Paul Guyer, Patricia Kitcher, among others, on grounds of having misread Kant’s ontology vis à vis his transcendental epistemology.

Janine Langan's Hegel and Mallarmé represents an analysis of Stéphane Mallarmé's pervasive, if "mysterious" Hegelianism which underlies, by the French symbolist's own admission, his total work. The author attempts to demystify the Hegelian substructure in Mallarmé by a careful examination and step-by-step description of the salient Hegelian elements. The latter task is accomplished by de voting a good part of the work to Mallarmé's longest poem "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard," which has at times been considered the "quintessence of unintelligibility," but which exemplifies a sustained, if covert, Hegelian-like structure and science-like system. Langan combines an instinct for comparative literature with an astuteness at recognizing philosophical implications to demonstrate the unmistakable affinity between the poet and the philosopher. In light of the reluctance of contemporary philosophers in general to venture into uncharted "foreign" territory of diverse disciplines, Langan's foray is particularly noteworthy.

This essay deals with a particularly recalcitrant problem in the history of ideas, that of irrationalism. It emerged to full consciousness in mid-eighteenth century thought. Irrationalism was a logical consequence of individualism which in turn was a direct outcome of the Cartesian self-reflective subject. In time these tendencies produced the "critical" Zeitgeist and the "epoch of taste" during which Kant began thinking about such matters. Like Alfred Bäumler, I argue that irrationalism could not have arisen in ancient or medieval philosophical discourse, as they both lacked a certain type of rationalism required as its conceptual antipode. Only after the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and the ensuing reason vs. passion debate acknowledging for the first time both human powers as equal contenders, did the specter of irrationalism arise and become a focus. Kant's revolution in thought produced "transcendental psychology" reconciling "pure" sensibility and "pure" reason and provided, I argue, the conceptual wherewithal to grant aesthetic feeling and irrationalism a philosophical niche.

In this paper I argue for the "incompleteness thesis" of Kant's General Metaphysics before completing a full analysis of the power of judgment which only occurred in the Critique of Judgment-Power. Kant scholars have argued that Kant's General Metaphysics was completed with the Critique of Pure Reason and the Third Critique added nothing significant to this quest. One of the issues in this paper is to understand Kant's various "transition problems" and their solution to unify knowledge under a metaphysics, all of which has implications for the natural and cognitive sciences even today.

This study focuses on Kant's attempt to find the link between feeling and cognition on a priori grounds in the three Critiques to make philosophical judgment possible. As such it treats the area of aesthetics and its formal principles. This work explores the enigma: How is it that Kant values the talent to judge more than understanding and reason; indeed the lack of it «no school can make good». Yet, even though Kant demonstrates how a priori synthetic judgments and a priori moral judgments are possible as particular pronouncements, he analyzes the power of judgment itself as an independent faculty only in the last Critique. The author argues that the aesthetic factor plays a recalcitrant, yet vital and necessary role in all human judging. Finding an adequate niche for feeling and its a priori principles becomes a key problem not just for Kant but for the entire philosophical enterprise.

This dissertation will explore a unique problem in Kant's critical philosophy, thus far not dealt with in the larger perspective it deserves, namely the possibility of judgment, particularly aesthetic judgment in the shadow of reason and understanding. Kant tells us in the Critique of Pure Reason that in the course of human conduct the power of judgment is more important than knowledge and reason , but how this is so he only comes to fully articulate in his culminating critical work, the Critique of Judgment. That judgment is a crucial focus in all three Critiques is indicated by the three guiding questions--how are a priori synthetic judgments possible?, how are moral judgments a priori possible? and how are aesthetic judgments a priori possible? The factor common to all is the demand for a priori status, i.e. what constitutes legitimate philosophical judgment in the three areas of human culture--science, morality and art. Assessing judgment in these areas turns up a peculiar, albeit recalcitrant, connection to the aesthetic component in human consciousness. Kant first confronts the link of judgment to feeling formally and critically in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique, then again in the second Critique concerning the relationship of "moral feeling" to the moral law. It is only in the third Critique that the aesthetic element in consciousness is fully integrated in Kant's critical system. ;My dissertation reconstructs Kant's attempt to link feeling and cognition and do so on a priori principles; it explores the crisis this represents for judgment in philosophical discourse. This study asks whether in the course of his Critiques Kant can be said to have solved the "crises of judgment" within the totality of his own system, and beyond that, to have found the answers of the aporiae of judgment in the human soul. Further one must ask: does Kant find a rational, that is philosophical solution to the problem of the irrational posed in mid-eighteenth century thought, which is essentially a problem of aesthetics, i.e. of individual taste which becomes that of critique and judgment? ;My claim is that Kant's answer lies in his unique but often obscured vision of reason's "architectonic" nature which finds in the Critique of Judgment its final solution. The architectonic vision assigns judgment-power, a "secret power" no longer, the task to reconcile simultaneous contradictory truths, for example to bring together in one consciousness the sensible and the supersensible, the conditioned and the unconditioned, and to generally "untie the knot of knowledge" by means of a theory of judgment.

I argue that once one holds (as Kant does) that the mind is equipped with innate, pre-existing, i.e. a priori structures, one can ask (as materialists or empiricists would), Is there an identifiable source of such structures and what does it imply? Already Schopenhauer, Moses Mendelssohn and others have taken that route of argument, without fully drawing the implications. In this paper I attempt to do so, posing the query: Is Kant's very explicit separation of the transcendent from the transcendental necessary in his critical system? I try to answer from various perspectives.