Jared Kemling

The Cultural Power of Personal Objects seeks to understand the value and efficacy of objects, places, and times that take on cultural power and reverence to such a degree that they are treated (whether metaphorically or actually) as "persons," or as objects with "personality"—they are living objects. Featuring both historical and theoretical sections, the volume details examples of this practice, including the wampum of certain Native American tribes, the tsukumogami of Japan, the sacred keris knives of Java, the personality of seagoing ships, the ritual objects of Hinduism and Ancient Egypt, and more. The theoretical contributions aim to provide context for the existence and experience of personal objects, drawing from a variety of disciplines. Offering a variety of new philosophical perspectives on the theme, while grounding the discussion in a historical context, The Cultural Power of Personal Objects broadens and reinvigorates our understanding of cultural meaning and experience.

Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms fails to account properly for personalized experiences; it cannot provide a basis for understanding how some experiences become personal while others do not. Our account of personalized experience will remain lacking as long as we follow Cassirer in viewing personalized experience as a non-necessary feature of other symbolic forms such as myth, language, religion, or art; instead it must be understood that personalized experience is grounded in an independent symbolic activity as basic to human cultural life as language, myth, or objectivating knowledge. This basic personalizing symbolic function is best understood as that same activity articulated in Gabriel Marcel's phenomenological descriptions of the act of "creative fidelity." Once this relationship has been grasped, it becomes possible to articulate a symbolic form of personalized experience by describing the unique way in which creative fidelity (as the personalizing symbolic function) spatializes, temporalizes, numeralizes (and as a result subjectifies/objectifies) its own distinct horizon of meaning (or: cultural world). The result will be a symbolic form, as Cassirer understands it, that is as far-reaching and fundamental to human cultural life as the three symbolic forms elaborated in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. By articulating this fourth symbolic form, we will have taken a significant step toward Cassirer's ultimate goal of a robust philosophical anthropology.

This work argues that an opportunity is being missed by the philosophical tradition, especially within philosophy of culture: an opportunity not just to philosophize “about” culture, but to embody culture and put it into practice. It argues that philosophy itself is a powerful form of culture – one that needs to be better understood and more explicitly practiced. To highlight this blind spot, the work introduces a distinction between “philosophy of culture,” and “cultural philosophy.” Cultural philosophy should be better explored by the discipline for two reasons: a clearer understanding of cultural philosophy would benefit all practitioners of philosophy; also, a philosopher of culture who engages cultural philosophy will be a more effective philosopher of culture. The goal of the project is to highlight the possibility of (and value in) a “cultural philosophy,” and to serve as something of a prolegomenon toward further work in that area.

In this paper, I attempt to reorient the "problem of fear," into the question of the "mystery of anxiety": in doing so, I focus on Gabriel Marcel's text "Being and Having: An Existential Diary," where he wrestles with the questions of fear and anxiety. Once we give up on the "problem" of fear and orient ourselves along lines of Being (anxiety) rather than Having (fear), we can approach the question meaningfully: from this perspective, we begin to see the importance of both Hope and Fidelity as not "solutions" to the "problem of fear," but rather as ways of Being that transcend the anxiety of a fundamentally finite and mortal creature. This paper is meant only to sketch an outline of the way in which we might transcend anxiety through Fidelity: there is more work required to fully flesh out this movement of transcendence.

The following paper seeks to examine whether, from the standpoint of a transcendental idealist, it is possible to have a phenomenology that can adequately disclose the nature and activity of person. First I establish that symbols are intuitive concretizations of the activity of person/Geist, and thus symbols are available to phenom- enological description. Then I raise the question of whether reflective judgment can be understood as a part of a possible phenomenology. I come to the conclusion that yes, the process of reflective judgment is phenomenologically available; reflective judgment offers an experience of “what it is like to be a person”. However, it is clear that reflective judgment must borrow a rule from phenomenal/determinate experience in order to imaginatively analogize the transcendental creativity of person. Thus, all that is available to phenomenology is an analogy of being person, and not person itself.

The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate two views that have been put forth regarding the logical structure of Peirce's putative transcendental deduction of his categories. Specifically, the paper asks the question: if Peirce is indeed invoking a transcendental method, should we understand such a "deduction" as an instance of prescision, of abduction, or of some other option? Both prescision and abduction have been offered as descriptions of Peirce's transcendental method, but it is not clear whether either of these structures is in fact transcendental, or whether either can be reduced to the other. It is my intention to make this debate (which has been latent...

As the title of the book indicates, Bernstein’s 2010 work The Pragmatic Turn is the common ground for this collection of twelve essays, with each contributor taking a theme from Bernstein’s volume and using it as a foundation to raise further issues concerning pragmatism after the “pragmatic turn.” Many essays also offer constructive criticism of Bernstein’s thought and positions, often suggesting possible alternatives. In a style reminiscent of the long-running Library of Living Philosophers series, Bernstein provides a short response to each essay, clarifying his thought in light of the points raised by the contributors. For those interested in Dewey specifically, rather than pragmatism more broadly, there are...