Karin Nisenbaum

This essay examines how the engagement with Spinoza that resulted from the pantheism controversy shaped the philosophical outlook of Karoline von Günderrode. I focus on her Spinozist view of human freedom and contend that she understands freedom as a form of self‐determination that does not require the capacity to do otherwise. Both Spinoza and Günderrode believe that we are free or self‐determined when we exist according to the necessity of our own nature. Yet in her dramas Günderrode raises an epistemic problem for this Spinozist view of freedom, namely, how do we know that we exist according to the necessity of our own nature? On Günderrode's view, possessing this kind of knowledge is a condition for the realization of freedom. Her plays and dramas explore the possibility of external and internal criteria for knowledge of our own freedom, but Günderrode ultimately favors a historical or narrative criterion. To know that they exist freely, individuals must be able to recognize the affinity of the present with the past and discern how their actions contribute to a developing historical process whose end is the vitalization of the earth.

In his famous essay, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” Kant argues that one is not allowed to lie, not even if a murderer comes to one’s door asking the whereabouts of their innocent victim who has taken refuge in one’s home. Many of Kant’s readers worry that his rigorism concerning the duty of truthfulness leaves us powerless in the face of evil. My aim in this paper is to reconstruct and offer a qualified defense of a Fichtean approach to the duty of truthfulness. I argue that, instead of leaving us powerless in the face of evil, the Fichtean approach gets at the root of evil. This is because Fichte’s prohibition against lying in his System of Ethics goes together with a perfectionist commitment to promote the greatest possible development of rational nature both in ourselves and in all other individuals.

abstract: This paper has two related aims. The first is to argue that Fichte's concept of freedom is perfectionist. By 'perfectionism,' I mean a moral theory according to which our good, ultimately, is realizing our true nature; Fichte also holds a perfectionist view of freedom, according to which we achieve freedom only to the extent that we succeed in making ourselves good or realizing our true nature. The second aim of this paper is to show how Fichte's perfectionist concept of freedom solves two problems confronting Kantian autonomy: the "paradox" of Kantian autonomy and the "dilemma" of post-Kantian autonomy. As I contend, Fichte's perfectionist concept of freedom avoids these two problems by enabling us to view self-determination as a form of self-causation, and by showing that we can be responsible for our immoral actions even if we are not fully free when we perform them.

In the following paper I look at the body as a site where individual and communal normative structures come into view. Drawing from the work of Sigmund Freud and Paul Ricoeur, and through an analysis of the compulsion to repeat, I offer an understanding of psychoanalysis as a practice whereby we decipher the body’s call to configure our individual lives more humanly. This involves the interruption of the compulsion to repeat and the transition from an instinctual and organic development, towards an ‘Erotic life.’ I also broaden the scope of the analysis and investigate the kinds of communal structures or bonds that the psychoanalytic concept of an ‘Erotic drive’ calls for. To this end, I introduce Walter Benjamin’s studies on the relation between different temporal and political structures

It is no longer disputed that Salomon Maimon decisively influenced the emergence and development of post-Kantian German Idealism. Yet there is far less consensus on how to interpret most aspects of Maimon’s thought, including the nature and philosophical significance of his skepticism and the reasons that compelled him to challenge Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories or pure concepts of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. In this article, I argue that the two ideas that define Fichte’s doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre—the necessity of a common derivation of all a priori knowledge from one principle, and the idea that philosophy should be based on freedom—can be traced back to Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy. I also argue that, by emphasizing the regulative role of the ideas of pure reason in Kant’s account of empirical cognition, Maimon enables a rereading of the argumentative structure of the first Critique that reveals the relationship between sensibility, understanding, and reason. This rereading of the first Critique shows that Kant has the resources to address Maimon’s key challenges, but it also puts pressure on his discursive account of human cognition.

In this book, Dennis Vanden Auweele explores the tension between pessimism and optimism in Kant's ethics and philosophy of religion. Going against a long tradition of interpretation that groups Kant together with other classic philosophers of hope, he aims to highlight the latent pessimism in Kant's works, and show that the full-blown pessimism of post-Kantian philosophers such as Schopenhauer can be read as the attempt to "think Kant's project through to its natural end". What Vanden Auweele means by 'pessimism' is not the Schopenhaurean view that it would have been better not to exist, but the view that "human nature does not navigate toward the good, that autonomy has but a relatively meager...

Kant developed a distinctive method of philosophical argumentation, the method of transcendental argumentation, which continues to have contemporary philosophical promise. Yet there is considerable disagreement among Kant's interpreters concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. On ambitious interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to establish certain necessary features of the world from the conditions of our thinking about or experiencing the world; they are world-directed. On modest interpretations, transcendental arguments aim to show that certain beliefs have a special status that renders them invulnerable to skeptical doubts; they are belief-directed. This paper brings Kierkegaard's thesis of the “subjectivity of truth” to bear on these questions concerning the aim of transcendental arguments. I focus on Kant's argument for the postulate of God's existence in his Critique of Practical Reason and show that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us construe the argument as both belief and world directed. Yet I also argue that Kierkegaard's thesis of the subjectivity of truth can help us understand the source of our dissatisfaction with Kant's transcendental arguments: It can help us understand that dissatisfaction as an expression of what Stanley Cavell calls the “cover of skepticism,” the conversion of metaphysical finitude into intellectual lack.