Marco Costantini

This article explores Adorno’s reflections on animality as a central motif in his critique of Enlightenment. Far from being a mere figure of otherness, animality appears in Adorno’s work as a repressed dimension of spirit that continuously resurfaces, exposing the limits of human self-understanding. Through a critical reconstruction of Adorno’s dialectic of spirit and nature, the article shows how the repression of animal resemblance shapes philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Particular attention is given to art and music as privileged spaces in which the memory of nature and the likeness to animals are preserved, offering a fragile image of reconciliation and a utopian anticipation of non-dominating life.

This paper explores significant shifts in Kant’s moral thought during the years 1762-1763, focusing on the transition from an analytic to an aesthetic approach to morality. Through an examination of "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" and "Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality", the study highlights Kant’s evolving methodology in understanding moral principles. Departing from the analytic emphasis on cognitive and conceptual clarity, Kant embraces an aesthetic perspective that prioritizes feeling as a means of accessing universal moral obligations. The paper investigates the challenges of applying analytic methods to morality, including the problem of particularised duties and the tension between justice and emotional impulses such as sympathy and complaisance. By analysing Kant’s reflections on the sublime and the beautiful, the paper elucidates how Kant’s aesthetic turn provides a resolution to the limitations of his earlier analytic framework.

In this article, I go against some interpretations of the “Träume eines Geistersehers” that read this work as the outcome of a profound crisis in Kant’s thought, triggered by the reading of Swedenborg and ending with the complete abandonment of his entire philosophical production. To do so, I highlight the continuity, on the methodological level, between the “Träume” and the texts of the 1760s that precede it, in particular with the “Deutlichkeit”. Having clarified some of the principles of the analytical method developed by Kant in the latter text of 1762, especially the role played by language in determining the content of the concept, I show how, in the “Träume”, Kant employs this method for analyzing the concept of spirit. Nevertheless, I take into account the specific epistemology adopted by Kant in the “Träume” and the effect it has on the relationship between method and metaphysics, the reconfiguration of which can be observed in the pages of the “Träume”. In contrast to the narrative that paints Kant as skeptical about metaphysics, I thus show how metaphysics was rather subject to a conceptual transformation that prepares the outcomes of Kant’s later thought.

In this essay, Karl Philipp Moritz seeks to demonstrate how a psychological analysis of language can clarify the deeper meaning behind the use of certain linguistic expressions. Specifically, Moritz focuses on impersonal verbs (in German, constructed with the pronoun ‘es’) and argues that these verbs express states of mind – sensations and thoughts – that the subject passively undergoes and, thus, cannot trace back to their own spontaneous mental activity. Moritz’s essay is a pivotal contribution to 18th-century linguistic thought, as it explores the relationship between how states of mind are expressed linguistically and the origin and nature of these states within the subject’s mental life.

In this contribution, we formulate the thesis that the methodological criticism against Wolff raised by Kant in his early writings is fully justified only if one grasps the different philosophies of language in the two authors. Depending on the function performed by linguistic usage in the analysis of concepts, a certain relationship between word, concept and thing is determined, which conditions the success of the analysis itself. Since Wolff abandons the use of language as soon as he has reached the degree of clarity and distinction of concepts, his definitions end up being inventions of meanings, constructions of concepts. This seems to be the reason why Kant emphasises that the only concepts that can be analysed are given, i.e. applied, concepts, and that words do not obtain their meaning except in linguistic use. In general, Kant appears to be averse to the technicalization of language, which distances the philosopher from the world that should be the object of their knowledge.

In this paper we will address the following points: (1) we will question the general belief that Kant’s philosophical approach has a geographical character, by showing how critical philosophy and physical geography establish, in their respective systems, two inverse relationships between the rational and the aesthetic form of spatiality; (2) we will argue that cartography still plays a role in the realization of a scientific system of cognition, and that this role consists in guiding this very realization; (3) lastly, we will develop the hypothesis that the map of the cognitive faculties, exemplified by the transcendental topic, is part of a device aimed at keeping the subject from the adventures of thought typical of dogmatism.

Prendendo in esame il decennio 1756-1766 del pensiero di Kant, il volume ritaglia un percorso che attraversa le tematiche filosofiche della cosmologia, della metodologia e dell’epistemologia. Un’analisi attenta dei testi mostra che tali tematiche non si susseguono semplicemente nell’orizzonte del pensiero di Kant, ma si intrecciano e si modificano, talvolta imponendo limiti le une alle altre. Dopo lo scritto accademico sulle monadi fisiche, Kant affronta la questione del metodo avviando una riforma della filosofia volta a liberare quest’ultima dai mondi-di-pensiero dei sistemi razionalistici. Il paradosso di una metafisica che diviene tanto più folle quanto più tenta di spiegare razionalmente la follia dei visionari è il tema al centro dell’ultimo scritto kantiano trattato in questo volume, del quale si dà un’interpretazione originale che tenta di risolvere molte delle difficoltà fino ad oggi sollevate dalla critica.

The contribution analyses the third part of the "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte", written by Kant in 1755, and focuses in particular on the ontological nexus that relate the activity of the soul to the material quality and to the morphology of the organic body. In the course of the analysis, the presence of two argumentative logics of Kant’s discourse will be highlighted. For the first one, the body is a limitation of the spirit, which would fully develop its cognitive faculties if it were not connected to any matter. For the second one, on the contrary, the connection with the body becomes a necessary condition for the spirit to be given the faculty to exercise its own power of thought.

The contribution consists of some fragments that examine, within the Kantian critical texts, in particular within the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" and the "Kritik der Urteilskraft", three different types of judgment, the aesthetic, the artistic and the teleological, in the attempt to bring out the fundamental connection that the judgment in general tightens with a certain concept of nature and a certain concept of technique, which cannot be traced to the universal mechanism defined by the pure understanding.

In this contribution, we first discuss the aspects of the analytic method conceived by Kant in the Deutlichkeit that differentiate it from the Wolffian method and relate it to the Newtonian method. Compared to the philosophical tradition, the task of analysing concepts appears profoundly changed. Since Kant aims philosophy towards the world, he considers concepts as something given and intends to discern their characteristic marks by observing their usual applications. Although Kant abandons any attempt to define concepts nominally, he still gives great relevance to words to the extent that concepts, according to him, acquire their meaning in the linguistic usage. We will also point out how for Kant the linguistic usage makes the analysis of concepts anything but easy and how a hermeneutic process is necessary for its completion. In distinguishing philosophical signs from mathematical signs, Kant provides the semiotic reasons that underlie his recourse to hermeneutics.

This contribution retraces the most significant moments of a debate that has seen researchers from different disciplinary areas reflect on schizophrenia, in particular on the symptom of thought insertion, with the conceptual tools of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. In the course of this report, some problematic aspects of the interpretations of the "Critique of Pure Reason" promoted in the aforementioned debate are highlighted. The last part of the contribution presents some considerations on the relationship between critical philosophy and madness.

This contribution consists of two parts. The first aims to clarify the structure of the nosology of psychopathologies that Kant proposes in the "Versuch über die Krankheiten des Kopfes". Such nosology consists of two series, arranged in ascending order, one relating to the social manifestations of madness, the other to its individual manifestations, which specifically concern the faculties of the soul. We will try to demonstrate the existence of a connection between these two series, and to illustrate how this occurs. The second part of the contribution, on the other hand, intends to question the thesis according to which Kant in his "Versuch" provided a social aetiology of psychopathologies. We will show, in spite of this thesis, how society creates conditions only for the manifestation of these pathologies, and not for their production, which must instead be sought in the body.