Roey Reichert

I examine the profound influence of Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology on Ernest Gellner’s social theory. Exploring how Kant’s attempt to preserve human agency in the face of mechanical explanations of nature shaped Gellner’s approach to the social sciences, I trace certain key concepts from Kant through to Gellner, including the “exception,” disenchantment, and mechanical dehumanization. I analyze Gellner’s expansion of the Kantian critique, in particular his historicization of Kant’s universal claims and his concept of the “Rubber Cage.” The essay concludes by considering the ongoing relevance of this Kantian-Gellnerian perspective for the contemporary social sciences.

The fifth chapter of _Experience Embodied_ is devoted to Herder’s theory of cognition and the epistemic merits of the capacity for ‘sympathy’, or ‘empathy’ – what Herder calls _Einfühlung_, and which Waldow renders more accurately as ‘affective immersion’. I situate Waldow’s reading of Herder as a member of the epistemological tradition within the debate on Herder’s relationship to the Enlightenment. Waldow’s reading, I contend, is congruent with the view of Herder as an Enlightenment, rather than anti-Enlightenment, figure. I focus on what Waldow calls ‘the problem of the conceivability of difference’ (Waldow 2020, 185) and how she charts Herder’s proposed method of Einfühlung and the need for ‘affective immersion’ to address this problem. However, I also identify three potential problems, which Waldow does not address, that can arise when _Einfühlung_is taken too far: the first is that it may lead to relativism, and thus to incoherence; the second is reductionism, which can eliminate, rather than draw attention to, difference – thereby achieving the opposite goal; while the third is that relying solely on _Einfühlung_as a method can lead us into error, as it is speculative and lacks an external truth criterion.