Ursula Renz

This chapter argues that the human perspective is not fully reducible – that is, that something would indeed be lost in the absence of the human perspective. It shows that epistemic subjectivity itself is an irreducible, ineliminable feature of the human standpoint. Subjectivity goes along with substantiality, and to be an epistemic subject is to be a substance with a mind. In E2p13, Spinoza identifies the mind's object with the body, thereby specifying where the multiplicity of epistemic subjects comes from – how, that is, individual epistemic subjects are identified and differentiated. The chapter looks at how the three kinds of knowledge relate to the notions of epistemic subjectivity. These include: imaginative knowledge; reason, or knowledge from common notions; and intuitive knowledge. Imaginative knowledge works straightforwardly on the model of having ideas in the thick sense.

Among the most peculiar traits of Kant’s critical philosophy is the contention that, while we can know our moral maxims and can thus reflect on our actions from a moral point of view, we cannot really know whether in a given situation our actions are actually motivated by those maxims. This means that, although we have a firm sense of our moral duties, we can never be certain whether some particular action of ours is done from duty or simply in accordance with it. This view is voiced in several of Kant’s writings. Most prominent is its appearance in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, but we also find it in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and in The Metaphysics of Morals, and it is even present in smaller writings such as “On a Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” or “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice”. It is against this background that I revisit Kant’s remarks on the lack of self-knowledge regarding the motives of our proper actions. I suggest a reading of Kant’s views on this issue in the light of a tradition reaching back to Plato, in which man’s self-relation is shaped in an irreducible way by both self-consciousness and self-ignorance.

In this paper, we reconstruct the development of Spinoza’s theory of judgment against the backdrop of the development of his political views. In this context we also look at the difference between Descartes’ meta-act theory of judgment, which Spinoza criticises, and his own all-inclusive approach. By “meta-act theory” we understand the claim that content and judgment about the truth of the content are metaphysically really distinct mental items. By an “all-inclusive theory” we understand the claim that judgment and content constitute only one mental act. We show further how the core intuitions of this all-inclusive theory are developed by Spinoza in an increasingly radical manner and how the practical implications of his all-inclusive theory come to the fore in the Theological-Political Treatise: given that content and act are not really distinct, it is metaphysically impossible that human subjects can give up their ability to judge, which is why Spinoza can plausibly contend that everybody has an inalienable right to form their own judgment.

In the past few years, the philosophical debate about self-knowledge has presented itself in a strikingly ‘pre-Kantian’ fashion. Some claimed that all sorts of self-knowledge can be analyzed in the manner of the empiricists, or in terms of cognitive psychology, whereas defenders of rationalism have not grown tired of voicing the claim that there must be some sort of self-knowledge present and underlying, as it were, all sorts of epistemic self-concern. It is against this background that this paper advocates what I would call a ‘Kantian’ strategy to approach the problem of self-knowledge. Taking Kant as a model, it argues, we may come to see how the current divide between empiricism and rationalism may be overcome in philosophical theorizing about self-knowledge.

Comment la conception de l’homme impliquée dans les notions et principes métaphysiques de la première et de la deuxième partie de l’Éthique peut-elle être conciliée avec le rôle que l’orientation vers le bien de l’homme joue dans la pensée éthique et politique de Spinoza? L’article suivant propose de dissoudre cette tension en attribuant à Spinoza une sorte d’existentialisme. Or, cet existentialisme n’est caractérisé ni par une réflexion sur la mortalité humaine, ni par l’invocation de la notion des possibilités humaines. En revanche, l’existentialisme spinoziste fait usage d’une notion tout à fait positive de la finitude humaine, et c’est de cette dernière idée que dérive la notion d’humanité. Cette lecture existentialiste du spinozisme exige que nous renoncions à toute interprétation de la doctrine du conatus dans des termes essentialistes. Mais elle ne conteste pas que la notion de conatus soit utilisée par Spinoza pour défendre son naturalisme. Contrairement aux approches existentialistes de Jean-Paul Sartre ou Martin Heidegger, l’existentialisme spinoziste ne s’oppose pas au naturalisme. L’article énonce finalement la double thèse que (1) le rationalisme spinoziste implique l’affirmation que l’homme peut accéder aux propriétés fondamentales de l’être, à savoir l’intelligibilité et la perfection de tout étant, et que (2) cela peut être éprouvé dans des expériences humaines affectives communes.

This paper examines the way in which Cassirer implicitly commented on current issues in his historical studies, proposing a case study on his monograph The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, published in November 1932. It begins with a general overview of a few famous and a few neglected instances of Cassirer’s position-takings through historical studies, before discussing briefly the context in which this monograph was written and examining how the Enlightenment is presented in the monograph from 1932. The paper claims that at the centre of Cassirer’s engagement with the Enlightenment was his concern with the autonomy of reason. The way in which Cassirer elaborated on this further shows that his defense of the Enlightenment was not just directed against the threats of totalitarian politics, but also had the aim of clarifying the nature of philosophy and its place in culture. This, however, the paper concludes, does not refute the notion that Cassirer was concerned with current politics when writing The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. The point is rather that he comprehended philosophy as political just in virtue of its exercising the autonomy that characterizes reason.

Depuis quelques années, la philosophie s’intéresse de plus en plus à la notion de forme de vie humaine. D’un côté, quelques philosophes ont avancé que pour décrire l’existence d’un être vivant, il faut faire référence à la forme de vie caractéristique de son espèce. D’un autre côté, plusieurs penseurs ont soutenu la thèse qu’on ne peut pas évaluer une pratique sans la comprendre dans le contexte de la forme de vie humaine. Le présent article discute la question de savoir si l’idée de la forme de vie humaine est présente chez Spinoza. Prenant comme point de départ l’idée d’un bien de l’homme, invoquée dans les Pensées métaphysiques et dans des passages parallèles de l’Éthique, l’article soutient que la pensée philosophique de Spinoza admet effectivement la notion d’espèce humaine. S’appuyant ensuite sur un examen de sa correspondance avec Henry Oldenburg, l’article défend une interprétation de la doctrine spinoziste des modalités qui permet d’admettre des capacités humaines non actualisées. L’article interroge alors la relation entre la doctrine spinoziste des modalités et la doctrine du conatus, avant de s’achever sur quelques remarques sur le rôle de la culture dans le développement de la forme de vie humaine. En somme, l’article défend l’idée que l’on peut trouver la notion de forme de vie humaine chez Spinoza et il montre dans quelle mesure cette notion est importante pour certains aspects de la pensée spinoziste.

In the introduction to the Leviathan, Hobbes famously defends the anthropological point of departure of his theory of the state by invoking the Delphic injunction ‘Know thyself!’ of which he presents a peculiar reading thereafter. In this paper, I present a reading of the anthropology of the Leviathan that takes this move seriously. In appealing to Delphic injunction, Hobbes wanted to prompt a particular way of reading his anthropology for which it is crucial that the reader relate the presented anthropological views to his self-conception. The anthropology of the Leviathan is thus a kind of manual for a certain kind of self-reflection by which the reader's self-knowledge is to be improved. Furthermore, I will argue that Hobbes' interpretation of the Delphic injunction illuminates several theoretical issues relevant to the epistemology of that kind of ‘self-knowledge’ that was demanded by the Delphic injunction. While Hobbes does not solve all the epistemological problems related with the ideal appealed to by this inscription, he does provide some interesting insights into some general requirements that any epistemological account of Socratic self-knowledge has to meet.