William P. Kiblinger

Kant’s critical philosophy responds in parallel ways to mysticism and speculative metaphysics. In doing so, he develops the distinction between brooding reason and healthy reason, the former causing excessive attention and abstraction that the latter must contain. Mystics and metaphysicians, according to Kant, exemplify such brooding reason. His regimen for maintaining healthy reason is not simply an operation of rational thought but itself an embodied activity as well, and these two activities intersect in the imagination. Although Kant’s work is often understood as wholly dismissive of mystical experience, I argue that his treatment of the religious imagination is fraught with ambiguity and can be most usefully understood as a technique for managing the incongruity of two types of religious imagination: the locative and the utopian.

Evolutionary theory is becoming an all-encompassing form of explanation in many branches of philosophy. However, emergence theory uses the concept of self-organization to support yet alter traditional evolutionary explanation. Biologist Stuart Kauffman suggests that the new science will need to tell stories, not simply as a heuristic device but as part of its fundamental task. This claim is reminiscent of C. S. Peirce’s criticism of the doctrine of necessity. Peirce’s suggestions reference Hegel, and this essay draws out this Hegelian background. In particular, it addresses the question of subjectivity and issues some Hegelian reminders so that such evolutionary and emergent theories will consider the implication of this research program on philosophy of mind. The essay focuses primarily on two post-Kantian, neo-Hegelian thinkers in contemporary philosophy who deal with this problem: John McDowell and Robert Brandom.

Developments in emergence theory and complexity science, when comprehended through the discussion of inner teleology in the post-Kantian philosophical tradition, disclose a possibility for understanding the biotechnological transformation that may mark the end of the era of humanism and the beginning of a "post-humanism." For a variety of reasons partly related to the peculiar circumstances of postwar Germany, the liberal tradition in continental philosophy and theology, especially in Germany, has allied itself with the resistance movement in the contest between logos and techne to define the nature and destiny of humanity. The terms of the debate and even many of its results, however, find their point of origin in some of the key figures of the idealist tradition. Further examination of this history, concentrating on its developing conception of the organism or animal as a reference point in situating the boundaries and position of humanism, reveals a prefigured mediating position that may help us better understand the nature of our time as well as provide a more measured response. ;In particular, Hegel's theory of the organism, which combines insights taken from Kant's notion of self-organization and Aristotle's energeia , sets the stage for Heidegger's clash with modernity. The battleground in this conflict between Heidegger's unusual humanism and the forces of anthropotechnology is the realm biopolitics. The resistance movement, whether it promotes a fundamental ontology or communicative ethics, retains an implicit teleology which hierarchically treats the human subject and nature in terms of an ethic of domination that must be resisted. The new perspective arising from complexity science reconceptualizes this teleology in ways anticipated by Hegel so that an ethic of cooperation can be understood to emerge in and through the coevolution of logos and techne