In his first work entitled “Thoughts Concerning the True Measure of Vital Forces” Kant made an attempt to solve one of the most famous disputes of 17th-century philosophy. Though Kant’s solution is incorrect, it shows the way the philosopher usually solved philosophical problems. In his later works, written during the critical period, Kant came back to the problems he dealt with in his first essay, but the most important continuation of it can be found in the unpublished notes being part of so-called Opus postumum.
This paper pursues transformation of Kant's definition of the category sublime in post-Kantian aesthetic reflexion. Finding this line of thinking (Herder, Schelling) allows not only present relevant approaches to the whole history of the aesthetic category, but also to show the platform for new thinking not only in aesthetic discourse, but wherever the sublime enter today at the core of interest (art, ethics, etc.).
The gravity of freedom, as one of the main features and privileges of Kant’s genius, can be verified by the fact, according to which his artistic creation reveals itself within the so-called Beautiful, Free Art. Despite all that, the work originates from reflections, which present themselves as reasons to reassess the main themes and characteristics in Kant’s aesthetic theory. In the paper, I deal with the analysis of a narrowed down understanding of genius; i.e. by interpreting freedom as ‘solely’ the liberation from rules of art creation and at the same time, in respect to Kant's conception of disinterestedness, from all outside-art objectives. In respect of concepts of genius specified by Kant, we can ask ourselves about the issue at hand; is it even possible for a genius to be unsatisfied with the mechanics of his own genius, in other words him being a genius per se.
The article deals with Kant´s concept of logic on the background of the historical developments of logic taking into account particularly Leibniz´s influence. A special attention is paid to its formality emphasized by Kant and inspired by Leibniz. It is the form that is determining the possibility of logic´s development. Although Kant broke later with neo-Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics, some of Leibniz´s traces are still identifiable in his logic (formality quantification, the subject of logic).
The background of the author’s thoughts is a radical critique of art and science by J. J. Rousseau and genuine aesthetic and moral disposition of a human being outlined by I. Kant in his pre-critic works. According to the author, the art of twentieth century reveals (comments, extremely magnifies, contemplates, designates, creates metaphors, asks the questions) problems of a “nature of a contemporary man”. The author illustrates possible consequences of Rousseau’s critique of an art and science in the present and the shifts of natural aesthetic dispositions, as named by Kant in the contemporary art.
The traditional theme of mimesis as a fundamental factor in art, art theory, and aesthetics has undergone many changes of meaning, ups and downs. The present article traces the development of the idea from the point of view of the understanding and appreciation of natural beauty. An inquiry into the relationship between art and reality, that is, mimesis, and the question of the order, reveals two lines of development and their point of bifurcation in Kant and Hegel. The Hegelian line heads towards structuralism, semiotics, semiology and linguistics, to a reduction of orders into standardized norms and epistemes, where the auto-referentiality of art is accented. The Kantian notion of mimesis as 'imitation', which understands the aesthetic idea of the natural order enables the transcendence of episteme and the presentation of the order in the state of becoming. This approach restores the true nature of art.
Kant’s way of developing anthropology differs from that characteristic of the scientific spirit of the 18th century. Besides omitting the natural determination of humans he composes anthropology as a doctrine with practical intentions. He defines pragmatic anthropology as a reflected self-formation, whose objective is not a theory of a human being (“school anthropology” in Kant’s terminology), but rather a set of practical instructions for approaching oneself as well as the others. Thus, drawing to some extent on Michel Foucault, Kant’s anthropology can be understood as a modern conception of the art of living. Kant’s Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view is not just a purposeless summary of his numerous lectures on anthropology; it is rather a sort of vade-mecum or a prescriptive writing focused on purposeful practice.
The main subject of the fifteenth paragraph of the chapter of Critique of Pure Reason entitled “Transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of understanding” is the concept of connection. It is interesting that in the chapter Kant used the word “connection” thirty two times in the edition from 1787, whereas in the first edition published in 1781 the word occurs five times only. The idea of the present paper is to show the importance of the concept of connection as conjunction by showing that it cannot be used as a synonym of synthesis. The article is intended as an introduction to further and more detailed study on the concept of connection.
The article consists of two parts. The first is the historical reconstruction of the fortunes of Kant’s private copy of the Scripture. The book was lost during the Second World War and the information about Kant’s notes made on its margins come only from commentators’ studies. The second part contains a short comparison of the main assumptions and rules of moral interpretation of the Scripture’s text. The rules can be traced in two works of Kant: Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and The Conflicts of the Faculties.
The work contains a concise of I. Kant’s views on the problem of the laws of nature and the theleological principle presented in this context, which Kant proposes in the character of a regulative methodological postulate. The analysis of fundamental philosophical notions (the law of nature, necessity, causality, purpose) carried out from the position of an extreme aprioristic rationalism leads Kant to the conclusion about the basic impossibility of educing the conception of purpose (in relation to nature) from aprioristic transcendental laws, ie. such laws which the theoretical reason imposes to the nature by necessity. However, the fact of a total functioning of an organism does not fit, according to Kant, into the frames of a mechanically understood causality. Kant tries to solve this problem choosing the way of conclusion by analogy and finally he suggests to introduce into the living nature a specific causal relation in which the purposes constitute a particular kind of causes and results at the same time. That conception oscillates between mechanicism and theological finalism, and the fitting of a science system into the frames of aprioristic categories does not permit a finally decide about the supremacy of one or the other way of seeing the world. However, nevertheless, the perceiving and stressing of the peculiarity of organic symptoms, the formulation of the postulate about their unreductability to the law of a mechanical type constitute unquestionable and great merit of the author of the Criticism of the Judgment Authority. The idea of the totality of organism, though involved in subjective idealistic non consequencies of Kant’s conceptions has in the given historical period all features of a deep and progressive thought, outpacing and inspiring several later research ideas, both in philosophy and in natural science.
The essay deals with the question of the beauty of the bodily form, the notion of perfection of the human species and its moral expression as well as with other problems connected with this aspect of aesthetic experience. In the XVIII century the problems were undertaken particularly by Friedrich Schiller, who on the grounds of Kantian aesthetics tried to show the difference between the free and dependant beauty, and between the natural beauty and fine arts, which led him to establish the notions of grace and of dignity as the aesthetic expression of human spirit. The essay is based chiefly on the following works: Schiller’s On Grace and Dignity and Critic of Judgment and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime by Kant.
The attempts to justify aesthetic judgments, searching the conditions of their validity as well as effords of grasping the essence of beauty have inspired the works of many philosophers. In the present article two philosophical traditions are compared: empiricism of Edmund Burke and transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In this way different consequences of the basic presumptions underlying the aesthetic theories can be easily found. The aim of the article is to stress the differences. More specifically the different questions to which both philosophers sought proper answers are pointed: Burke’s question of the objective qualities causing the experience of beauty and sublimity and Kantian problem of possibility of the purely aesthetical judgment. Also the difference of the concept of taste is examined. Finally the Burke’s aesthetics is criticised on the grounds of Kant’s concept of the reflexive power of judgment.
The present paper raises the problem of the Kantian influences in the philosophy of Bierdiaiev. I want to suggest that it is difficult to call Bierdiaiev thought as the Kantian or neo-Kantian. Although many of Bierdiaiev works make reference to the philosophy of Kant, nevertheless not as a systematic presentation, but as a creative transformation of Kantianism.
The article shows the critical analysis of the analytics of the sublime from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, presented by V. Basch. In his work Essai critique sur l’esthetique de Kant Basch tries to prove Kantian division between the mathematical and dynamically sublime superfluous. In his interpretation of the problem also other aspects of Kant’s theory of the sublime (such as referring to the idea of the infinity and his description of the process of ‘grasping and uniting’ in the experience of mathematical sublime) are needless. On the grounds of his criticism Basch gives his own theory of the sublime. According to it the very nature is sublime, and the glorification of human nature is given not in calling to the ideas of reason, but in the uniting with nature.
The article compares concepts of genius in esthetic reflections of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. According to Kant’s views included mainly in Critique of Judgment a brilliant man creates work of arts inspired by the nature. In Schopenhauer philosophy, though, nature and perception do not play such important role in creation. More crucial is human being and his imagination. A genius creates each of his work from the beginning. The most perfect of them are created through inspiration. They emerge without intention or contemplation. Genius, according to Schopenhauer, does not seek inspiration as it come to him itself.
Kant’s general conception on logic is outlined in an opuscule entitled “Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit”, before the appearance of “Kritik”. His attitude towards Aristotelian logic is more accurately outlined in “The Critique of Pure Reason”. In Kant’s conception general logic is the science of the intellect’s rules in general. Transcendental logic is the science of a priori elements of thought. Only transcendental logic is justified logic. Transcendental logic requires first order quantificational logic with identity as a general logic.
In the “absolute philosophy” of Hoene Wroński, which he also terms “Messianism” (he is a creator of this notion) we encounter fourfold inspirations resulting from Kant’s works. Two of them originate from the first Critique – dealing with the problem of the dualism of being and thought, and the antinomies of reason. The other originate from the second Critique and concern the question of how practical reason shows the way in which the third antinomy of theoretical reason can be solved. Finally the last inspiration stems from the Kantian philosophy of history in which Wroński found the conception of a goal for the development of humanity, which is civil society governed by universal law and the federation of republican states.
In Kantian philosophical system transcendental theology is a part of cognition of pre-being educed only from transcendental notions. Nevertheless any attempts of speculative cognition of pre-being are futile. The value of the transcendental theology is thus merely negative as it shows the bounds of theoretical use of the reason. The idea of the pre-being gains its reality only in the practical use of the reason. In this way transcendental theology becomes the first premise of religion.
En s’inspirant de l’approche de Natalie Depraz qui defini la position théorique de Husserl tardif comme «l’empirisme transcendental», je propose retrouver aussi dans la philosophie de Emmanuel Levinas une forme specifique du transcendentalisme, transcendentalisme de genese – différente de l’apriorisme transcendental de Kant. Je demontre que – en dépit de l’apparence – on peut interpreter certaines couches de la réalité ou certains phénoménes ou encore événements que Levinas soumet à l’analyse – telles que «il y a», «la mort», «le feminin», «la fecondité», «la jouissance» et «le travail – la demeure» – comme les conditions empirico-transcendentales de la genese du sujet mur et susceptible de nouer «l’intrigue éthique». Je montre ainsi combine Levinas doit aux méthodes classiques de la phénoménologie. Cependant je demontre aussi que ni la transcendence de l’Infini qui se devoile dans «l’épiphanie du visage», ni cette figure du sujet qui est décrite dans la dernière période de Levinas, notamment «le soi» – le sujet dechiré de l’interieur par la diachronie propre a lui, le sujet an – archique, indicible dans un langage prédicatif – ne peuvent plus remplir les functions transcendentales. En fin j’essai de demontrer que la perspective transcendentale chez Levinas trouve ses limitations et qu’elle est remplacée dans la dernière période par une sorte de dialectique apophatique.
Firstly, the contents of Hume’s Dialogues of Natural Religion had no principal influence on Kant’s critique of physico-theology in Critique of Pure Reason. Secondly, Kant recognizes the falshood of Hume’s conviction that critique of natural theology annihilates “the religious hypothesis”. Thirdly, according to Kant, the same arguments which discredit the critique of natural theology expressed by Hume make “Epicurus thesis” more probable.
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