The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds


Book Description

The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds represents a new wave of interest in 'the metaphysical Kant'. In recent decades Kant scholars have increasingly become skeptical of interpreting Kant as a philosopher who wished to truly "leave metaphysics behind". The contributors to this volume share a common commitment to the idea that Kant's philosophy cannot be properly understood without careful attention to its metaphysical presuppositions and, in particular, to how those metaphysical presuppositions are compatible with Kant's critique of more "dogmatic" forms of metaphysical thought. The authors approach Kant's thought from a wide variety of different perspectives - emphasizing not just the familiar Leibnizian background to Kant's metaphysics, but also its broadly Aristotelian underpinnings and its relationship with metaphysical themes in post-Kantian German Idealism. Similarly, although most of the essays in this volume relate in some way to the familiar question of how best to interpret Kant's transcendental idealism, they also deal with a wide range of other topics, including Kant's modal metaphysics, his views on the continuum, his epistemology of the a priori, and the foundations of his "metaethical" views.







Plotinus on Consciousness


Book Description

Plotinus is the first Greek philosopher to hold a systematic theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple layers of experience: different layers of consciousness occur in different levels of self. This layering of higher modes of consciousness on lower ones provides human beings with a rich experiential world, and enables human beings to draw on their own experience to investigate their true self and the nature of reality. This involves a robust notion of subjectivity. However, it is a notion of subjectivity that is unique to Plotinus, and remarkably different from the Post-Cartesian tradition. Behind the plurality of terms Plotinus uses to express consciousness, and behind the plurality of entities to which Plotinus attributes consciousness (such as the divine souls and the hypostases), lies a theory of human consciousness. It is a Platonist theory shaped by engagement with rival schools of ancient thought.




Brill's Companion to German Platonism


Book Description

For six centuries, Plato has held German philosophy in his grip. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism examines how German thinkers have interpreted Plato and how in turn he has decisively influenced their thought. Under the editorship of Alan Kim, this companion gathers the work of scholars from four continents, writing on figures from Cusanus and Leibniz to Husserl and Heidegger. Taken together, their contributions reveal a characteristic pattern of “transcendental” interpretations of the mind’s relation to the Platonic Forms. In addition, the volume examines the importance that the dialogue form itself has assumed since the nineteenth century, with essays on Schleiermacher, the Tübingen School, and Gadamer. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism presents both Plato and his German interpreters in a fascinating new light.




Plotinus on Self


Book Description

Plotinus, the founder of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy, conceptualises two different notions of self (or 'us'): the corporeal and the rational. Personality and imperfection mark the former, while goodness and a striving for understanding mark the latter. In this text, Dr Remes grounds the two selfhoods in deep-seated Platonic ontological commitments, following their manifestations, interrelations and sometimes uneasy coexistence in philosophical psychology, emotional therapy and ethics. Plotinus' interest lies in what it means for a human being to be a temporal and a corporeal thing, yet capable of abstract and impartial reasoning, of self-government and perhaps even invulnerability. The book argues that this involves a philosophically problematic rupture within humanity which is, however, alleviated by the psychological similarities and points of contact between the two aspects of the self. The purpose of life is the cultivation of the latter aspect, the true self.




Kant's Theory of Action


Book Description

The theory of action underlying Immanuel Kant's ethical theory is the subject of this book. What 'maxims' are, and how we act on maxims, are explained here in light of both the historical context of Kant's thought, and his classroom lectures on psychology and ethics. Arguing against the current of much recent scholarship, Richard McCarty makes a strong case for interpreting Kant as having embraced psychological determinism, a version of the 'belief-desire model' of human motivation, and a literal, 'two-worlds' metaphysics. On this interpretation, actions in the sensible world are always effects of prior psychological causes. Their explaining causal laws are the maxims of agents' characters. And agents act freely if, acting also in an intelligible world, what they do there results in their having the characters they have here, in the sensible world. McCarty additionally shows how this interpretation is fruitful for solving familiar problems perennially plaguing Kant's moral psychology.




The Concept of World from Kant to Derrida


Book Description

In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engaging with current issues in politics and ecology. He focuses on the work of five principal thinkers: Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Derrida, all of whom attempt to establish new grounds for seeing the world as a whole. Gaston presents a critique of the self-evident use of the concept of world in philosophy and asks whether one can move beyond the need for a world-like vantage point to maintain a concept of world. From Kant to the present day this concept has been a problem for philosophy and it remains to be seen if we need a new Copernican revolution when it comes to the concept of world.




Aesthetics After Metaphysics


Book Description

This book focuses on a dimension of art which the philosophical tradition (from Plato to Hegel and even Adorno) has consistently overlooked, such was its commitment – explicit or implicit – to mimesis and the metaphysics of truth it presupposes. De Beistegui refers to this dimension, which unfolds outside the space that stretches between the sensible and the supersensible – the space of metaphysics itself – as the hypersensible and show how the operation of art to which it corresponds is best described as metaphorical. The movement of the book, then, is from the classical or metaphysical aesthetics of mimesis (Part One) to the aesthetics of the hypersensible and metaphor (Part Two). Against much of the history of aesthetics and the metaphysical discourse on art, he argues that the philosophical value of art doesn’t consist in its ability to bridge the space between the sensible and the supersensible, or the image and the Idea, and reveal the sensible as proto-conceptual, but to open up a different sense of the sensible. His aim, then, is to shift the place and role that philosophy attributes to art.




Kant's Conception of Freedom


Book Description

Although a good deal has been written about Kant's conception of free will in recent years, there has been no serious attempt to examine in detail the development of his views on the topic. This book endeavours to remedy the situation by tracing Kant's thoughts on free will from his earliest discussions of it in the 1750s through to his last accounts in the 1790s. This developmental approach is of interest for at least two reasons. First, it shows that the path that led Kant to view freedom as a transcendental power that is both radically distinct from and compatible with the causality of nature was a winding one. Second, it indicates that, despite the variety of views of free will that Kant held at various times, the concept occupied a central place in his thought, because it was the point of union between his theoretical and practical philosophy.




Kant on Moral Autonomy


Book Description

This book explores the central importance Kant's concept of autonomy for contemporary moral thought and modern philosophy.