Kant's philosophy of the aesthetic and the philosophy of praxis

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Association for Economic and Social Analysis.This essay seeks to reconstruct the terms for a more productive engagement with Kant than is typical within contemporary academic cultural Marxism, which sees him as the cornerstone of a bourgeois model of the aesthetic. The essay argues that, in the Critique of Judgment, the aesthetic stands in as a substitute for the missing realm of human praxis. This argument is developed in relation to Kant's concept of reflective judgment that is in turn related to a methodological shift toward inductive and analogical procedures that help Kant overcome the dualisms of the first two Critiques. This reassessment of Kant's aesthetic is further clarified by comparing it with and offering a critique of Terry Eagleton's assessment of the Kantian aesthetic as synonymous with ideology

Rational a priori or Emotional a priori? Husserl and Scheler’s Criticisms of Kant Regarding the Foundation of Ethics

Based on the dispute between Protagoras and Socrates on the origin of ethics, one can ask the question of whether the principle of ethics is reason orfeeling/emotion, or whether ethics is grounded on reason or feeling/emotion. The development of Kant’s thoughts on ethics shows the tension between reason and feeling/emotion. In Kant’s final critical ethics, he held to a principle of “rational a priori.” On the one hand, this is presented as the rational a priori principle being the binding principle of judgment. On the other hand, it is presented as the doctrine of “rational fact” as the ultimate argument of his ethics. Husserl believed that Kant’s doctrine of a rational a priori totally disregarded the a priori essential laws of feeling. Like Husserl, Scheler criticized Kant’s doctrine of a rational a priori, and therefore developed his own theory of an “emotional a priori”. Both of them focused their critiques on the grounding level of ethics. Scheler, however, did not follow Husserl all the way, but criticized him and reflected on his thoughts. At last, he revealed the primary status of a phenomenological material ethics of value

MORALITY, LAW AND POLITICS IN THE PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY OF KANT\u27S LATE WORKS

U povezanosti s najnovijim pokušajima obnove Kantove filozofije, kako je prikazuju njeni suvremeni istraživači i zagovornici, kao što su Herbert Schnädelbach, Hans Lenk, Konrad Cramer, Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Volker Gerhardt, Karl-Otto Apel, Otfried Höffe i drugi čiji su radovi ove godine objavljeni pod naslovom Kant in der Diskussion der Moderne, autor ovoga rada pokušava analizom Kantove rasprave Über den Gemeinspruch: Das Mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis pokazati da kod kasnoga Kanta nije samo naznačen i razložen program praktične filozofije od filozofije morala i prava do politike i povijesti, nego da je on u tri poglavlja navedene rasprave već razrađen u smislu moderne liberalne teorije morala, državnog prava i međunarodnoga ili "svjetsko-građanskog" prava prema temeljnom principu Kantove praktične filozofije: "Was aus Vernunftgründen für dir Theorie gilt, das gilt auch für die Praxis".In the wake of the \u27Kant revival\u27, which has spawned a plethora of works on his philosophy by its contemporary interpreters and advocates such as Herbert Schnädelbach, Hans Lenk, Konrad Cramer, Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, Volker Gerhardt, Karl-Otto Apel, Otfried Höffe and others (whose studies were published this year under the title of Kant in der Diskussion der Moderne), the author tries to prove, by means of an analysis of Kant\u27s treatise Über den Gemeinspruch: Das Mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis that not only did Kant in his later works draft and expound the programme of practical philosophy of morality and right, politics and history, but that in the last three chapters of this work, this philosophy evolves into a modern liberal theory of morality, state law and international or "international civil" law built around the central principle of Kant\u27s practical philosophy: "Was aus Vernunftgründen für dir Theorie gilt, das gilt auch für die Praxis"

Beyond Representation: Philosophy And Poetic Imagination

The essays in this volume explore the ways in which traditional philosophical problems about self-knowledge, self-identity, and value have migrated into literature since the Romantic and Idealist periods. How do so-called literary works take up these problems in a new way? What conception of the subject is involved in this literary practice? How are the lines of demarcation between philosophy and literature problematized. The contributors examine these issues with reference both to Romantic and Idealist writers and to some of their subsequent literary and philosophical inheritors and revisers. Their essays offer a philosophical understanding of the roots and nature of contemporary literary and philosophical practice, and elaborate powerful and influential, but rarely decisively articulated, conceptions of the human subject and of valu

Minima Pedagogica: Education, Thinking and Experience in Adorno

This article attempts to think of thinking as the essence of critical education. While contemporary education tends to stress the conveying of knowledge and skills needed to succeed in present-day information society, the present article turns to the work of Theodor W. Adorno to develop alternative thinking about education, thinking, and the political significance of education for thinking. Adorno touched upon educational questions throughout his writings, with growing interest in the last ten years of his life. Education, he argues following Kant, must enable students to think for themselves and to break free of the authority of teachers, parents and other adults. Nevertheless, in his discussions of education Adorno says little about the nature of thinking, and the secondary literature on his educational theory addresses this question only cursorily. Important claims on the nature of thinking do appear elsewhere in Adorno's work. From his early writings up to Negative Dialectics, Adorno is preoccupied with thinking, sketching the outlines of critical-dialectical thought. Still, these reflections rarely touch upon educational questions, and the Adorno scholarship has yet to establish this link. Unlike studies which read Adorno's educational thought against the backdrop of the history of education and the German Bildung tradition, or in relation to art and aesthetics, the present article brings together Adorno's ideas on education and thinking in an attempt to contribute both to the Adorno scholarship and to the growing field of education for thinking

Between Theory and Praxis: Art as Negative Dialectics

This paper takes up Adorno’s aesthetics as a dialectic between philosophy and art. In doing so, I argue that art provides a unique way of mediating between theory and practice, between concepts and experience, and between subjectivity and objectivity, because in art these relations are flexible and left open to interpretation, which allows a form of thinking that can point beyond itself. Adorno thus uses reflection on art as a corrective for philosophy and its tendency towards ideolog

The philosophical significance of binary categories in Habermas’s discourse ethics

The philosophical programme associated with the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas has been widely discussed in the literature. The fact that Habermas has devoted a considerable part of his work to the elaboration of this philosophical programme indicates that discourse ethics can be regarded as a cornerstone of his communication-theoretic approach to society. In essence, Habermas conceives of discourse ethics as a philosophical framework which derives the coordinative power of social normativity from the discursive power of communicative rationality. Although there is an extensive literature on Habermas’s communication-theoretic account of society, almost no attention has been paid to the fact that the theoretical framework which undergirds his discourse ethics is based on a number of binary conceptual divisions. It is the purpose of this paper to shed light on the philosophical significance of these binary categories in Habermas’s discourse ethics and thereby demonstrate that their complexity is indicative of the subject’s tension-laden immersion in social reality

Communicating Toward Personhood

Marshalling a mind-numbing array of data, Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, shows that on virtually every conceivable measure, civic participation, or what he refers to as “social capital,” is plummeting to levels not seen for almost 100 years. And we should care, Putnam argues, because connectivity is directly related to both individual and social wellbeing on a wide variety of measures. On the other hand, social capital of the “bonding kind” brings with it the ugly side effect of animosity toward outsiders. Given the increasing heterogeneity of our world, the goal therefore must be to enhance connectivity of the “bridging sort,” i.e., connecting across differences. This, in turn, requires that we first clarify what bridging communicative styles looks like. Examining communication as it might transpire in Kant’s kingdom of ends, through the perspective of Habermas’ “communicative action,” and within the scientific community, offers a compelling suggestion that there is a way of communicating such that, if adopted, one would come to view others as if they were persons, i.e., that a bridging communicative style facilitates a kind of bonding that sees through differences toward the commonality of personhood. This paper will briefly explore how communicating toward personhood might be promoted