Search Results (93)

From the Christian heartland of Europe emerged the techno-scientific culture borne from the Enlightenment movement. Prior to this cultural outlook that severed culture from its foundational roots in religion, it was the case that religion was not only a crucial agent in the shaping of culture, but in many ways, the heart of culture. With secular rationality and its underscoring of the techno-scientific mindset, a growing privatization of religion has become the acceptable ethos of contemporary Western culture. Secularism, largely understood in terms of a naked public sphere, is increasingly perceived to be the only form of rationality that can guarantee societal cohesion and the democratic spirit. But as Ratzinger pointed out in his 1993 Hong Kong Address to the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops Conferences of Asia, this Western understanding of culture that is governed by a hermeneutic of suspicion towards religion, and which seeks to replace the heart of culture with autonomous reason a la Kant, ends up leaving culture in a winter land of existential frostiness. By depriving culture of its roots in the transcendental dimensions of human experience, much of the wisdom and riches that have been accumulated in the pre-techno-scientific cultures—regarding fundamental questions such as “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What happens when I die?”, “Does life make sense?”, “Do I have a destiny?” and more—are now left to the manufactured logic of the techno-scientific with its anthropological reductionism that fails to offer the big picture of the cultural outlook that did not construe the scientific and the technological as antithetical to religion. This essay seeks to unpack the arguments Ratzinger made in this Address at Hong Kong, with the hope that this theological exegesis of the Hong Kong lecture could once again offer an invitation to the world of the techno-scientific, the world of secular rationality, to open up to the world of faith, so that together, the breadth and depth of the human culture would once again flourish in its greatness. Full article

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) is widely known as a poet and sometimes described as a poet’s poet (Heidegger). However, more recent interpretations, undertaken by Dieter Henrich, Michael Franz and others, have shown that he was a genuine philosopher as well, who had an original conception of the relation between art, poetry and metaphysics, with neo-Platonic and theological roots. This paper reconstructs Hölderlin’s ideas and their relation to those of Kant and Fichte. Hölderlin emerges, on the interpretation offered here, as a metaphysician of life, a poet of the biosphere and as such most relevant to our present-day predicament. Full article

In Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, Hölderlin introduces two narrative planes: the description of action and the reflection (or memory) of past events. The transition between these points of view is facilitated by the extensive use of metaphor. This paper examines Hölderlin’s use of metaphorical language through Plato’s conception of beauty as a link between the sensible and intelligible worlds and Kant’s notion of the “aesthetic idea” as an imaginative representation that “occasions much thinking” (viel zu denken veranlasst). This analysis shows how both sources constitute the theoretical framework for the construction of a New Mythology, as outlined in Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. Full article

Denise Ferreira da Silva’s recent work, Unpayable Debt, makes a provocative intervention into current debates over and struggles for global justice in the wake of colonialism and in view of contemporary neo-colonial forces of extractive violence. Ferreira da Silva argues that only the return of the total value of the land and labor of the formerly enslaved and colonized would suffice to repay the debt owed to them by the global economy. Yet, such a debt is both unlimited in space and unrestricted in time, since that stolen land and expropriated labor are the very materiality of the global economy, past and present. For Ferreira da Silva, only a truly “raw materialist” apprehension of the scope of this debt, one which appreciates its elemental and cosmic composition, can enable decolonial justice to be conceived or achieved. In this paper, after outlining the arguments of Unpayable Debt, I elaborate Ferreira da Silva’s sense of the elemental stakes of global justice, extending and elaborating her thought through a reading of the recent afro-futurist film Neptune Frost (2021). Full article

After criticizing the three traditional proofs of divine existence in the first Critique, Kant fills this void with an apologetic argument based on his practical philosophy. However, this moral–religious project has long been charged with various inconsistencies, particularly regarding the tension between the demand for moral perfection and human limitation. There is even some indication that he becomes aware of these issues, as he later moves away from the vision of endless moral progress that holds his original project together. However, this revision does not resolve all the tensions, as the question of how imperfect humans can be well-pleasing to God remains. I argue that this predicament is a difficult-to-avoid feature of his project given how it interacts with his religious context of Lutheran Christianity. This is because he incorporates some of its elements (particularly its uncompromising moral standard) virtually intact while radically altering others (such as vicarious atonement and imputation of alien righteousness). However, this procedure undermines the coherence of the tradition he inherits because the elements he fully incorporates are meant to lead to the traditional doctrines he leaves behind. I conclude by reflecting on how theists who are sympathetic to Kant should lead his moral–religious project out of its current precarious predicament. Full article

This paper recounts the author’s reluctant journey of translating Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth into Japanese, a process that turned out to be a mix of philosophical tightrope walking and comedic pratfalls. Along the way, we meet Baumgarten, the original translator who coined the aesthetica nomenclature, Kant, who insists that there can be no such thing as a science of sensibility, and a parade of Japanese translators who took great artistic liberties in rendering an alien term into a complicated language formed by three layers of different writing systems. The author reflects on his coining of a new translation for “aesthetics” in Japanese—Kansei-Jutsu (“Sensibility-Art”)—a term that baffled publishers, thrilled a few cultural studies scholars, and may have earned a side-eye from beauty salons already using “estetikusu” for facials. The translation saga spirals into debates about what “aesthetics” even means, culminating in a bittersweet realisation: translation is less about getting it right and more about sparking delightful, sometimes ridiculous, new ways of thinking. By the end, aesthetics re-emerges as a celebration of difference, proving that even conflicts can create a strange and wonderful commons when approached with an openness to diverse sensibilities. Full article

Intelligent machines (IMs), which have demonstrated remarkable innovations over time, require adequate attention concerning the issue of their duty–rights split in our current society. Although we can remain optimistic about IMs’ societal role, we must still determine their legal-philosophical sense of accountability, as living data bits have begun to pervade our lives. At the heart of IMs are human characteristics used to self-optimize their practical abilities and broaden their societal impact. We used Kant’s philosophical requirements to investigate IMs’ moral dispositions, as the merging of humans with technology has overwhelmingly shaped psychological and corporeal agential capacities. In recognizing the continuous burden of human needs, important features regarding the inalienability of rights have increased the individuality of intelligent, nonliving beings, leading them to transition from questioning to defending their own rights. This issue has been recognized by paying attention to the rational capacities of humans and IMs, which have been connected in order to achieve a common goal. Through this teleological scheme, we formulate the concept of virtual dignity to determine the transition of inalienable rights from humans to machines, wherein the evolution of IMs is essentially imbued through consensuses and virtuous traits associated with human dignity. Full article

Kant’s philosophy of history is one of the best examples to trace the remains of certain theological concepts that emerged during the Christian tradition, which are secularized in order to shape a philosophical history. This process of secularization involves hidden causes through the weakening of the doctrinal truths of Christianism. These threats come from two antithetical poles whose attempts to demolish the Christian faith have been noticeable since its beginnings: Gnosticism and Ebionism. This article seeks to trace the influence of both doctrines in Kant’s philosophy of history. Based on his reinterpretation of certain theological concepts, it offers an adequate frame to understand the backgrounds that sustain Kant’s hope when regarding history. His great hesitation between an ultimate, intra-historical consummation and an infinite aspiration never fulfilled on Earth can be explained well from the opposite Ebionite and Gnostic perspectives. In conclusion, the article proposes that the tension that inspires Kant’s philosophy of history emerges from an unstable synthesis between Gnosticism and Ebionism. Full article

A central question within contemporary debates about the structure of self-love concerns the place and status of the other. Is self-love identical to, or at least vulnerable to, the accusation of self-absorption and narcissism? Whereas contemporary critiques of self-love argue self-love is in principle impossible, the present essay suggests that self-love can be integrated with the love of the other at an a priori level. This material a priori, distinct from the Kantian formal a priori, entails resources such as commitment to myself, to the other, and to us as relational unit, as well as to the enforcement of boundaries that protects against acts of injury and abuse instigated against that relational unit; I suggest such resources overcome the charge of narcissism levelled at the very idea of self-love. Prior to that, a brief contextual discussion of key moves about philosophical anthropology, focused on the concept of the monad in Leibniz, Husserl and its extreme repudiation in Jean-Luc Marion, is to be addressed. Finally I assess the intimate relationship between self-love and the love of the other inspired in large part by Augustine’s anthropology. Full article

Insofar as the caesura of tragic temporality and the movement of “tragic transport’” are said to be shaped by a tendency toward the “eccentric sphere of the dead” in Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Remarks on Oedipus”, the privileged position of this sphere within Hölderlin’s “Remarks” solicits further analysis of what this topos signifies within both Hölderlin’s poetological writings and his translation of Oedipus the King. How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” relate to Hölderlin’s formal descriptions of the caesura that lends tragic succession a certain equilibrium, and what is implied in the qualification of this region as an “eccentric sphere”? How does the “eccentric sphere of the dead” register in the language of Sophocles’ tragedy? And conversely, what does the language of Oedipus the King indicate concerning the constitution and parameters of the “spheres” of the living and the dead? These are the questions that will be pursued in this essay, beginning with the broader resonance of the terms to which Hölderlin takes recourse in his “Remarks”, and proceeding to the ways in which the limits of life and death are articulated in Sophocles’ drama and Hölderlin’s translation. Those elaborations of the “eccentric sphere of the dead” will, in turn, allow for a reinterpretation of the more formal determinations of “tragic transport” that Hölderlin offers. Full article

With 1600 titles Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. is the most academically published pope in Church history. His stature as a theologian is only comparable to that of Leo the Great or Gregory the Great. In an age that has lost an appreciation for the human being as a person, the peritus Ratzinger introduced at the Second Vatican Council the notion that divine revelation is ultimately identical with the Godman Jesus Christ. In his view, Jesus Christ, as a divine person with both divine and human natures, redeems the postmodern human being from solipsistic self-preoccupation and existentialist despair. Such is the result of a positivistic and rationalistic approach to the figure of Jesus Christ. At the beginning of the 21st century, Pope Benedict XVI inaugurated an epochal, personalist, and Christocentric shift by penning the Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, taking serious Kant’s critiques and writing thus the first “post-critical” Christology presented to postmodernity. Nowhere else does Ratzinger write so extensively on “the man from Nazareth”. Full article

In the Appendix to his dissertation, with respect to Kant, Marx provided an in-depth analysis of the ontological proof of the existence of God. Here, we explore this analysis in detail. Firstly, we argue that “faith” (Glaube) is the foundation of Marx’s interpretation of the ontological proof of God and its difference from that of Kant. On one hand, Marx’s understanding of the ontological argument can be called the “Realization of Belief” (RB). The object of faith is, for the believer, endowed with some kind of real power; that is to say, the object is real for the believer who has faith in it. This line of argument differs from the Kantian Hypostatization of Idea (HI), which attempts to prove the transcendental God as an a priori concept that implies itself as an empirical being or a posteriori phenomenon. On the other hand, “faith” was also the foundation upon which Marx based his interpretation of Kant. Subsequently, in the context of Marx’s dissertation, we clarify the connotations of “reality”, “belief”, and “faith”. “Reality” refers to objects exerting a real force that works on those with faith in their imagination while not necessarily entailing that the imagined object of belief is an empirical one. “Belief” refers either to an opinion (doxa) based on “faith” or to an idea without necessity in the sense of David Hume’s philosophy. As for “faith”, Marx uses this term in the Protestant sense, meaning obedience to the object one believes in, where obedience refers to the absence of self-righteousness. In a state of “faith”, the faithful one possesses “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Finally, on the basis of these two considerations, we reflect on the existing academic interpretations of the theme of this article and highlight some differences between these interpretations and the present article. We show that existing interpretations of Marx’s summary either conflate the two theories of the HI and RB or miss the importance of “faith” in Marx’s arguments. We conclude that Marx, at the time of his dissertation, interpreted the ontological argument by way of the RB, which was based on the concept of “faith”, and that his critical understanding of Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof was founded on the same interpretation. Full article

This article proposes an underappreciated value for traditional natural theology and its familiar arguments for the existence of God, without endorsing the soundness or the rational cogency of these arguments. Famously, Aquinas and Kant represent two extremes, with Aquinas endorsing some natural theology arguments for God’s existence and Kant opposing such arguments. This article recommends a moderating approach, on the grounds that while Aquinas is unduly optimistic here by the epistemic standards of many inquirers, Kant is too pessimistic regarding the heuristic value of the relevant natural theology arguments. The neglected heuristic value of these arguments, according to this article, is in their prompting in unique ways some challenging and fruitful questions for inquiry about God. The disputed natural theology arguments have not achieved anything near a consensus on their soundness or rational cogency, but they still can have significant heuristic value aside from their soundness or rational cogency. This article identifies the relevant fruitful questions and their theoretical importance for human inquiry about God. Ultimately, a heuristic interrogative approach to familiar arguments of natural theology gives these arguments a new role with resilient heuristic value for inquiry about God, even if they do not justify the belief that God exists. Such moderation, this article contends, is rationally defensible with regard to these arguments. Full article

This article offers a fresh exegesis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, focusing on his conceptualization of artwork as the reproduction of the thing’s general essence. Grounding the analysis in Heidegger’s revisit of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, this study explores Heidegger’s interpretation of a thing as a “composed homogeneity” that reveals inherent determinations of temporality and spatiality in the self-presence of beings as a phenomenon grasped within finite human cognition. This is inextricably linked to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, elucidating a cyclical human–thing dynamic integral to Heidegger’s ontology. Going deeper, I draw parallels between Kant’s “supersensible” realm and Heidegger’s “earth”, revealing a teleological (ethical) design manifested in art that captures the dual essence of Nature—using Kantian terminology, its purposiveness and contrapurposiveness—intersecting with Heidegger’s notion of the counter-essence of ἀλήθεια in relation to freedom. Finally, I show how the manifold aesthetic metamorphoses of this existential scheme within the existentiell ordinariness through nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, such as equipmentality, emerge as the everyday incarnation of this design. Full article

Philosophers often rely on sciences of their own time. This is especially true for scientists writing philosophical works. In the case of Ernst Mach, the scientific references are mainly to physics, physiology, evolutionary biology and—in a somewhat different manner—the new discipline of psychology. Like so many authors in the late 19th century, Mach had extreme confidence in the methods of the natural sciences. However, this trait, often called scientism or positivism, can easily be used in polemical accounts that obscure other aspects of Mach’s thought. Mach is well-known for both his analysis of sensations and his evolutionary conception of perception and knowledge. The tension between the ambition to clarify the empirical basis of perception on the one hand and the focus on the natural origins of human perception on the other hand is, however, considerable. A comparison of these two perspectives can contribute to an ontological understanding of experience that sheds new light on the much-discussed topic of sense data and at the same time clarifies the difference between experience and observation and the role of experimental science in this context. In some respects, Mach seems closer to William James than to his followers in the Vienna circle. The accusation of idealism made by Lenin in his influential critique of positivism overlooks the implications of this naturalist approach but offers the occasion to dwell on the ontological implications of something that can be called natural historicity. Comparisons with Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes and Kant situate the empiricist theory of perception. Full article