On Categorial Illusion in Kant

 

By Dennis Schulting

In this notice, I want to address a remark that Anil Gomes (2018) makes, in an excellent critique of my earlier book Kant’s Radical Subjectivism (Schulting 2017), with respect to the modal nature of the claim about the application of categories to objects, namely the belief—in my account—that ‘the destination claim [is] one about the objects of experience necessarily exemplifying the categories’. Gomes writes that this

seems too strong since, on the face of it, it looks like there can be categorial illusions: cases where the objects of judgement, experience, or perception seem to exemplify some category or other but actually fail to do so. (2018:101)

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New Work on Kant (IV): Kant on Persons and Agency

 

ERIC WATKINS (ed.) | Kant on Persons and Agency | Cambridge University Press 2018

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By Christian Onof 

This volume of papers features an excellent line-up of many among the most influential contemporary Kant scholars so that the reader is entitled to expect much food for thought. And this expectation is fully met with a selection of thought-provoking papers around the topics of the person and agency, therefore dealing both with Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy. The types of paper range from careful analyses of Kantian texts (from the Critical period) to developments of ideas that have a Kantian origin, but sometimes move well beyond that. This mixture is welcome: Kant’s philosophy is kept alive through new interpretations of the letter of his philosophy and through drawing upon insights taken from his writings and developing them in directions that may be said to be in the spirit of Kant’s writings but clearly go beyond its letter. Of course, this raises the question of how far beyond the letter one can go while remaining within the spirit of the Critical Kant, as we shall see.

Reply to Jessica Leech and Andrew Stephenson

 

NICHOLAS STANG | Kant’s Modal Metaphysics | Oxford University Press 2016

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By Nicholas Stang 

Let me begin by thanking Andrew Stephenson and Jessica Leech for such detailed, insightful, and thought-provoking comments. Writing a book is a lonely business, and one is never sure that the product of one’s labours will find a receptive audience, much less a sympathetic one. In Andrew and Jessica, Kant’s Modal Metaphysics (henceforth KMM) has found both and I thank them warmly for it.

New Work on Hegel (III): Hegel and Derrida

 

JOHANNES-GEORG SCHÜLEIN | Metaphysik und ihre Kritik bei Hegel und Derrida | Meiner Verlag 2016

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By Jacco Verburgt 

This fine monograph, which is the trade edition of a slightly revised Ph.D. dissertation (Ruhr-Universität Bochum 2014), addresses and assesses important issues and desiderata relating to the Hegel-Derrida debate, not least of which is a rehabilitation of Hegel’s essentially metaphysics-critical approach (cf. e.g. p. 366). Notably, it reconstructs some grave limitations of Derrida’s reading of Hegel and ultimately even uncovers a downright failing (a Scheitern, not only a Fehlen of an actual or full implementation) of the deconstruction strategy when it comes to interpreting Hegel (to be sure, not necessarily in the case of other philosophers or authors), as Derrida himself seems to acknowledge, at least partially or implicitly, according to Schülein (cf. e.g. pp. 297ff.). That is to say, the failing of Derrida’s earlier strategy (roughly from the 1950s and 1960s) of an immanent-deconstructive, delimiting or destabilising, critique of Hegel’s allegedly closed and totalitarian (as well as bourgeois) metaphysical system—in Derrida’s well-known sense of a metaphysics of presence, which is largely inspired by the later Heidegger (cf. esp. pp. 45–62, 67–8 [note 80], and 365), and its so-called onto-theological and phonocentric character—would eventually provoke a turn, especially in Glas (a text from 1974), to what one might call an external-realist confrontation with Hegel (cf. esp. pp. 250, 363 and 369).