Category Archives: Philosophical

Revisiting Hegel’s radicalism

Leave a reply

Hegel_portrait45In recent decades, the heart of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik––his enterprise of calling into the question and systematically substantiating all of thinking’s basic concepts and rules––has struck many commentators as outdated if not outright misguided.

In an effort to make Hegel’s thought relevant, Hegel studies have largely focused on the aspects of Hegel’s philosophy that are most compatible with our current philosophical climate. In contrast, however, my approach embraces Hegel’s philosophical radicalism. In my paper, I will first sketch out Hegel’s place within a broader tradition of what I term radical philosophy. Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. The indeterminable boundary between Sanity and Madness in Hegel and Freud
  2. The relationship between law, moral and morality in Hegel’s Philosophy of Law
  3. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  4. Husserl’s theory of signs in the first Logical Investigation

Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense

Leave a reply

Kant_IMy aim in this paper is to analyze Kant’s account, during the early 1760s, of the relation between judgment, distinctness of representations and ‘inner sense’. I will argue that Kant takes over and radically transforms important strands of Wolff’s thought on the same issues. Indeed, both Kant and Wolff define judgment with a view to the act of the mind performed therein.

Kant however rejects Wolff’s attempt to explain the possibility of judgment through the gradual accumulation of lower cognitive acts (such as attention, comparison, reflection). Judgment, Kant argues, is a specific way of relating Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. Kant’s epigones: Otto Liebmann’s metaphysical rejection of the ‘thing-in-itself’
  2. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  3. Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze
  4. Husserl’s theory of signs in the first Logical Investigation

Husserl’s theory of signs in the first Logical Investigation

Leave a reply

Edmund-Husserl1The Logical Investigations is Husserl’s “breakthrough work”, which established the concepts and themes which he would go on to analyze throughout the rest of his career. Those Investigations start with an examination of the function of signs in expression. The goal of this paper is to briefly explicate the fundamentals of that theory.

To expedite this process, we will examine three relationships between different acts that are executed during the experience of expression. Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. On Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenological Psychology
  2. The Noema Debate
  3. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  4. The indeterminable boundary between Sanity and Madness in Hegel and Freud

On Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenological Psychology

3 Replies

Edmund-Husserl1This paper primarily takes the form of an introduction to and a clarification of Husserl’s account of “phenomenological psychology”. This is a discipline that comes very close to phenomenology, and whose boundaries often seem to blur with those of phenomenology (and Husserl’s way of presenting such an account raises, rather than clarifying confusions).

Specifically, in this paper, I disambiguate between three different meanings of “phenomenological psychology” that, I claim, can be found in Husserl’s works. Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. A Phenomenology of Torture
  2. Husserl’s theory of signs in the first Logical Investigation
  3. The Noema Debate
  4. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense

Heidegger’s Reading(s) of Immanuel Kant

Leave a reply

martinHaedegerBoth the notes of his 1927/8 Winter Seminar Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) show that Heidegger’s phe-nomenological destruction of the Critique of Pure Reason ultimately serves a constructive purpose, namely, to uncover Kant’s tacit insights about the human condition. The most compelling passages from Phenomenological Interpretation and Kant and the Problem of Meta-physics deal, respectively, with those about the transcendental deduction of the categories of understanding and transcendental imagination in the Critique. Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  2. Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze
  3. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense
  4. Revisiting Hegel’s radicalism

A Phenomenology of Torture

7 Replies

depressionMoving from a phenomenology of the body, I will argue that torture must be understood in light of the lived-body, its projects and its pain. Drawing on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Drew Leder, and Elizabeth Scarry, I will first develop a phenomenological description of the body in pain. This will include a description of the intersubjective life-world of the body in pain.

Using examples both from the past (Dante, judicial torture, ancient warfare and Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. On Husserl’s Idea of Phenomenological Psychology
  2. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  3. Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze
  4. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense

Kant’s epigones: Otto Liebmann’s metaphysical rejection of the ‘thing-in-itself’

2 Replies

LiebmannOne of the particular claims of Kant’s transcendental idealism is that we can cognize, with the help of our transcendental (mental) apparatus, the data of the experience that we perceive through senses.

This ‘Copernican revolution’ in philosophy provoked animosities and doubts among the disciples of Kant, many of them bringing into question the stake of a proper approach and method of interpreting Kant’s philosophy.

Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense
  2. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  3. Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze
  4. Revisiting Hegel’s radicalism

Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze

1 Reply

Gilles-Deleuze1The body without organs is one of the more elusive concepts belonging to the philosophical vocabulary of Gilles Deleuze. One way to conceive of the body without organs is by means of the aesthetic approach to the theory of sensation that Deleuze provides in his study of the artwork of the Irish painter Francis Bacon.

In this paper I will show how the body without organs works and, subsequently, how the body without organs testifies to the vital Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  2. A Phenomenology of Torture
  3. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense
  4. Revisiting Hegel’s radicalism

Human Suffering as Neuroscience Problem

2 Replies

sufferIn this paper, we consider such a phenomenon as suffering. In a general sense, suffering is physical or moral pain, anguish. In the life of many people there is a whole tendency to constant suffering. Let us examine in more detail the causes and origin of the strategy of suffering. From the point of view of physiology and medicine, an individual can constantly experience a state of suffering due to congenital or previously acquired disruption of the work of the nervous system, the genetic conditionality of the malfunctioning of neurotransmitters. Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  2. Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze
  3. A Phenomenology of Torture
  4. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense

Philosophical ideas of American romanticism in 19th century

2 Replies

American romanticismAmerican romanticism was formed in the 19th century, as a kind of paradigm of philosophical, literary and scientific views. This unique phenomenon of world culture had a tremendous impact on the aesthetical, ethical, political and philosophical ideas of the second half of the 19th century. Continue reading →

Related posts:

  1. Aristotle and Informal Logic
  2. Thinking the primacy of the Body with Gilles Deleuze
  3. A Phenomenology of Torture
  4. Kant and Wolff on judgment, distinctness of representations and inner sense