The Historicity of the A Priori (original) (raw)

Moral Theory and Moral Motivation in Dilthey’s Critique of Historical Reason

Idealistic Studies, 2017

Dilthey’s moral writings have received scant attention over the years, perhaps due to his apparent tendency toward relativism. This essay offers a unified look at Dilthey’s moral writings in the context of his Kantian-styled “Critique of Historical Reason.” I present the Dilthey of the moral writings as an observer of reason in the spirit of Kant, watching practical reason devolve into error when it applies itself beyond the bounds of possible experience. Drawing on moral writings from across Dilthey’s corpus, I retrace Dilthey’s argument that moral theories from Kantianism and utilitarianism to natural law theory suffer significant motivational problems because of the way they transcend the “synthesis” of moral perception. Dilthey’s argument suggests that abstract moral theory is always bound to seem unmotivating and unreal from the standpoint of lived experience, and perhaps that, to avoid this, moral philosophy should confine itself to more situated, case-specific judgments.

Law and Structure in Dilthey's Philosophy of History

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2021

This paper interprets Dilthey's treatment of history and historical science through his engagement with Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. It focuses on Dilthey's account of the possibility of objectivity in the Geisteswissenschaften. It finds in Dilthey a view of history as a law-governed, dynamical structure expressing the totality of human life, cast in a reworked Hegelian notion of objective spirit. The aim of historical thought is to understand the unity of this structure to the greatest extent possible, and thereby to understand lived experience itself. Dilthey's epistemological standpoint recommends beginning with concrete studies in the special human sciences, and working toward a more general representation of the regularities and patterns in the historical record.

The Voyage of Human Reason in and beyond Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason

Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2020

The Copernican Revolution had meant for modern Europe surer navigation, bolder voyages and wilder discoveries. With the declaration of independence of America in 1781 and the publication of The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant in the same year, the age of Enlightenment defined itself as an age of coming of age and of daring to know. This essay tries to draw out the peculiar enlightenment ethos of a youth against youth through Kant’s depiction of the voyage of human reason in the First Critique. It will do so by examining the four-fold sense of objects, the island of truth surrounded by illusion, amphibolic insularity, the mirror of schema and the “No Further!” of the Pillars of Hercules. Interrogating the dual sense of “limit” as both infinitizing, transgressively de-territorializing and yet at the same time self-delimiting, self-critiquingly re-territorializing, this essay argues for a hermeneutic vantage point to comprehend Kant as the unwilling mariner who by way of the transcendental as-if attempted to gain a certain spectatorship, a particular possibility of seeing - at a shore already and increasingly lost to the European and global humanity of centuries to come.

Self-Reflection, Interpretation, and Historical Life in Dilthey (page proofs)

Recent Contributions to Dilthey’s Philosophy of the Human Sciences, 2011

Diverging from the dominant Neo-Kantian and Positivist epistemologies of his era, Dilthey’s works engaged and articulated the import of the historical for reflection (Besinnung) and knowledge (Wissen). Pursuing a double strategy, Dilthey's writings enact historical research with a philosophical intent while interpreting philosophy in relation to its historical referential contexts. Philosophy is not historical in being lost in the plural, the particular, the relative, and the contingent, as Dilthey's critics contend, but by experientially and self-reflectively encountering and interpreting the present through its lived expressions and objectifications and in its practical interests and needs. Philosophy is both historical and systematic for Dilthey in being informed by and responding to its times, and the questions that concern a generation, and by reflectively proceeding from empirical and factical conditions to concepts.

The Critique of Historical Reason and the Challenge of Historicism

Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, 2022

This article examines Wilhelm Dilthey's project of a critique of historical reason and the reproach of historicism addressed by Heinrich Rickert. Through a comparative analysis of their respective attempts to establish a philosophical grounding for the human sciences, this article demonstrates that Dilthey and Rickert, despite their disagreement, converge toward a productive reinterpretation of the crisis of historicism and pave the way for a reconfiguration of the relationship between philosophy and history. The article focuses on three aspects of the historicist view: the importance of the particular, the historically situated character of the knowing subject, and the primacy of historical consciousness. Résumé Dans cet article, nous examinons le projet d'une critique de la raison historique mené par Wilhelm Dilthey et l'accusation d'historicisme portée contre lui par Heinrich Rickert. En comparant leurs tentatives respectives d'offrir un fondement philosophique aux sciences humaines, nous montrons que Dilthey et Rickert, en dépit de leurs divergences, convergent vers une réinterprétation productive de l'historicisme et conduisent à une reconfiguration de la relation entre philosophie et histoire. Cet article analyse trois implications théoriques et pratiques de l'historicisme : la mise en valeur du particulier, le caractère historiquement situé du sujet connaissant et la primauté de la conscience historique.

The Place and Meaning of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781) in the legacy of Western philosophy

South African Journal of Philosophy, 1982

Kant's Critique of pure reason (1781) represents an important turning-point in the development of modern philosophy. Before Kant we see the rise of the ideal of the autonomous personality which used, in order to proclaim its freedom, natural science as an instrument to dominate nature. Indeed, Kant tried to consolidate and strengthen the preceding natural science-ideal, but in the restricted form of the rationalistically elevated understanding which-though limited to sensibility in order to save a separate super-sensory domain for the practical-ethical freedom of autonomous manis considered to be the a priori (formal) lawgiver of nature. The nominalistic roots of this conception are seen from the fact that he did not merely transpose the universal side of entities into human understanding, since he actually elevated human understanding to the level of the conditioning order for things: 'understanding creates its (a priori) laws not out of nature, but prescribes them to nature.' Systematic distinctions drawn by Kant are repeatedly related to their historical roots and evaluated by means of immanent criticism (for example in connection with the problems of his Transcendental Dialectics). The influence of this work is mentioned with reference to some philosophical trends and some special sciences (sociology and mathematics). In conclusion a critical appraisal is given of the opposition between analysis and synthesis.

Kant on History

Estudos Kantianos, 2014

Abstract: This essay intends to show how Kant’s approach to history paves the way for his philosophy of history. In order to do so, I will first draw on some texts included in the transcripts of Kant’s Logic Lectures to articulate his views on history. I will then argue that Kant’s philosophy of history constitutes his particular way of making sense of the contingency proper to historical knowledge in light of the interests of reason.

The Fracture of a Kantian antinomy: Machiavelli and Spinoza, tr. by Dave Mesing

Parrhesia, 2015

the fracture of a kantian antinomy: machiavelli and spinoza vittorio morfino, translated by dave mesing A genealogy of historical consciousness understood as the absolute knowledge of time should show how the equation reality = history is not empirically selfevident but the effect of a long sequence of events that, towards the end of the eighteenth century, led to thinking about history tout court, without any genitive. It should show, in other words, historical consciousness as a contingent phenomena. In his reconstruction of the fundamental themes of the first methodological debate on the practice of historiography in France at the end of the sixteenth century, Fabio Merlini emphasizes the three procedural imperatives that constituted the birth certificate of this discipline which just a half-century before was entirely absent from the university setting: 1) writing the facts of the past in an order irreducible to that of the chronological sequences of chroniclers and medieval annals; 2) subtracting this reconstruction from the prescriptions of dogmatic theology; 3) freeing writing from the stylistic rules of rhetoric. This methodological debate comes to a head with the education of memory as a logical reconstruction of the past; in other words, an historical event can be thought as such only as the product of another historical event. In this way a new order of univocal explanation is inaugurated with respect to the orders of traditional explanation:

A Mélange of Revisionist Kantian Studies

Wilhelm Dilthey, in a lecture, once recounted an anxiety-raising dream he had experienced some years earlier. He was being tormented by the anarchy of philosophical thought as he reviewed the orientations of different philosophers that he had divided rather arbitrarily into three groups. The first consisted of all those thinkers around Archimedes and Ptolemy who base their exploration of the world upon the material solidity of universal physical nature. Deriving a single causality from the laws of nature, they subordinate spirit to matter. Knowledge, consequently, is determined by the methods of the natural sciences. In the center a second group constituted itself around Socrates and Plato who establish the knowledge of a supersensual world order based on the consciousness of the divine in the human. Far to the left, thinkers of all nations surrounded Pythagoras and Heraclitus, the first to intuit the divine harmony of the universe, a power that resides in every object and person and moves them according to the laws of nature. Gradually, in the dream, the distance between these different thinkers increased, and, as a hostile alienation enveloped them, philosophy was torn in even more than three directions. Dilthey responds to his growing torment over the dissemblance of truth and the antinomies of the different philosophical systems by taking refuge in historical consciousness, claiming that it shatters the last chains that philosophy and the natural sciences could not break. In his judgment historical consciousness will save the unity of the human being's soul! Coincidentally he makes peace with the great differences, recognizing that each world-view is historically conditioned and therefore also limited and relative. In the dream Dilthey located Immanuel Kant in the second group, surrounded not only by Socrates and Plato but also St. Augustine, Descartes, Schiller, Fichte and Carlyle. It is "the great Kant who elevated the ideal of freedom to the level of critical consciousness thus reconciling it with empirical knowledge;" and Dilthey observes him approaching the others "with his three-cornered hat and cane, his features hardened by the stain of thought." In all likelihood these contemporary American scholars of Kant's philosophy, Robert Greenberg, Paul Guyer and Samuel J. Kerstein, who have authored books on cardinal aspects of Kant's philosophy, would follow Dilthey in locating Kant in that second circle. Whether they would relate themselves to the orientation of that group does not emerge in their critical analysis of Kant's thought. They are working inside the world of Kant's writings, primarily the Critique of Pure Reason, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and the Critique of Practical Reason, and they offer new, critical perspectives of Kant's thought in dialog with Anglo-American Kantian studies. To some extent they appear to be revisionists, attempting to correct traditional interpretations of Kant. But in contrast to Dilthey's dream, there are no intimations of reproachful criticism or personal anguish that their critiques convey as they engage in their revisionist scholarship. The value of their work, therefore, may depend on the extent to which the readers of their books would value their critical conclusions. Professor Greenberg's Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge is a pioneering work on Kant's transcendental ontology that is submitted as the true foundation of his transcendental epistemology. Its challenge to the traditional Anglo-American interpretation of Kant predicates it as a mandatory