The Transcendentals and the Code of the Extraordinary Mind (original) (raw)
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American Transcendentalism (1836-1860), despite having an amorphous and transient lifespan, holds strong importance in American history: religious, philosophical, and literary. Not only did this movement approach societal and spiritual life with new and radical perceptions concerning a variety of matters, but the tenets it preached still strike a certain chord within all who study them. Leaders of this compelling movement, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, who are all prominent names in American literary history, called for a “transcendence” from a mediocre existence. Transcendentalism rooted from and sprouted diverse explanations of religion and philosophy including Unitarianism, Puritanism, and Idealism. However, in spite of the pivotal role politics, religion and philosophy played in the formation of the American Transcendentalist thought, this paper will not be discussing them. The following chapters have been orchestrated to exemplify, in breadth and depth, how 19th century American Transcendentalist doctrines yet seep from contemporary literature, contrary to a widespread belief that American Transcendentalist texts were extinguished when their explicitly transcendental authors passed away, and the movement itself subsided. In doing so, I will be analyzing two modern novels (fiction and nonfiction) in light of a quintessential transcendentalist text.
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The philosopher Salomon Maimon (1753-1800), who is widely known for his Autobiography (1792), 1 has unfortunately been a rather marginalized figure in philosophy, and his extensive philosophical work, which comprises several books, commentaries and journal articles, unduly neglected. This is all the more surprising, since Maimon was a very active figure on the philosophical scene during his day. Apart from his numerous articles, he kept up correspondence with prominent scholars, such as Reinhold, Ben David and others, though he never held a chair of philosophy himself. Fichte, who can be seen as the main philosophical heir of Maimon's thoughts, spoke of him with high esteem and confessed his limitless respect toward his talents. 2 Yet, after his death, Maimon's oeuvre fell almost completely into oblivion. As Samuel Atlas speculates, Maimon's critico-skeptical investigations were simply overshadowed by the grandeur and splendor of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and their metaphysical systems. 3 A further reason might be Maimon's rather unorthodox style of writing and lack of systematic structure. With German not being his mother tongue, Maimon was aware of the grammatical infelicity of his expression, and deficiency in exposition and structure. Thus, he anticipated his fate: ''A writer who has a good style is read. One who has expository power is studied. One who has neither the one nor the other, supposing him,
Transcendental Approach in the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: Is there any positive program
Absract: In this research I would like to show how transcendentalism works within the framework of the modern analytical philosophy of consciousness and in what sense it opposes the naturalism. A considerable number of analytical philosophers do not consider transcendentalism as a 'legal' trend of philosophy and often consider it as a purely historical-archival phenomenon. In this case, the self-definition of a transcendentalist in the analytical medium turns out to be not very clear at times. Below, I will try to clarify the essence of this approach in specific application towards the key issues of the analytical philosophy of consciousness and provide such characteristics of it which would allow unmistakably recognise the handwriting of a transcendentalist even in case they name themselves differently. In this case, transcendentalism should be understood as a certain type of argumentation, and a little bit more broadly, as a certain methodological principle. I will show what is the correlation of critical and positive components in such approaches as naturalism and transcendentalism.
In metaphysics the term «transcendental» is used to denote the different aspects of being, that is of whatever is real. The term indicates that being and its properties are present in each of the predicaments or categories, such as substance, quantity, quality, relation, location, time, action, etc. Therefore, they «transcend» the limits of these different classesl. Some early Greek philosophers had noticed that whatever exists must have some unity and goodness, but they never treated the theme systematically. The philosophy of being begins with Parmenides who describes his fulgurant intuition of the unitary and unchangeable character of being as having been revealed to him from aboye. Being is and not-being is not. Being is one and immutable; it is also knowable, for being and thinking, he writes, are the same.
The Reality of the Transcendentals
2019
The transcendentals entered Western intellectual discourse as “vagrants” (ens vagans) – which roamed Aristotle’s categories, impervious to univocal abstraction. To traditional realists with an interest in distinguishing the mind-dependent from the real, these properties carried the unwelcome implication that it is not possible to state univocally how individuals exist in their own right, independently of how we think about them. Instead, properties like “thing,” “otherness,” “unity,” “goodness,” and “truth” pervade every category. As a result, it is perhaps unsurprising that thinkers in the Western realist tradition have usually accorded transcendentals merely mind-dependent status for one reason or another – even though Aquinas also attributes to God the transcendentals in a mind-independent subsistent mode unavailable to our experience. However, in the philosophies of Aquinas, John Poinsot, and Ralph Austin Powell, there are also reasons to consider the opposing view, and not only when the “natural knowledge” of Thomism is understood to emerge from experience of ens primum cognitum (the first and undifferentiated experience of being), which secures a terminus in the real for experience of the transcendentals. In my view, what decisively resolves both the old problem of describing beings independently of how we think about them, and the perplexing nature of the transcendentals themselves, is to consider the implications of Poinsot’s work on real relation, the significance of which Powell rediscovered in the 20th century, and which John Deely later realised resolves a pivotal difficulty with the Aristotelian category of relation, namely that relatio rationis have “as their positive essence exactly the same positive structure as their mind-independent counterparts,” making the mind-independence of categorial relation a mere accident, not something essential to relations. This paper articulates the respect in which this development implies that transcendentals are real, contra the traditional views of the foregoing authors upon whom my argument relies.