Kant's lectures on anthropology capture him at the height of his intellectual power. They are immensely important for advancing our understanding of Kant's conception of anthropology, its ...development, and the notoriously difficult relationship between it and the critical philosophy. This 2003 collection of essays by some of the leading commentators on Kant offers a systematic account of the philosophical importance of this material that should nevertheless prove of interest to historians of ideas and political theorists. There are two broad approaches adopted: a number of the essays consider the systematic relations of the anthropology to critical philosophy, especially speculative knowledge and ethics. Other essays focus on the anthropology as a major source for the clarification of both the content and development of Kant's work. The volume also serves as an interpretative complement to the translation of the lectures in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.
Revisiting African philosophy's classic questions, D. A. Masolo advances
understandings of what it means to be human -- whether of African or other origin.
Masolo reframes indigenous knowledge as ...diversity: How are we to understand the
place and structure of consciousness? How does the everyday color the world we know?
Where are the boundaries between self and other, universal and particular, and
individual and community? From here, he takes a dramatic turn toward Africa's
current political situation and considers why individual rights and freedoms have
not been recognized, respected, demanded, or enforced. Masolo offers solutions for
containing socially destructive conduct and antisocial tendencies by engaging
community. His unique thinking about community and the role of the individual
extends African philosophy in new, global directions.
In the 19th century, personhood was a term of regulation and discipline in which slaves, criminals, and others, could be "made and unmade." Yet it was precisely the fraught, uncontainable nature of ...personhood that necessitated its constant legislation, wherein its meaning could be both contested and controlled.
Examining scientific and literary narratives, Nihad M. Farooq'sUndisciplinedencourages an alternative consideration of personhood, one that emerges from evolutionary and ethnographic discourse. Moving chronologically from 1830 to 1940, Farooq explores the scientific and cultural entanglements of Atlantic travelers in and beyond the Darwin era, and invites us to attend more closely to the consequences of mobility and contact on disciplines and persons. Bringing together an innovative group of readings-from field journals, diaries, letters, and testimonies to novels, stage plays, and audio recordings-Farooq advocates for a reconsideration of science, personhood, and the priority of race for the field of American studies. Whether expressed as narratives of acculturation, or as acts of resistance against the camera, the pen, or the shackle, these stories of the studied subjects of the Atlantic world add a new chapter to debates about personhood and disciplinarity in this era that actively challenged legal, social, and scientific categorizations.
Naturalistic interpretations of Nietzsche’s thought ultimately appeal to two arguments. On the one hand, when tracing various human phenomena back to processes sufficiently explicable by the natural ...sciences, it would appear that Nietzsche was pursuing a de facto naturalization program. On the other hand, in BGE 230, the need for the naturalization of human beings as a whole is often interpreted as an argument de jure. After outlining some basic features of contemporary naturalism and showing its incompatibility with Nietzsche’s philosophy, I argue in this paper that neither the de jure nor the de facto argument can be understood in a naturalistic sense. The task of “translating man back into nature” in BGE 230 is indeed turned against a point of view held by “old metaphysical bird-catchers.” An analysis of the manuscript and a comparison of it with the preface to HH I, in which this figure is used in the opposite sense, suggests rather that Nietzsche conceives of the renaturalization of the human in a deceptive way, that is, as one of those numerous “snares and nets for unwary birds” scattered throughout his works. Widening this view, a similar dynamic arises with respect to the de facto argument. In the concluding section, I highlight how, in
, certain naturalization operations are countered by as many arguments to the contrary. Such sudden shifts in perspective seem to indicate, at least in
, a desire to subvert naturalism from within.
For this second edition, Seymour has written a new introduction and has added a new retrospective essay.Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man by Seymour W. Itzkoff is currently ...one of the few books available in the English language that discusses the philosophy of twentieth-century German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Itzkoff's study brings Cassirer's perspective directly into the contemporary debate over the evolution of human thought and its relationship to animal life. Further, Itzkoff places Cassirer directly in the context of recent philosophical thought, arguing for the importance of his Kantian perspective, a significance that is amply vindicated by the current interest in Cassirer's ideas.
The famous debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger of 1929 in Davos was set on a global stage and, yet, inherently Eurocentric. This volume explores how the hypothetical presence of the ...Kyoto school founder Nishida Kitarō would have overcome this limitation.
Originally published in 2003, this book offers a comprehensive account of Kant's theory of freedom and his moral anthropology. The point of departure is the apparent conflict between three claims to ...which Kant is committed: that human beings are transcendentally free, that moral anthropology studies the empirical influences on human beings, and that more anthropology is morally relevant. Frierson shows why this conflict is only apparent. He draws on Kant's transcendental idealism and his theory of the will and describes how empirical influences can affect the empirical expression of one's will in a way that is morally significant but still consistent with Kant's concept of freedom. As a work which integrates Kant's anthropology with his philosophy as a whole, this book will be an unusually important source of study for all Kant scholars and advanced students of Kant.
