Band 106, Heft 2

Abstract: Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by the Dreams of Metaphysics (1766) drew a mixed reaction from Kant’s contemporaries, many of whom were confused by its tone. More recent commentators still find it difficult to identify Kant’s precise position on a number of important issues. This article uses Remarks in the “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime” as the key to understanding Dreams . Kant was “set right” by Rousseau, and this setting right involved Kant’s entering into a dynamic of attraction and repulsion with Rousseau’s insights – a dynamic that results in one’s finding one’s place. This dynamic of attraction and repulsion is best understood in terms of R. Girard’s mimetic theory.

Abstract: In his Critique of Judgment , Kant relates the communicability of aesthetic feeling to the fact that we are in a position to communicate cognitions. In his references back to the theory of cognition in the first Critique , however, Kant alters the original direction of proof and attributes a new role to some of his most important theorems, e.g. to his claims about synthesis and its foundational function for composition and relation. In this paper, I will reconstruct and defend Kant’s views on communicability and the changes associated with it. In a final section, I will argue that the concept of communicability should not be identified with the concept of subjective universal validity. Subjective universal validity is merely a special case of the former.

Abstract: Scholars have failed to adequately distinguish Kant’s grades of evil: frailty (weakness of will), impurity, and depravity. I argue that the only way to distinguish them is, f irstly, to recognize that frailty is explicitly, practically irrational and not caused by any sort of self-deception. Instead, it is caused by the radical evil that Kant finds within the character of all persons. Secondly, impurity can only be understood to be self-deception either about the nature of the act itself, which results in an epistemic error, or about one’s motivations for following a properly reasoned, moral conclusion, which results in a motivational error. Thirdly, depravity is self-deception about morality itself, by which the agent believes that it is morally right to follow self-love.

Abstract: This article examines the development of the law of gravitation in the writings of Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant and Jakob Friedrich Fries. Fries was a philosopher, mathematician and physicist who stood in the Kantian tradition, but who nevertheless had empiricist leanings. Whereas the development of the law of gravitation is well explored as regards Newton and Kant, the heuristic interpretation of the Kantian ‘fundamental forces’ carried out by Fries has not yet received the scholarly attention it deserves. In the following, I will elaborate on how Newton, Kant and Fries developed the law of gravitation and how it was incorporated in their natural philosophies.

Abstract: An ontology of the intelligible world cannot explain the phenomenon of a „free will“, which is able to decide between good and evil. It follows that a Moralontologie also cannot explain an agents freely determining his actions as good or evil.

Abstract: Guo Moruo is one of the most controversial intellectuals of China in the first half of the 20th century and a famous translator of the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, Nietzsche etc. Having immersed himself in Western conceptions of aethetics, literature, social sciences, politics, and philosophy while living in Japan, he introduced this newly acquired knowledge to the Chinese reading public. After his self-pronounced conversion to Communism in 1924 he published a short story titled The Steeple of Löbenicht Church , describing a day in the life of the German philosopher Kant. Irrespective of his political attitude, in his opinion Kant’s ideas offered sound advice and urgently needed new standards in the endeavour to modernize China.