Volume 24, Issue 2

In the 1787 Transcendental Deduction of the Categories Kant indicates the only possible ways by which one can account for a necessary agreement of experience with the concepts of its objects (B166), using analogies between modes of explanation and biological theories about the origin of life. He endorses epigenesis as a model for his system of pure reason (B167). This paper examines various interpretive claims about the meaning of this theory of generation and its significance for Kant’s philosophy (Section 1), showing that, after his Critical shift in perspective, in 1775/77 Kant already combined preformed elements and their purposively oriented formation by natural forces (Section 2). Contrary to the standard view, Kant’s theory of race appears to constitute the background to assess Blumenbach’s later (1799/1781) shift to epigenesis after supporting Haller’s preformism (Section 3). In Section 4, I argue that the ground of affinity between epigenesis and formal idealism rests in tracing the first origin of these conformities: external a posteriori climate conditions and predisposed germs and dispositions within the generative power of the human body; and external a posteriori experience and spontaneous a priori concepts of its objects, within pure sensory intuiting and pure thinking. In both cases the external empirical conditions would function as occasioning propelling factors affecting internal pre-established forms of generation.

This text studies the corporeality of attentive reading. It relies and builds upon philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion that there is, each time, a recitative voice within the heart of our advancement through a textual body. This text examines the intriguing figure of recitative voice by paying attention to two bodily variations of reading: reading aloud and reading silently. Nancy’s recitative voice, as a sonorous, resonant, oral, buccal and vocal notion, can help us in explicating how our bodies condition our experiences of reading, yet ultimately he remains rather implicit on how we advance through textual bodies. This short text argues that we can explicate the bodily weight implicit to reading, if we interpreted it as a recitative act. When we read aloud, our experience of a text consists of an advancement of our conjoined gaze and voice through the letters, words and sentences making up our text; when we read silently, our closed and silent mouth is still conjoined with our advancing gaze, advancing as desirous for speech and with words already grasped, even when no words are folded in (or with) exhaled warm air.

Is it possible to measure a people’s capacity for containing the ambitions of any regime at its helm—its ability to resist the power of a tyrant? We begin here from the premise that this power has to be in proportion to individuals’ capacity (both individually and in groups) for communicating, at least among themselves, dissatisfaction with the regime. As the paper subsequently shows, by articulating an ontology of information diffusion on a communication network structure, it is possible to take some stock of the features of a communications network that facilitate resistance to tyranny (among other things), and so to begin answering questions about the sort of power that people living within them might be able to mobilize, while not yet answering outright the question of how to measure the power to resist.

As a celebration of the Tractatus 100th anniversary it might be worth revisiting its relation to the later writings. From the former to the latter, David Pears recalls that “everyone is aware of the holistic character of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, but it is not so well known that it was already beginning to establish itself in the Tractatus ” ( The False Prison , 1987). From the latter to the former, Stephen Hilmy’s ( The Later Wittgenstein , 1987) extensive study of the Nachlass has helped removing classical misconceptions such as Hintikka’s claim that “Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations almost completely gave up the calculus analogy.” Hilmy points out that even in the Investigations one finds the use of the calculus/game paradigm to the understanding of language, such as “in operating with the word” (Part I, §559) and “it plays a different part in the calculus”. Hilmy also quotes from a late (1946) unpublished manuscript (MS 130) “this sentence has use in the calculus of language”, which seems to be compatible with “asking whether and how a proposition can be verified is only a particular way of asking ‘How do you mean?’” Central in this back and forth there is an aspect which seems to deserve attention in the discussion of a semantics for the language of mathematics which might be based on (normalisation of) proofs and/or Hintikka/Lorenzen game-dialogue: the explication of consequences. Such a discussion is substantially supported by the use of the open and searchable The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen . These findings are framed within the discussion of the meaning of logical constants in the context of natural deduction style rules of inference.