DOCSLIB.ORG

What Is Diacritical Hermeneutics? First a Brief Ogy

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
What Is Diacritical Hermeneutics? First a Brief Ogy Journal of Applied Hermeneutics December 10, 2011 What is The Author(s) 2011 Diacritical Hermeneutics? Richard Kearney What is diacritical hermeneutics? First a brief ogy. Why these? Because each solicited an word on what I mean by hermeneutics gener- interpretation of dual meanings: a) divine and ally, then several words on the qualifier, dia- human (theology), b) prosecutorial and defen- critical.1 sive (law), c) ancient and actual (philology). All three disciplines called for a method of I understand hermeneutics as an art of de- discriminating between different and often ciphering multiple meaning. In its most basic conflicting readings. Wilhelm Dilthey would sense this relates to the human capacity to add ‘history’ to the list as a universal human have ‘two thinks at a time,’ as James Joyce science devoted to reading between past and said. More precisely, it refers to the practice present; a science, which he saw as a model of discerning indirect, tacit or allusive mean- for a general hermeneutics of life as it inter- ings, of sensing another sense beyond or be- prets itself. Whence the birth of philosophical neath apparent sense. This special human ac- hermeneutics. tivity may in turn call for a method of second- order, reflective interpretation involving a Later, Heidegger would broaden the defi- process of disclosing concealed messages, nition further in speaking of an ontological either by a) unmasking covered-up meaning hermeneutic committed to understanding the (hermeneutics of suspicion) or b) by disclos- fundamental difference between Being and ing surplus meaning (hermeneutics of affir- beings - a task based on a pre-understanding mation). In short, I understand hermeneutics of our everyday existence as being-toward- as the task of interpreting (hermeneuein) plu- death. The famous hermeneutic circle. Finally, ral meaning in response to the polysemy of and more recently, thinkers like Gadamer, language and life.2 Ricoeur, and Caputo have augmented the con- temporary project of philosophical hermeneu- Hermeneutics, thus viewed, is an activity tics in various significant ways (semantic, carried out in the name of its founding spirit, psychoanalytic, deconstructive). But what all Hermes: Messenger of gods, guardian of these different hermeneutic movements share thresholds, and carrier of cryptic codes. The is a commitment to the task of adjudicating three original disciplines of hermeneutics, formulated by Friedrich Schleiermacher in the 19th century, were theology, law, and philol- Corresponding Author: Dr. Richard Kearney The Charles B. Seelig Professor in Philosophy Philosophy Department Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA Email: [email protected] 2 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 between different levels of meaning. cipation does not erupt ex nihilo. It does not start with modern revolutions and the En- So where exactly does diacritical herme- lightenment; rather it draws from a whole pal- neutics fit in? And how might it contribute to impsest of prior narratives of liberation going the hermeneutic legacy described above? back, in the West, to Biblical stories of exo- dus and the Socratic awakening. Aristotle ad- I have already sketched my project of dia- dresses the question of ethical criteria already critical hermeneutics in the Introduction to when he remarks that if you wish to com- Strangers Gods and Monsters and other relat- municate the meaning of a virtue you recount ed texts.3 But as John Caputo has remarked, the story of someone who embodies it - e.g., this project has, to date, been more performed Achilles for courage, Penelope for constancy, than explained. I will attempt to redress the Tiresius for wisdom. Such narratives - ancient balance here by addressing the question under or modern - provide phronesis with exempla- five main headings: ry paradigms by which to measure, judge, and act. Otherwise how could one tell the differ- 1) In the most obvious sense, dia-critical ence between just and unjust actions? These involves a critical function of interrogation. I differences require careful criteriological dis- mean this in the modern sense of the term criminations. And there are obviously other from Kant’s three Critiques down to the more essential criteria apart from the narrative one contemporary movements of Critical Theory mentioned (e.g., rational deliberation of rights, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Habermas virtue ethics, pragmatist judgment, phenome- and Foucault. In this broad sweep, I would nological intuition of values, spiritual exercis- obviously include critiques of race, class, es, feminist and socio-cultural critiques, wis- gender, power, and the unconscious: All criti- dom traditions etc.). In short, pace decon- cal philosophies, which carry on the legacy, struction, I am not against criteria as long as amongst others, of the ‘three masters of sus- they involve vigilant discernments and dis- picion’ (Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche). In short, tinctions. I understand critique here as both a) an in- quiry into the conditions of possibility of 3) Third, in keeping with the more precise meaning; and b) a critical exposure of dictionary definition of dia-critical, I refer to a ‘masked’ power in the name of liberation and grammatological attention to inflections of justice. This latter more ethico-political aspect linguistic marks. In this technical sense, dia- of critique is one I find lacking in most main- critics provides rules for differentiating be- stream hermeneutic methods to date (Dilthey, tween minute units of language (signifiers, Heidegger, Gadamer) until we arrive at Ric- graphemes, accents). Think, for example, of oeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion and the difference, which the following accents - Vattimo’s hermeneutics of subversion. grave, acute, circumflex, and diaeresis - make on the same letter in the French language: é è 2) Second, dia-critical involves the criteri- ê, ë. Or think of how ‘où’ with an accent ological function of discerning between com- (meaning ‘where’) differs from ‘ou’ without peting claims to meaning. This comprises accent (meaning ‘or’). These silent, discreet hermeneutic retrievals of previous testimonies signs distinguish between values of the same as well as future oriented projects - utopian, character. Small graphic demarcations thus messianic, eschatological. ‘Emancipation is serve to avoid confusion between otherwise itself a tradition,’ as Ricoeur says; it is a form identical letters, helping us differentiate be- of ‘anticipatory memory.’ The idea of eman- tween distinct meanings. More generally, in 3 Kearney Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2011 Article 2 structural and post-structural linguistics, dia- dog Argos.5 For if Hermes discloses hermetic critics denotes a way of reading differentially, messages from above, Argos brings animal across gaps and oppositions, in keeping with savvy from below. The former guides our de- the Saussurian maxim that language is a net- ciphering of cryptic masks and messages work of ‘differences without positive terms’. (Hermes appears to Baucis disguised as a In these respects, diacritics is all about micro- beggar). The latter, Argos, imparts a canine reading. And here, I think, I share common flair for recognizing the friend or enemy in ground with John Caputo’s radical hermeneu- the visitor (e.g., Odysseus returned to Ithaca tics and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction.4 to oust the suitors).6 4) In addition to this technical usage in Diacritical hermeneutics may thus be de- linguistic and semiotic practice, diacritics also fined as both sacred and terrestrial in so far as has the older diagnostic meaning of reading it ranges up and down - in ascending and de- the body. The Greek terms, dia-krinein and scending spirals - from the highest hintings of dia-krisis, referred to the medical or therapeu- the absolute to the lowest soundings of the tic practice of diagnosing symptoms of bodily abyss. While hands reach up, feet reach down. fevers, colorations, and secretions. In this But no matter how high or low hermeneutic sense, the word designated the hermeneutic ‘sense’ goes, it never leaves us totally in the art of discriminating between health and dis- dark. It is not blind but half-seeing and half- ease. Such a skill to read between the lines of believing. It is a sort of incarnate phronesis, skin and flesh - in order to sound the move- which probes, scents, and filters. Something ments of the soul (homeopathic or allopathic) akin to Wittgenstein’s seeing-as in our most - was often a matter of life and death. Need- ordinary perceptions or Heidegger’s under- less to say, this model of micrological reading standing-as in our most basic moods (see his of somatic and psychosomatic symptoms has analysis of Verstehen-Befindlichkeit in Being deep implications for the practice of philo- and Time). This fundamental form of existen- sophical reading in its own right. I agree with tial sensibility is further radicalized in Mer- Wittgenstein that philosophy is therapy. In leau-Ponty’s more embodied notion of ‘dia- sum, diacritical hermeneutics should do you critical perception’ to which I shall return be- good! low.7 5) These four characteristics – critical, cri- At this stage, and by way of addressing teriological, grammatological and diagnostic - some of the more recent discussions of her- comprise the basis of what I call, finally and meneutics, we might ask how our fivefold most primally, ‘carnal hermeneutics.’ Here model of diacritical hermeneutics compares we are concerned with a hermeneutics that with John Caputo’s method of ‘radical her- goes all the way down. It covers diacritical meneutics’ inspired by Derrida’s deconstruc- readings of different kinds of Others - human, tion. While the diacritical and radical ap- animal or divine. All with skins on. Such car- proaches share a common commitment to mi- nal hermeneutics has a crucial bearing, to take cro-logical reading, there are significant dif- just one example, on how we ‘sense’ subtle ferences. In contrast to deconstructive sans- distinctions between hostile and hospitable savoir, diacritical hermeneutics practices a strangers (the same term, hostis can refer to certain savoir, which goes beyond Derrida’s guest or enemy).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • From the Philosophy of Religion to the History of Religions
    CHAPTER ONE FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION TO THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS CHOLARS of religion have devoted little attention to the con- nections between their views of religious history and the phi- Slosophy of religion. Hayden White’s comment that “there can be no ‘proper history’ which is not at the same time ‘philosophy of history’”1 can also be applied to religious history, but that is seldom considered today. On the contrary! Religious studies has taken pains to keep the philosophy of religion far away from its field. Neverthe- less, there is a great deal of evidence for the assertion that the histo- riography of religion was also in fact an implicit philosophy of reli- gion. A search for such qualifications soon yields results, coming up with metahistorical assumptions originating in the philosophy of reli- gion. These sorts of connections have been conscientiously noted by Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Eric J. Sharpe, Jan de Vries, Jan van Baal, Brian Morris, J. Samuel Preus, and Jacques Waardenburg in their his- tories of the field. Yet, to date, no one has made a serious attempt to apply Hayden White’s comment systematically to research in the field of religious history. But there is every reason to do so. Evidence points to more than simply coincidental and peripheral connections between religious studies as a historical discipline and the philosophy of religion. Perhaps the idea of a history of religions with all its im- plications can be developed correctly only if we observe it from a broader and longer-term perspective of the philosophy of religion.
    [Show full text]
  • Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and Two Forms of Modern Dialectics
    Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana ISSN: 1315-5216 ISSN: 2477-9555 [email protected] Universidad del Zulia Venezuela Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and two Forms of Modern Dialectics VALIULLINA, Zaynab R.; LUKJANOV, Arkadiy V.; PUSKAREWA, Marina A. Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and two Forms of Modern Dialectics Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, vol. 23, no. 82, 2018 Universidad del Zulia, Venezuela Available in: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=27957591037 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1513030 This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International. PDF generated from XML JATS4R by Redalyc Project academic non-profit, developed under the open access initiative Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana, 2018, vol. 23, no. 82, July-September, ISSN: 1315-5216 2477-9555 Notas y debates de actualidad Philosophy of Ecological Crisis and two Forms of Modern Dialectics La filosofía de la crisis ecológica y dos formas de la dialéctica moderna Zaynab R. VALIULLINA DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1513030 Bashkir State University, Rusia Redalyc: https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa? [email protected] id=27957591037 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7120-4516 Arkadiy V. LUKJANOV Bashkir State University, Rusia Marina A. PUSKAREWA Bashkir State University, Rusia Received: 21 August 2018 Accepted: 16 September 2018 Abstract: e rapid development of science and technology results in a change of human lifestyle. e main purpose of the work is to study the philosophy of ecological crisis and the forms of modern dialectics. e idea of "intersubjectivity" will function as our methodological basis. Continuation of Hegel’s ideas and essays of existentialists are related to dialectical processing of thought and technology.
    [Show full text]
  • Historical Monographs Collection (11 Series)
    Historical Monographs Collection (11 Series) Now available in 11 separate thematic series, ATLA Historical Monographs Collection provides researchers with over 10 million pages and 29,000 documents focused on religious thought and practice. The content dates from the 13th century through 1922, with the majority of documents originating from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Biblical Research Perspectives, 1516 - 1922 profiles how biblical studies grew with critical tools and the discovery of ancient manuscript materials. The Historical Critical Method radically transformed how people viewed scriptural texts, while manuscript discoveries like the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus transformed how scholars and lay people viewed sacred texts. Catholic Engagements with the Modern World, 1487 - 1918 profiles the teaching and practices of the Catholic Church in the modern era. The collection features a broad range of subjects, including Popes and Papacy, Mary, Modernism, Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Oxford Movement, and the Vatican I ecumenical council. Christian Preaching, Worship, and Piety, 1559 - 1919 reflects how Christians lived out their faith in the form of sermons, worship, and piety. It features over 700 texts of either individual or collected sermons from over 400 authors, including Lyman Beecher, Charles Grandison Finney, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Francis Xavier Weninger. Global Religious Traditions, 1760 - 1922 profiles many living traditions outside of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It addresses theology, philosophy,
    [Show full text]
  • The Postsecular Traces of Transcendence in Contemporary
    The Postsecular Traces of Transcendence in Contemporary German Literature Thomas R. Bell A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Dr. Sabine Wilke, Chair Dr. Richard Block Dr. Eric Ames Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Germanics ©Copyright 2015 Thomas R. Bell University of Washington Abstract The Postsecular Traces of Transcendence in Contemporary German Literature Thomas Richard Bell Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Sabine Wilke Germanics This dissertation focuses on texts written by four contemporary, German-speaking authors: W. G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn and Schwindel. Gefühle, Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt, Sybille Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg, and Peter Handke’s Der Große Fall. The project explores how the texts represent forms of religion in an increasingly secular society. Religious themes, while never disappearing, have recently been reactivated in the context of the secular age. This current societal milieu of secularism, as delineated by Charles Taylor, provides the framework in which these fictional texts, when manifesting religious intuitions, offer a postsecular perspective that serves as an alternative mode of thought. The project asks how contemporary literature, as it participates in the construction of secular dialogue, generates moments of religiously coded transcendence. What textual and narrative techniques serve to convey new ways of perceiving and experiencing transcendence within the immanence felt and emphasized in the modern moment? While observing what the textual strategies do to evoke religious presence, the dissertation also looks at the type of religious discourse produced within the texts. The project begins with the assertion that a historically antecedent model of religion – namely, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s – which is never mentioned explicitly but implicitly present throughout, informs the style of religious discourse.
    [Show full text]
  • Network Map of Knowledge And
    Humphry Davy George Grosz Patrick Galvin August Wilhelm von Hofmann Mervyn Gotsman Peter Blake Willa Cather Norman Vincent Peale Hans Holbein the Elder David Bomberg Hans Lewy Mark Ryden Juan Gris Ian Stevenson Charles Coleman (English painter) Mauritz de Haas David Drake Donald E. Westlake John Morton Blum Yehuda Amichai Stephen Smale Bernd and Hilla Becher Vitsentzos Kornaros Maxfield Parrish L. Sprague de Camp Derek Jarman Baron Carl von Rokitansky John LaFarge Richard Francis Burton Jamie Hewlett George Sterling Sergei Winogradsky Federico Halbherr Jean-Léon Gérôme William M. Bass Roy Lichtenstein Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael Tony Cliff Julia Margaret Cameron Arnold Sommerfeld Adrian Willaert Olga Arsenievna Oleinik LeMoine Fitzgerald Christian Krohg Wilfred Thesiger Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant Eva Hesse `Abd Allah ibn `Abbas Him Mark Lai Clark Ashton Smith Clint Eastwood Therkel Mathiassen Bettie Page Frank DuMond Peter Whittle Salvador Espriu Gaetano Fichera William Cubley Jean Tinguely Amado Nervo Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay Ferdinand Hodler Françoise Sagan Dave Meltzer Anton Julius Carlson Bela Cikoš Sesija John Cleese Kan Nyunt Charlotte Lamb Benjamin Silliman Howard Hendricks Jim Russell (cartoonist) Kate Chopin Gary Becker Harvey Kurtzman Michel Tapié John C. Maxwell Stan Pitt Henry Lawson Gustave Boulanger Wayne Shorter Irshad Kamil Joseph Greenberg Dungeons & Dragons Serbian epic poetry Adrian Ludwig Richter Eliseu Visconti Albert Maignan Syed Nazeer Husain Hakushu Kitahara Lim Cheng Hoe David Brin Bernard Ogilvie Dodge Star Wars Karel Capek Hudson River School Alfred Hitchcock Vladimir Colin Robert Kroetsch Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai Stephen Sondheim Robert Ludlum Frank Frazetta Walter Tevis Sax Rohmer Rafael Sabatini Ralph Nader Manon Gropius Aristide Maillol Ed Roth Jonathan Dordick Abdur Razzaq (Professor) John W.
    [Show full text]
  • What Literature Knows: Forays Into Literary Knowledge Production
    Contributions to English 2 Contributions to English and American Literary Studies 2 and American Literary Studies 2 Antje Kley / Kai Merten (eds.) Antje Kley / Kai Merten (eds.) Kai Merten (eds.) Merten Kai / What Literature Knows This volume sheds light on the nexus between knowledge and literature. Arranged What Literature Knows historically, contributions address both popular and canonical English and Antje Kley US-American writing from the early modern period to the present. They focus on how historically specific texts engage with epistemological questions in relation to Forays into Literary Knowledge Production material and social forms as well as representation. The authors discuss literature as a culturally embedded form of knowledge production in its own right, which deploys narrative and poetic means of exploration to establish an independent and sometimes dissident archive. The worlds that imaginary texts project are shown to open up alternative perspectives to be reckoned with in the academic articulation and public discussion of issues in economics and the sciences, identity formation and wellbeing, legal rationale and political decision-making. What Literature Knows The Editors Antje Kley is professor of American Literary Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Her research interests focus on aesthetic forms and cultural functions of narrative, both autobiographical and fictional, in changing media environments between the eighteenth century and the present. Kai Merten is professor of British Literature at the University of Erfurt, Germany. His research focuses on contemporary poetry in English, Romantic culture in Britain as well as on questions of mediality in British literature and Postcolonial Studies. He is also the founder of the Erfurt Network on New Materialism.
    [Show full text]
  • Literary and Cultural Translata Bility: the European Romantic Example
    Literary and Cultural Translata bility: The European Romantic Example Ian Fairly Abstract This essay presents an overview of Western and Central European thinking about translation in the Romantic period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In it, I seek to delineate a convergence of aesthetic and cultural theory in the Romantic preoccupation with translation. Among other things, my discussion is interested in how translation in this period engages debate about what it means to be a ‘national’ writer creating a ‘national’ literature. I offer this essay in the hope that its meditation on literary and cultural translatability and untranslatability will resonate with readers in their own quite different contexts. One of the central statements on translation by a British Romantic writer occurs in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817). Reflecting on the achievements of Wordsworth's verse, Coleridge proposes that the " infallible test of a blameless style " in poetry is " its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning ". This is at once a prescription for fault-finding and an index of immaculacy. A utopian strain sounds through Coleridge's " infallible " and " blameless ", suggesting that an unfallen integrity may be remade, or critically rediscovered, in the uniqueness of poetic utterance. Translation Today Vol. 2 No. 2 Oct. 2005 © CIIL 2005 Literary and Cultural Translata bility: 93 The European Romantic Example Where Wordsworth's " meditative pathos " and " imaginative power " are expressed in verse which cannot be other than it is Coleridge asserts a vital congruence between the particular and the universal. Yet his formula does not preclude the translational recovery of that expressive pathos and power in words of another language.
    [Show full text]
  • Anarchy in the PA? Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Statism, and the Future of Public Administration
    CONFERENCE DRAFT This paper is not intended for general circulation and may not be cited without the permission of the author. Anarchy in the PA? Anti-Essentialism, Anti-Statism, and the Future of Public Administration Thomas J. Catlaw Assistant Professor School of Public Affairs Arizona State University 411 North Central Avenue Mail Code 3720, Suite 450 Phoenix, AZ 85004 Email: [email protected] Phone (602) 496-0459 Paper prepared for presentation at the “Public Administration and Anti-Essentialism” Conference, Florida Atlantic University, Fort Lauderdale, FL—March 2-3, 2007 Introduction Authority has been an ongoing focus of scholarly and intellectual investigation for nearly entirety of modern social science. In sociology, this concern can be tracked from Weber’s famous typologies and Durkheim’s exposition of anomie, a state induced by the decline of regulative authority relations, through the 1960’s “twilight of authority” (Nisbet, 1975) and the contemporary declaration of a “post-traditional” order (Giddens, 1994). Authority has also received enormous consideration in political science and political philosophy (Agamben, 2005; Arendt, 1958; Benne, 1943; DeGeorge, 1985; Engles, 1978; Flathman, 1980; Friedrich, 1972; Laski, 2000/1919; Lowi, 1970; McKercher, 1989), anthropology (W. B. Miller, 1955; Turner, 1969), organizational sociology (Blau, 1968; Dalton, Barnes, & Zaleznik, 1973/1968; Meyer, 1972), psychology (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989), and a wide range of provocative interdisciplinary legal, political, and psychological perspectives (Diggins & Kann, 1981; Friedrich, 1958; Horkheimer, 1972; Lincoln, 1994; Pennock & Chapman, 1987; Sennett, 1980). The literature on the topic is internally contradictory and voluminous—not withstanding the fact that consideration of authority readily expands into equally nebulous and complex concepts such as power, legitimacy, the state, and the nature of social order itself with no obvious analytic or historical limit.
    [Show full text]
  • An Introduction to Philosophy
    An Introduction to Philosophy W. Russ Payne Bellevue College Copyright (cc by nc 4.0) 2015 W. Russ Payne Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document with attribution under the terms of Creative Commons: Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 International or any later version of this license. A copy of the license is found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ 1 Contents Introduction ………………………………………………. 3 Chapter 1: What Philosophy Is ………………………….. 5 Chapter 2: How to do Philosophy ………………….……. 11 Chapter 3: Ancient Philosophy ………………….………. 23 Chapter 4: Rationalism ………….………………….……. 38 Chapter 5: Empiricism …………………………………… 50 Chapter 6: Philosophy of Science ………………….…..… 58 Chapter 7: Philosophy of Mind …………………….……. 72 Chapter 8: Love and Happiness …………………….……. 79 Chapter 9: Meta Ethics …………………………………… 94 Chapter 10: Right Action ……………………...…………. 108 Chapter 11: Social Justice …………………………...…… 120 2 Introduction The goal of this text is to present philosophy to newcomers as a living discipline with historical roots. While a few early chapters are historically organized, my goal in the historical chapters is to trace a developmental progression of thought that introduces basic philosophical methods and frames issues that remain relevant today. Later chapters are topically organized. These include philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, areas where philosophy has shown dramatic recent progress. This text concludes with four chapters on ethics, broadly construed. I cover traditional theories of right action in the third of these. Students are first invited first to think about what is good for themselves and their relationships in a chapter of love and happiness. Next a few meta-ethical issues are considered; namely, whether they are moral truths and if so what makes them so.
    [Show full text]
  • CHAPTER 2.1 Augustine: Commentary
    CHAPTER 2.1 Augustine: Commentary Augustine Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis (henceforth Augustine) was born in 354 A.D. in the municipium of Thagaste (modern day Souk Ahras, Algeria, close to the border with Tunisia). He died in 430, as the Arian1 Vandals besieged the city of Hippo where he was bishop, marking another stage in the demise of the Roman Empire. Rome had already been sacked in 410 by Alaric the Visigoth, but the slow decline of Roman grandeur took place over a period of about 320 years which culminated in 476 when Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain. Augustine thus lived at a time which heralded the death knell of the ancient world and the beginnings of mediaeval western European Christendom.2 Augustine‘s great legacy to western civilization is that intellectually he united both worlds in drawing from the ancient thought of Greece and Rome and providing a Christian understanding of the intellectual achievements of the ancients. His new synthesis is a remarkable achievement even today and for those of us, who remain Christians in the West, our debates, agreements and disagreements are still pursued in Augustine‘s shadow.3 1 Arianism was a schismatic sect of Christianity that held the view that the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, is created and thus does not exist eternally with the Father. 2 See J. M. Rist‘s magnificent Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rist notes that, ‗Despite his lack of resources he managed to sit in judgment on ancient philosophy and ancient culture.‘ p.
    [Show full text]
  • Critique of Pure Reason the Dialectic
    Critique of Pure Reason the Dialectic Immanuel Kant 1781 Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Each four-point ellipsis . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions will be reported between square brackets in normal-sized type. This version follows (B) the second edition of the Critique, though it also includes the (A) first-edition version of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Undecorated marginal numerals refer to page-numbers in B; ones with an ‘A’ in front refer to A, and are given only for passages that don’t also occur in B. The likes of ..356 in the margin mean that B356 (or whatever) started during the immediately preceding passage that has been omitted or only described between square brackets. These marginal numerals can help you to connect this version with other translations, with the original German, and with references in the secondary literature. Cross-references to other parts of this work include the word ‘page(s)’, and refer to numbers at the top-right corner of each page.—The Transcendental logic divides into the Transcendental analytic, which started on page 45, and the Transcendental dialectic, which starts here. First launched: January 2008 Critique. Dialectic Immanuel Kant Contents Introduction 155 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Kant's Account of the Rational Sources of Metaphysics in The
    CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS. International Journal of Philosophy N.o 10, Diciembre 2019, pp. 235-239 ISSN: 2386-7655 Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3583193 Kant’s Account of the Rational Sources of Metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason RUDOLF MEER• Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Russia Review of: Willaschek, M., Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics. The Dialectic of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 308. ISBN-13: 978- 1108472630. The Transcendental Dialectic is an insufficiently studied section of the Critique of Pure Reason. This is surprising given that Division Two of the Transcendental Logic forms the largest part of Kant’s first critique. If the doctrine is systematically considered, then Kant’s critique of the metaphysica specialis—that is, rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology—is at the core of the investigations (Willaschek 2018, p. 11). And in fact, the emphasis seems to be on the destruction of the unconditioned objects, God, world, and soul. In this sense, the Transcendental Dialectic would be a long Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic and the Transcendental Aesthetic, in which Kant dissociates himself once again from the metaphysical tradition and his philosophical opponents, in order to legitimize indirectly the previous analysis. Kant gives unambiguous hints for understanding the architectonic of the Critique of Pure Reason in this sense, by classifying the Transcendental Analytic as Logic of Truth and the Transcendental Dialectic as Logic of Illusion. Hence, Kant’s early critics had determined that Kant neither has a positive dialectic theory nor a concept of system, and this is a point of view which is frequently repeated in subsequent writings.
    [Show full text]