18th-century German philosophy

Ein Gemeinplatz der modernen Ästhetik besteht darin, dass sich die Produktivität des Künstlers einem entfesselten Gebrauch seiner Einbildungskraft verdankt. Nach dieser Vorstellung kann der Künstler neue Werke hervorbringen, weil er sich der assoziativen Kraft seiner Einbildungskraft überlässt. Als eine historische Quelle für die Auffassung, dass der Künstler in der Verwendung seiner Einbildungskraft von zwingenden Regeln frei ist, wird dabei oft Kants Genietheorie des Künstlers angesehen. Kant wird damit als Opponent der Regelpoetik Gottscheds und Vorbereiter der Genieauffassung der Romantik wahrgenommen. Tatsächlich stellt die Auffassung, dass das künstlerische Genie seine Einbildungskraft frei von begrifflichen Zwängen ausübt, einen wichtigen Teil von Kants Theorie der schönen Kunst dar. Wie sich jedoch leicht feststellen lässt, schreibt Kant dem schöne Kunst hervorbringenden Genie keine absolute Freiheit im Gebrauch der Einbildungskraft zu. Im Folgenden beschäftige ich mich mit den Beschränkungen, denen die Einbildungskraft des Genies trotz der ihr zugeschriebenen Freiheit laut der Kunsttheorie der Kritik der Urteilskraft unterworfen ist.

Los "Prolegómenos " de la Aesthetica (1750-1758) de Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten se ofrecen aquí en latín y español.  Primera traducción parcial de esta obra capital de la filosofía moderna, que define y fundamenta el campo de esta disciplina, recogida luego en Estética breve (prólogo, selección, traducción y notas de Ricardo Ibarlucía, Buenos Aires, Excursus, 2014).

Kant interpreters are divided on the question of whether determinate cognition plays a role in the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic judgement. I provide a 'non-cognitive' interpretation that allows Kant's statements regarding judgements of natural beauty to cohere such that determinate cognition need not be taken to perform any role in such judgements. I argue that, in aesthetic harmony, judgement privileges the free activity of the imagination over the cognizing function of the understanding for the purpose of unifying the object, although the free imagination cannot violate the obscure concepts and principles of ordinary common sense.

Luigi Imperato
The Limits of the Reason and Possibilities of the Philosophy
Keywords: Teleology, System, Limits, Reason, Freedom

The philosophy is, according to Kant, a kind of knowledge ex principiis of systematic nature. The system is an all complete in itself, namely an organic whole. In many places in his work, however, Kant also states that philosophy, as a mere idea of a complete science, never occurs in practice. This contradiction is explained by the fact that philosophy is indeed a whole as a system of principles of knowledge a priori, but, on the one hand, it can not know reality in its ultimate foundations, and on the other hand, it can order the experience on the basis of the intellectual concepts only formaliter, and not also materialiter. The limits of reason are the cause of incompleteness of philosophy, which must stop in front of the supersensible, even if this stop is also an opening to the same supersensible. The concept of the system has then not only theoretical implications, but also practical: the philosophy, as system of pure reason, is a teleologia rationis humanae. The concepts of a organic totality involved by the idea of system allows such a transition from the theoretical to the practical consideration. The fulfillment of the system as teleologia rationis humanae is so constituted by the moral, where the opening to the theoretical concept of the supersensible takes shape thanks to the concept of freedom, even if it remains unattainable in terms of knowledge.

In § 42 of the third Critique, ‘On the intellectual interest in the beautiful,’ Kant claims that it is ‘always the mark of a good soul’ (5:298) to take an ‘immediate interest’ in natural beauty because it indicates a moral interest in harmony between nature and moral freedom. In the same pages, however, he denies the possibility of a similarly morally significant interest in artistic beauty. This paper argues that according to his own theory of fine art Kant ought not to deny this value to artistic beauty. In the pages that immediately follow his discussion of immediate interest Kant defines artistic beauty as the joint product of a ‘natural gift’ of genius and a freely exercised discipline of skill and taste. This commits him to the claim that artistic beauty embodies and expresses a harmony between nature and freedom in the productive act of a human being, and thus to the claim that one can take an immediate and morally significant interest in artistic beauty, just as much as in natural beauty.

Hegel aura vécu dans une période de bouleversements historiques successifs, qui ont eu une influence certaine sur sa philosophie, de l’Esprit comme de l’histoire ou de la politique, en tant que spectateur éclairé : la Révolution Française est parmi ceux-là, et elle aura marqué la réflexion et la philosophie hégelienne jusqu’à ses derniers écrits. La Phénoménologie de l’Esprit a au sein de cette réflexion, disséminée dans l’œuvre hégelienne, une place importante, parce qu’elle marque le premier écrit véritablement critique de cette époque, se distanciant ainsi de l’enthousiasme que l’esprit révolutionnaire avait suscité chez le jeune Hegel, comme chez de nombreux intellectuels de son temps.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YZYRRACGABSQBQTCC6J2/full?target=10.1080/01916599.2022.2064603

In this article, I develop the concept and practice of ‘listening to difference,’ examining J.G. Herder’s aural theory of cultural diversity as primarily worked out in the ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772). I examine the sources Herder critiqued to outline his aural theory of linguistic and cultural difference, which have thus far only been summarily mentioned if at all in scholarship despite the prominence of the ‘Treatise’ in intellectual history and philosophy. These sources comprise the travelogues of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French scientists, mathematicians, diplomats, and Jesuit missionaries who described the inadequacy of Romanized orthography to accurately transcribe the sounds and pronunciations of the indigenous peoples they encountered throughout the Americas, Thailand, and China. Herder’s critical readings of travelogues showcased the unintended failures and interruptions in European colonial practices of listening.

I argue that it was the French travellers’ failure to erase difference, to transform it into identity or, in other words, into a universalist monolingualism, which produced a consciousness of cultural and linguistic difference, even if repressed. The sounds of the spoken indigenous languages exposed the limits of the paradigms of Catholic and European linguistic classification. Instead, the exemplary technologies for preserving difference in scriptural and listening practices were for Herder the Hebrew alphabet and the oral transmission of poetry in ancient and Indigenous cultures.

Listening to difference, as I define it, involves an openness to listening to the voices and sounds of the othered by listeners who recognize their distinct situated, embodied positionalities. It offers alternate possibilities to conceive of human diversity as continually in formation and not as a static or progressive hierarchy.

Case studies in postcolonial contextualization mark a forty-year-old missiolog-ical trend in evangelical scholarship. The largely unqualified support of indigenous theological expression by mission theorists represents an epistemological shift from a conservative bibliology toward felt-needs evangelization and religious roundtable dialogue methods. Evangelical contextualization theory today echoes German Ro-manticism's early assessments of indigenous language and local religion, especially as seen in the works of pluralistic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). No study of postcolonial contextualization is complete without considering the enduring influence of Herder's " vernacular consciousness " on the current missiological mindset.

This 'Introductory Essay' is intended for those who are about to make their first acquaintance with Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason', who perhaps know little or nothing about the life of the author, nor of the place that his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ has in the history of thought. It will not provide many facts of interest for those already far advanced with their studies of Kant or professors who already appreciate all of the fascinating differences between the first and second editions of Kant’s masterwork. Nor will it teach much to authors who have penned commentaries and text-books on the complex discussions of Time and Space, the Permanence of Substance and the Synthetic Unity of Apperception. However, it will hopefully give some taste of the depth and brilliance of Kant's immortal volume. It can introduce those who are unfamiliar with Kant to a few facts about his life and to some of the ideas with which he excited the thinking community at large, to the extent that his work is still of significance today. Available in a second download from academia.edu is the 'Editor's Note' extracted from the same volume, and that extract explains the significance of Francis Heywood's first English translation of the 'Critique' (also appearing as part of the introductory matter).

Abstract - The overall intention of this dissertation is to put forth every aspect by which Lessing’s work belongs to the philosophical field. Thus we must not only study the metaphysical fragments or the great texts on esthetics, but recognize in the theological, critical, erudite, even literary writings, what indeniably makes them philosophical as well. Though Lessing is no "systematical thinker", it remains very instructive looking for common problems running across his whole work: indeed his interrogations concerning truth, history and the individual constitute heuristic links between the different fields Lessing has dedicated himself to deal with.
Yet what is truly philosophical in Lessing is not only to be found in « themes » : focusing on style and art of writing leads to ask how strategies of polemical, dialogical and « gymnastical » nature are at work in Lessing’s writings. As a result of this, we can defend that it is in the very conception Lessing himself has of philosophy that he founds this singular praxis in the art of writing - a praxis which is philosophical in itself.
Nevertheless this praxis contains a double paradox : one might pretend the theoretical stand Lessing takes on philosophy would tend to contradict his actual philosophical praxis. On the one hand metaphysics, which he devalues in theory, still provokes an interest and efforts he never denied. Practical philosophy on the other hand, which he claimes to be the « only legitimate philosophy », shoud appear not to have the corresponding rank in his actual work. Yet our study tries for the central category of an « ethics of truth », as a possible way to build a common solution for both paradoxes. This is what leads us to consider the position of the individual regarding truth as one essential and constant issue of Lessing's philosophical effort. Moreover the way Lessing finally develops philosophy as a philosophy of history is another way to deal with the second paradox.
Annexes to the dissertation ( though not to find in the published version) add french translations of the fragment-texts by Lessing which occured to be essential to our study."""

Although its origins stem from theological debates, the general will would ultimately become one of the most celebrated and denigrated concepts emerging from early modern political thought.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau would make it the central element of his political theory, and it would take on a life of its own during the French Revolution before being subjected to generations of embrace or opprobrium.  James Farr and David Lay Williams have collected for the first time a set of essays that track the evolving history of the general will from its origins to recent times.  These essays include attention to the general will’s theological, political, formal, and substantive dimensions with a careful eye to the concept’s virtues and limitations as understood by its expositors and critics, among them Pascal, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and John Rawls.

"The definitive scholarly edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s philosophical aphorisms.

Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist. An eminent experimental physicist and mathematician, Lichtenberg was knowledgeable about the philosophical views of his time, and interested in uncovering the philosophical commitments that underlie our common beliefs. In his notebooks (which he called his Waste Books) he often reflects on, challenges, and critiques these philosophical commitments and the dominant views of the Enlightenment, German idealism, and British empiricism. This scholarly collection of Lichtenberg’s philosophical aphorisms contains hundreds of trenchant observations drawn from these notebooks, many of which have been translated into English here for the first time. It also includes a historical and philosophical introduction to his writings, situating him in the history of philosophy and ideas, and is supplemented with a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and extensive introductory and textual notes explaining his references.

“This is a great project by an extremely knowledgeable translator. Tester does a fine job making the case for Lichtenberg and explaining his thinking.” — Carl Niekerk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Steven Tester is a joint PhD candidate in philosophy at Humboldt University in Berlin and in German at Northwestern University."

Anton Wilhelm Amo: an African philosopher in Early Modern Europe
Preliminary program
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg [29-31 October 2018]
Organized by Dwight Lewis (University of South Florida) and Falk Wunderlich (MLU Halle)

* Special thanks to Falk Wunderlich for all his work!!!

This is a substantively revised and expanded version of a previous draft. In this version, I present an overview of the important contributions to the literature constituting the querelle des femmes by German writers in the 16th and 17th centuries, and provide an analysis of Erxleben’s Rigorous Investigation, making the case for its importance as a contribution within the querelle but also show that it holds significant interest within the history of 18th century German philosophy more broadly.

Leibniz’s influence on philosophy in Germany during the eighteenth century is extensive in almost every respect – it is both wide and deep. The new definitions of clarity and distinctness he proposes in the Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas deserve special attention, because they played a role in so many different parts of German philosophy. In this chapter, I will track the role these definitions played from Leibniz’s metaphysics to Wolff’s logic and metaphysics, Baumgarten’s aesthetics, and Kant’s critical philosophy. Although the reign of clear and distinct ideas in German philosophy came to an end when Kant and his followers began to argue that clarity and distinctness could not explain the distinction between sensibility and the understanding; the relationship between concepts and objects; or the validity of judgments about truth and beauty, I will argue that they preserved the systematic connection between metaphysics, logic, and aesthetics that had been established by Wolff and Baumgarten using the concepts of clarity and distinctness.

This paper is designed to show how Hölderlin’s requirement to build a modern poetics stems from Kant’s Critique of Judgment, particularly in establishing a fruitful relationship between philosophy and poetry. Hölderlin will find here the necessary philosophical discourse to found a typically modern poetics, able to do justice to the greatness of the ancient Greek poetry, especially where genius and the a priori principle of taste are related. For Hölderlin, the greatness of modern poetry is dependent upon the establishment of “calculable law,” or poetry logos, i.e., its properly, “a priori” rational element, wherein the poet is not a merely exalted genius beside himself but a creator who needs to found his creation in the understanding in such a way that he is able to pass it on to the upcoming generations.

From John Noyes' "Introduction" to the book, Herder's essay on being:
In “Herder’s Kantian Critique of Kant on the Concept of Being,” his examination of Herder’s epistemological foundations in the Essay on Being, Nigel DeSouza reads Herder’s first philosophical piece as a clarion
call to philosophers to a new way of understanding human nature, laying out the epistemological foundation of his early philosophical anthropol- ogy. First, DeSouza demonstrates how Herder, drawing on the cutting-edge insights of his mentor, Kant, as well as Crusius, formulates the first of several of his critiques from the 1760s of the rationalist Schulphilosophie of Wolff and Baumgarten, in which philosophy is straitjacketed into a top-down conception of knowledge, whose object is clear and distinct concepts and the logical order among them. DeSouza then turns to the positive ideas that emerge from this critique, and the role they play in his early philosophical anthropology. The objective is to illustrate how the central epistemological idea of the Essay on Being—that human nature, by virtue of its limits, has a bottom-up mode of knowledge that is grounded in the senses—connects with the young Herder’s metaphysical convictions about the soul-body relationship, especially his belief in soul-body interaction, as worked out in other writings from the 1760s. The emphasis throughout is on the striking originality of Herder’s particular conception of a holistic understanding of human nature.

What is it that makes a mental state conscious? Recent commentators have proposed that for Kant, consciousness results from differentiation: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is distinguished, by means of our conceptual capacities, from other states and/or things. I argue instead that Kant's conception of state consciousness is sensory: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is accompanied by an inner sensation. Interpreting state consciousness as inner sensation reveals an underappreciated influence of Crusius on Kant's view, solves some long-standing puzzles concerning Kant's difficult doctrine of self-affection, and sheds light on his theory of inner experience.

In the A-preface of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant kindly warns his readers to pay special attention to the chapter on the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” Looking to mitigate the reader’s effort, Kant goes on to explain the chapter’s methodology, suggesting that the inquiry will have “two sides.” One side deals with the “objective validity” of the pure categories of the understanding; he calls this the “objective deduction.” The other deals with the powers of cognition on which the understanding rests; he calls this the “subjective deduction.” Having gone to such great lengths to outline his method ahead of time, it comes as no small surprise that the actual chapter offers no clear indication of where the two deductions are located. In this essay, I address this puzzle. On the way, I engage with both traditional and recent interpretations of the subjective deduction, arguing that they fail—in one way or another—to satisfy the criteria that Kant develops in the preface.

In 1755, the renowned German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), then at his early thirties, with no major publications at hand, released a lengthy treatise on cosmogony, entitled 'Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels' (Universal Natural History and Theory of Heavens). This work did not however find its way into the hands of public, as its publisher went bankrupt and Kant, unfortunately enough on his own side, then hesitated to reflect further on his cosmological ideas; leading this essay to be forgotten in a century of silence. The treatise was written in German (that is, Kant decided to address the public audience), but at the same year, he also released a Latin work as a requisite for his academic credentials, entitled New Elucidation of the First Principles in Metaphysical Cognition; and less than a year later, another one entitled The Employment in Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, of which Sample I Contain the Physical Monadology. The present major project is an attempt to re-evaluate Kant’s earlier work in cosmogony, hermeneutically, in the light of these two technical works in metaphysics, as well as the context of his philosophico-theological discussions of German rationalism as early as the early-1750s. I believe that Kant’s novel interpretation of some apparently classical concepts reverberating throughout Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, like chaos, perfection, and density, when interpreted in their proper context, would reveal the essence of modern approaches to cosmology. I would take Laplace’s role in the so-called Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis, as a case of a post-Newtonian, but as much classical as a Newtonian, model of structure-formation as a reliable measure in our evaluation of Kant’s share in the originality of this hypothesis. In the philosophical side, I believe, Kant’s treatment of the problem of Divine intervention, especially in the physical works of Newton, Leibniz, and Kant’s contemporary physico-theologians led to some outstanding achievements in articulating the physical and metaphysical necessities entailed in our knowledge of an ordered universe. So, this project tries to bring Kant’s conviction of his venture in cosmology into proper light, and provide an account of the metaphysical groundings upon which he transcended the Newtonianism of 17th and 18th centuries, and managed to formulate a rational cosmogony in a purely physical sense.  It seems to me that the tone in which Kant wrote his so-called pre-critical works in natural science implies a persisting presence of a transcendental element as early as the mid-1750s, which was formulated in its proper terminology, only within the framework of his critical work of the early-1780s up through the end of his life. This major project is concluded with a survey of Kant’s enduring arguments for the groundwork of a rational cosmology and science in general, and a circumstantial discussion of the modern accounts of a teleological universe (as exemplified in the so-called anthropic principle, or the fine-tuning arguments), supplemented with an account of Kant’s reaction to the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which provides us an insightful outline of his intellectual independence.

Giorgio Tonelli and Norbert Hinske showed that sources of the German Aristotelianism are necessary to clear the Kantian use of the term "transcendental", but they could not find a direct source. Thanks to new evidences, the Author proposes Franz Albert Aepinus as this often searched for "missing link" On this basis, the Kantian transcendental philosophy is interpreted as an answer to the structural problem of the Scholastic transcendental philosophy: the necessity and impossibility of a prepredicative plane.

Based on numerous echoes to the text in the Bohemian lands, their contextualization and subsequent analysis, I will try to point out its ambivalent character and its purposeful interpretations, both in the Czech and German-language environmen. Taking into account other paratexts that accompanied this "canonical" text (such as comments, translations or adaptations) I specify its scope in the fiction and journalism and professional (scientific) production and emphasize its updating potential (I. Cornova, V. F. Durych, J. Dobrovský, J. Jungmann, A. Jungmann, J. Kollár, A. Smetana etc.)
(only in Czech)

The International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ISECS) is pleased to announce the 2018 International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars. Colleagues from all fields of eighteenth-century studies are invited to submit abstracts for this one-week event. Formerly called the East-West Seminar, the International Seminar for Early Career Eighteenth-Century Scholars brings together young researchers from a number of countries each year. The 2018 meeting will take place in Viterbo, Italy and will be organized by Prof. Francesca Saggini and the Dipartimento di studi linguistico-letterari, storico-filosofici e giuridici – DISTU.
The seminar will be held from Monday, September 10 to Friday, September 14, 2018 in Viterbo.

The 2018 ISECS International Seminar for Early Career Scholars will engage discussions on the forms, representations and modalities of silence in the eighteenth century.
Silence, of individuals and cultures, of the physical voice or of the written word and information deleted from the page, has historically taken many forms. It may be reticent, dissembling or imposed by others. Voluntary or coerced, it might be the silence of women, of marginal social and religious groups, of communities that are denied the right to speak. There are other silences as well: the interruption of sound in a musical pause and the silence of religious practices, which speak to, and of, the inner life. All these forms of silence were present in the eighteenth century, as they had been throughout history, but perhaps for the first time, some of them were singled out for special scrutiny. Works on aesthetics, for example, investigated the use of silence and the implicit in rhetorical writing, or dwelled on reverie, and how it might be induced in the reader. In rhetoric, attention was paid to discursive figures and strategies capable of making silence more eloquent than the word. Conduct books devoted many pages to the art of conversation, emphasising the essential role of silence to ensure the correctness of social interactions, especially for women, but also for politicians. Censorship – whether institutional or self-imposed – also produces silences, as do the more or less conscious failures of memory found in life writing and in historical discourse: one need only think of the revisions required to write the history of colonialism, wars or slavery. Eighteenth-century historiography attempted to remove some of the silences it found in history, often filling in the lacunae through conjecture. Silence is also represented in the visual arts and, signally, in the novel, which devised new narrative techniques for the purpose, whether to evoke the silences in characters’ conversations, and the contexts and landscapes in which silence reigns (a hallmark of the picturesque, for example), or to leave the reader in suspense by strategically withholding information. And then there is the theatre, where after the triumph of pantomime and the illegitimate spectacles that deployed a hybridized combination of body, speech, stage machinery and lighting effects, the century comes to a close with the rise of melodrama, which replaced the spoken word with music and revolutionised the notion of acting as the art of speech, while giving new prominence to silent characters and heroes. Finally, there is the silence that becomes firmly and widely established in the eighteenth century through the practice of reading narrative texts for oneself, replacing the social activity of reading aloud for a group of listeners with a solitary, interiorized experience. On these and other silences, on silence in all its forms and meanings in the eighteenth century, the seminar calls for contributions. The theme of the conference, “Silence in eighteenth-century arts, history and philosophy,” must thus be understood in the broadest terms possible to include:


- anonymity
- silence, reflection, meditation
- social silence, silence and social interaction
- negation: denials, disclaimers, disavowals
- silence and secrets
- censorship and self-censorship
- ellipses, omissions, blank pages, hyphens, asterisks – the typographical and linguistic modes of silence
- ghost chapters (deleted, lost, rewritten)
- silenced characters, characters that disappear
- quiet spaces: the loci of silence
- reading and silence
- silence as resistance and rebellion
- scripting silence and muteness
- the performativity of silence
- silence and the canon
- silence and history
- silence in relation to cultural memory studies
- silence and/as remembrance

The seminar is limited to 15 participants. The proposals (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words) should be based on an original research project (e.g. a doctoral dissertation) which addresses one of the aspects mentioned above. Because this is a seminar rather than a conference, each participant will be given approximately one hour to present the texts and questions that will then form the basis of a group discussion led in turn by one of the participants. Preference will be given to scholars who are at the beginning of their academic career (ABD; PhD or equivalent for less than six years, including ECRs). The official languages of the seminar are English, Italian, French. Translations of abstracts and various seminar materials not in English will be made available to participants.

Applications should include the following information: a brief curriculum vitae with date of PhD (or equivalent); a list of principal publications and scholarly presentations; a brief description of the proposed paper (approx. 3 pages, double-spaced, max 1,000 words); and one letter of recommendation. Colleagues are invited to submit proposals by January 31, 2018. Please send abstracts by e-mail to Francesca Saggini: fsaggini@unitus.it, ccing into the conversation Alberta Boschi alberta.boschi@gmail.com . If your email programme supports the delivery receipt option we encourage you to request delivery receipt. We will attempt to notify all correspondents before February 28, 2018 regarding the status of their submission