Author
A. J. Mandt
Bio: A. J. Mandt is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Environmental philosophy & Archimedean point. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.
Papers
More filters
•
TL;DR: Fichte as mentioned in this paper was the first post-philosophical thinker who successfully completed the Kantian project and substituted Wissenschaftslehre for it philosophy, the embodiment of "reason's own self-produced knowledge of itself," the articulation of a principle from which all other sciences must be, in principle, strictly "deducible."
Abstract: Today even ambitious philosophers are ironic about pretensions to wisdom. Perhaps their single most characteristic pose in this age of debunking criticism is as "conversationalists" in the "great conversation of mankind" anxious "to help the argument along." The metaphor of culture as a conversation is telling in itself. It has replaced the "enlightened" image of "the republic of letters," that lost common homeland of intellectuals. The polity of ideas has given way to the marketplace on the one hand and the "private" conversation on the other. It is, then, immensely difficult for us to understand a thinker like Fichte who saw himself as not only a sovereign citizen in the Republic of Letters, but as one of its magistrates, who perceived his thinking not as a "voice in the conversation of mankind" but as a "science of sciences," the embodiment of "reason's own self-produced knowledge of itself," the articulation of a principle from which all other sciences must be, in principle, strictly "deducible."(1) It would be utterly quixotic for a contemporary philosopher to write a Wissenschaftslehre. How, then, are we to understand the work of a thinker like Fichte? It is not just that, unfashionably by today's standards, he produced a philosophical system. Our difficulty in understanding him lies more deeply yet in the kind of system he articulated, namely, a system echoing the Cartesian ideal of a philosophy more geometrico, in which all knowledge was conceived as founded in a single, self-evident principle. Our philosophical imaginations can hardly comprehend what Fichte could have meant by saying that "every science requires a first principle," and further, that "a science can have no more than one first principle, for if it had more than one it would be several sciences instead of one."(2) Even more alien to us is Fichte's conviction that such a relentlessly theoretical enterprise as transcendental science could be necessary not only to cognition generally, but to our prospects of fulfilling our "vocation" as human beings.(3) We are closer, temperamentally, to the therapeutic philosophizing of a thinker like Wittgenstein, who held that "the real discovery is one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to,"(4) than to a thinker with Fichte's combative determination to achieve a philosophical archimedean point on which not only his system of philosophy, but the whole modern age, indeed, the fate of humanity itself, can pivot. For us, the stakes in philosophizing are less; we are more likely to anticipate the dissolution rather than the necessity of philosophizing. For us, philosophy has lost its preeminence among the attractions of civilized life. As Hegel would recognize in the years shortly after Fichte's death, for modern thinkers "their philosophy is only by the way, a sort of luxury and superfluity." Modern philosophers are no longer the "self-sufficing individualities" that ancient thinkers were, but, for the most part, academic bureaucrats, their calling sunk in "the ordinary commonplace of state or class relationships."(5) Unlike Fichte and his compatriots in the heroic age of the German Aufklarung and the French Revolution, we cannot seriously see our philosophical labors as a master key to a total transformation in human nature. Fichte's contrary, and in his day, unremarkable, attitude inevitably makes him seem archaic. It is, then, hardly possible to reflect on the tasks of philosophy as Fichte understood them without situating him in historical context. This requires not only that we stimulate some sympathy for the system building of classical German philosophy, and recollect something of the intellectual struggles of the Aufklarung, but more fundamentally that we reflect on Fichte's self-understanding of his own historical position. When we do this, the central fact that confronts us is that Fichte saw himself as, in essence, the first post-philosophical thinker, the thinker who successfully completed the Kantian project and substituted Wissenschaftslehre for "mere" philosophy, science for the aspiration to it. …
2 citations
Cited by
More filters
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss their experiences of referring to Novalis in the context of Maori postcolonialism and metaphysical philosophy, and discuss their own experiences of relating to the dead white male in a Maori perspective.
Abstract: In this paper I shall discuss my experiences of referring to Novalis in the context of Maori postcolonialism and metaphysical philosophy. As with other methods of research, from a Maori perspective one always alights on and then carries the effects of the philosopher that stands behind the method, whether the philos- opher is silent or explicit. This important onto-epistemological interaction, in a general sense, acknowledges for the indigenous person that one is always 'within' the world and not detached from it. The maligned dead white male hence unavoid- ably becomes the highly constructive, living impulse behind what is to become fresh and innovative indigenous thinking.
7 citations
01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: Schopenhauer's System of Transcendental Philosophy: An Interpretation and Defense as mentioned in this paper is a system of transcendental philosophy which is based on a theory of experience coordinated to a general theory of cognitive faculties.
Abstract: Schopenhauer’s System of Transcendental Philosophy: An Interpretation and Defense In this work is presented and defended the thesis according to which Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophical project should be understood as aiming at putting forward a system of transcendental philosophy. That system comprises a theory of experience coordinated to a general theory of cognitive faculties and to a “first principle” which we present and discuss. So understood, Schopenhauer’s philosophy exhibits a peculiar relationship of continuity with Kant’s transcendental philosophy: it inherits and reformulates Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s project as it was conceived in response to the skeptics Salomon Maimon and Gottlob Ernst Schulze, building a system of transcendental philosophy which encompasses the foundationalist ambitions of Reinhold’s project and the criticisms which that project had received, as much as some criticisms which was addressed at Kant’s theory of experience itself in the context of reception of the Critique of Pure Reason..
1 citations