Dominique Pagani sees Kant as the culmination and the summing-up of the Enlightenment. He borrows from him the division of philosophy into "what can I know?" and "what ought I to do?", as well as freedom as a postulate of practical reason1. From the Critique of Pure Reason, he retains the Copernican revolution: the subject stops being a passive mirror and becomes an active prism2. He also retains the a priori forms of space and time and the unknowability of the thing in itself. He stresses the "unbridgeable abyss" between nature and freedom. The Critique of Judgment tries to throw a fragile bridge across this abyss. He reads closely its account of reflective judgment, which in his view anticipates the unconscious, and its example of the nightingale3. He often links Kant to Rousseau, the "Newton of morality"4. He criticises Kant for a freedom that remains formal, a negative dialectic and a priori forms with no historical genesis5. Finally, he distinguishes Kant from his neo-Kantian appropriation6.
Summary produced automatically from 150 of the passages below, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the moment in the session.
Who is this?
Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher. Born in Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia, he is considered one of the central thinkers of the Enlightenment. His comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and philosophy of religion have made him one of the most influential and highly discussed figures in modern Western philosophy. […]
6:46Critique of the Power of JudgmentFirst systematic philosophical aesthetics; reflective judgment reveals a pleasure whose desire I did not know.
17:56Critique of the Power of JudgmentFormula of "finality without representation of an end"; distinction between legislation by nature and by freedom.
33:40Critique of Pure ReasonPhilosophy proceeds by concepts, mathematics by construction of concepts; the example of the triangle shows that mathematical judgment is synthetic.
1:06:54Critique of the Power of JudgmentWith the sublime he grazes the abyss and the infinite, but draws the curtain on what stirs beneath the surface.
1:38:42Formed by Newton, Hume, and Rousseau; roused from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, he seeks to account for causality.
44:36Critique of the Power of JudgmentLegislation by nature and legislation by freedom are exercised over one and the same territory: this is a peaceful coexistence.
58:23He leaves his walk only for the storming of the Bastille and for the Social Contract.
1:00:26Critique of Pure ReasonReason sees only what it produces itself; it interrogates nature as a judge: this is the Copernican revolution.
1:17:00He does not give the genesis of legislation by freedom, but he systematizes the effort of the Enlightenment.
1:42:59Critique of the Power of JudgmentReflective judgment seeks the term that determinant judgment already possesses.
0:00A mere nominal marker of modernity; the Revolution takes him out of the course of his walks.
17:03Critique of Pure ReasonChanges the subject-object relation: the subject is no longer a mirror but a prism that transforms what it receives.
31:03Critique of Pure ReasonNewton's laws hold for the phenomenon, not for the thing in itself; the phenomenon unites matter and form.
1:02:30Critique of Pure ReasonThe noumenon makes freedom possible; new criterion of truth, Copernican revolution, the judge who forces witnesses to answer.
1:37:56His limit: a subject without history or genesis, even though he discovered that time constitutes the subject.
14:23Critique of Pure ReasonHe sums up the Enlightenment century; he interrupted his regulated walk only for the storming of the Bastille and the Social Contract.
36:15Critique of Pure ReasonReading of the preface: mathematics entered the secure path of science through a revolution.
50:00Critique of Pure ReasonPhilosophy proceeds by concepts, mathematics by construction in pure intuition; space and time are pure intuitions.
1:07:08Critique of Pure ReasonReason perceives only what it itself produces: one of the most important sentences in the philosophy of science.
1:19:28Its depth lies in thinking the subject as split, unlike Comte.
8:42Critique of the Power of JudgmentThe stroller delighted by the nightingale finds his pleasure spoiled on learning that it is a mechanism, without a single note having changed.
13:54The unbridgeable abyss between the historical sciences and the natural sciences, which his last critique attempts to bridge.
43:32Critique of Pure ReasonAwakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, he wrestled with the concept of causality.
1:50:52Reason is the faculty of ends; a machine has no purpose of its own.
2:00:55The schema forms an airlock between two dichotomous entities, like number between unity and plurality.
23:13Critique of the Power of JudgmentHe distinguishes determining and reflective judgment; he also recalls the distinctions between analytic and synthetic, and between hypothetical and categorical imperative.
41:08Critique of the Power of JudgmentField, territory and domain: the faculty of knowledge legislates over two domains, nature and freedom.
57:12Critique of the Power of JudgmentAn abyss separates nature from freedom, but freedom must be realized in the sensible; the power of judgment unites the two.
1:04:51The thesis of disinterested aesthetic pleasure, which he considers to be the only error in Kant's aesthetics.
1:29:59Wherever there is man, two legislations contend over the same territory.
45:59Critique of the Power of JudgmentThe introduction distinguishes legislation by nature from legislation by freedom and seeks a bridge over the abyss between them.
55:58Critique of Pure ReasonHe humiliates reason in knowledge and rehabilitates it in morality as the faculty of ends.
58:55His limit is history: he wants to know nothing of geneses and consigns freedom to the unknowable.
1:03:11Nature and freedom dispute a single territory, that of phenomena; freedom must push nature back.
27:38Opens then closes the rationality of the human order; division between the law of nature and the legislation of freedom.
34:01Critique of the Power of JudgmentAn unbridgeable abyss separates the theoretical and the practical; the third Critique throws a bridge across it.
41:25Critique of the Power of JudgmentTwo domains, nature and freedom, legislate over the same territory, the totality of objects of a possible experience.
50:43His spatial metaphors; the common territory is the phenomenon, Erscheinung, distinct from appearance.
29:46The distinction of the senses of the verb "to be" lets him "play the gamekeeper" against those who poach in the field of knowledge.
34:20Awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume, he is caught between Newton and a science that works in fact without being grounded in right.
1:23:13He emancipates the subject of knowledge: the subject is no longer a passive mirror but a prism that transforms.
1:31:08Critique of Pure ReasonReading of the preface: the a priori, the revolution in mathematics, and the formula "reason only sees what it itself produces".
1:51:15Critique of Pure ReasonIn the transcendental aesthetic, space and time become the a priori forms of experience, supplied by the subject.
16:04Reason is the faculty of ends; the understanding is hypothetico-deductive.
33:28Sets an unbridgeable abyss between nature and the human world.
1:01:48Banishes ends from nature, places freedom in the subject; wrote on the genesis of the solar system.
1:07:06Critique of Pure ReasonDistinguishes analytic and synthetic judgments, then hypothetical imperative and categorical imperative.
1:10:49Critique of the Power of JudgmentWith reflective judgment and disinterested pleasure, he reintroduces finality and throws a bridge between pure reason and practical reason.
22:07The phenomenon, a fundamentally Kantian concept: the set of objects of a possible experience, a compromise between the real and the a priori structure of knowledge.
28:03Critique of Pure ReasonThe transcendental aesthetic: space and time as a priori forms; the thing in itself is neither in space nor in time, hence freedom.
36:57The phenomenon is the whole of appearance; totality is the synthesis of unity and plurality in the table of categories.
1:23:57Freedom is a postulate of practical reason.
19:23Crowning achievement of the Aufklärung, he distinguishes understanding and reason.
59:36Critique of Pure ReasonPhilosophy of the faculties: sensibility, understanding, reason; reason, humiliated in knowledge, is rehabilitated in action.
1:43:17Never went beyond his walk except for the storming of the Bastille and the translation of the Social Contract.
6:45He posits an impassable abyss between the domain of legislation by nature and that of legislation by freedom.
1:07:20Objectivity in the Kantian sense: what holds for all subjects.
1:16:07Critique of Pure ReasonIf all knowledge begins with experience, it does not all derive from experience; he sets empiricist and idealist back to back.
13:16One of the greatest epistemologists; his doctrine of the faculties distinguishes sensibility, understanding and reason.
28:59Critique of Practical ReasonHe distinguishes the hypothetical imperative from the categorical imperative through the example of the merchant who scrupulously returns the correct change.
8:33Critique of Pure ReasonKant asks how the sciences of nature, already real with Newton, are possible; the title of the cycle inverts his question.
29:19Critique of the Power of JudgmentHis testament, where reflective judgment shows that the beautiful reveals our desires to us.
53:29He almost definitively ruins the hope of raising philosophy on the model of the hard sciences.
55:32Critique of Pure ReasonThe example of the triangle distinguishes philosophy, which proceeds by concepts, from mathematics, which constructs its concepts in intuition; hence the critique of dogmatism.
1:38:58For him Newton's physics is real; the problem of the cycle is the reverse.
33:40He formulated the questions "what can I know?" and "what must I do?", which divide theoretical philosophy from practical philosophy.
50:00Critique of the Power of JudgmentThe introduction distinguishes legislation by the concept of nature and legislation by freedom; causality turns out to be a metaphysical concept there.
2:21Cited in disputes between philosophers, against Hegel.
44:41Crowning achievement of the Enlightenment, he sums up philosophy's program in "what can I know?", "what must I do?", "what am I permitted to hope?".
5:58He borrows from him the division between "what can I know?" and "what must I do?".
17:01Critique of Practical ReasonFor Kant, freedom is a postulate of practical reason, that is, of the reason that answers the question "what must I do?".
11:07Critique of Pure ReasonDistinction between understanding and reason; the questions "what can I know?", "what must I do?"; theoretical reason and practical reason.
32:30The schema, a deep and difficult concept, is like an airlock: homogeneous to two apparently incompatible things, the outside and the inside; the edge resembles it.
24:13Critique of Practical ReasonKantian morality cannot tame civil society; he brings the political back to the moral, the objective to the subjective.
25:44Critique of the Power of JudgmentHegel advised students to start over with it.
33:35Draws again on Holy Scripture on lying as absolute evil.
1:21:07As severe as the apostle; against Benjamin Constant, lying is never justifiable.
1:25:55Groundwork of the Metaphysics of MoralsThe Bible dates the entry of evil not from Cain's fratricide but from the first lie; the devil is the primal liar.
1:15:37Critique of the Power of JudgmentThe pleasure taken in the nightingale's song vanishes if one learns it is an automaton: proof that nature is a fantasy.
37:24He learned to identify the antinomies that arise as soon as one is not dialectical.
1:12:10Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind: Clouscard overcomes this dichotomy through the adequacy of image and concept.
1:19:38Critique of the Power of JudgmentHis most complete text, and the most pregnant with future significance.
2:19Critique of the Power of JudgmentThe crisis of the philosophy of knowledge and the division made in the introduction to the third Critique.
26:36Reflected his whole life on causality, as if he sensed that only a subject can be a cause.
30:38The term "postulate of freedom" is taken from him.
34:18Critique of Pure ReasonNegative knowledge of the noumenon, without space or time; distinction between knowing and thinking; "I have had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith."
9:32Philosopher of liberty, whose thought corresponds to revolutionary reality.
1:35:32Critique of the Power of JudgmentHe reduces totality to interaction, but the kingdom of ends is an intelligible community; Pagani calls the Frankfurt school 'Kant minus the critique of judgment.'
1:52:03Critique of the Power of JudgmentDistinguishes determining judgment and reflective judgment: aesthetic pleasure satisfies a desire we know nothing about, and Kant is on the verge of discovering the unconscious.
5:51Revered by the young men of Tübingen, who refuse the clerical appropriation of his rationalism.
14:13Critique of Practical ReasonOpens the way to a solution: Newtonian knowledge is determined, the question "what must I do?" presupposes freedom as a postulate.
33:28Distinction between understanding and reason, which Hegel deepens.
41:47Critique of the Power of JudgmentPays tribute to Rousseau in the third critique, which seeks the synthesis between what can I know and what ought I to do.
Season 8 · 9 Jul 2020#13 • Return to the logics of the subject
