[PDF] Impure Reason eBook

Author : D. C. Schindler
Publisher : CUA Press
Page : 374 pages
File Size : 13,60 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 081321534X

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Plato's Critique of Impure Reason offers a dramatic interpretation of the Republic, at the center of which lies a novel reading of the historical person of Socrates as the "real image" of the good

Author : Steven James Bartlett
Publisher : Studies in Theory and Behavior
Page : 886 pages
File Size : 27,62 MB
Release : 2021-09-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0578886464

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The Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the massive work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new Critique focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ conflict with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge. This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful. The Critique of Impure Reason proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of possible meaning are determined. Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, metalogical projection. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the Critique of Impure Reason develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems. CONTENTS AT A GLANCE Preface Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Acknowledgments Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call Introduction A note to the reader A note on conventions PART I WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude 2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic 3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference 4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality PART II THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy 5 Reference, identity, and identification 6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference 7 Possibility theory 8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification 9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference 10 Framework relativity 11 The metalogic of meaning 12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness 13 Projection 14 Horizons 15 De-projection 16 Self-validation 17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility PART III PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference 19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics 20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side” 21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism 22 The projections of time, space, and space-time 23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will 24 Projections of the self and of solipsism 25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields 26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference 27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference 28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory PART IV HORIZONS 29 Beyond belief 30 Critique of Impure Reason: Its results in retrospect SUPPLEMENT The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference APPENDIX I: The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers APPENDIX II: Epistemological Intelligence References Index About the author

Author : W. Daniel Wilson
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 508 pages
File Size : 29,4 MB
Release : 1993
Category : History
ISBN : 9780814324967

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Based on the premise that the modem discourse of enlightenment and its self-critique began in the eighteenth century, Impure Reason provides a fresh look at the controversy through cultural, social, and political history, confronting the often abstract theories of a dialectics of enlightenment with concrete historical studies of the Age of Enlightenment. This volume brings together current research on the German Enlightenment in order to familiarize an American audience with the period that gave rise to Lessing, Kant, and Goethe-as well as to other important figures who are practically unknown outside of German studies. Leading scholars on eighteenth-century German society, politics, literature, and culture bring a uniquely American perspective to the project, with critiques that generally have not been voiced in Germany. Their essays, which represent a wide range of attitudes toward enlightenment, cover topics as varied as the debate on colonialism; the difficulties of diversity; the use and abuse of reading; male sexuality in enlightenment self-critique; medicine, patriarchy, and heterosexuality; art and social discipline; disturbed mourning and the Enlightenment's flight from the body; and women possessed by the devil. Modem critics and defenders of enlightenment who are discussed in the essays include Horkheimer and Adorno (who are themselves subjected to a genderbased critique), Jurgen Habermas, Jean-Franvois Lyotard, Manfred Frank, Richard Rorty, and Christa Wolf. Impure Reason will interest scholars in German studies, gender studies, history, philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, and other fields. The volume will also help introduce scholars and other interested readers outside the area of German studies to the particularly German tradition of Enlightenment critique and its status today.

Author : Anne Munz
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 48,19 MB
Release : 1999-02-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1567508707

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Thanks to the enormous progress of neuroscience over the past few decades, we can now monitor the passage of initial stimulations to certain points in the brain. In spite of these findings, however, subjective consciousness still remains an unsolved mystery. This volume exposes neuroscience and cognitive science to philosophical analysis and proposes that we think of our conscious states of mind as a composite phenomenon consisting of three layers: neuronal events, somatic markers, and explicit consciousness. While physics and chemistry can and have been successfully employed to describe the causal relation between the first two layers, the further step to articulate consciousness is purely interpretative and points to the preponderant importance of language. Language is essential for the transformation of inchoate, not very informative somatic markers and mere moods into full consciousness and appraised emotion. Munz uses literary examples to shift our understanding of the mind away from computational models and to show how eloquence about our states of mind is manufactured rather than caused. He firmly rejects the efforts of both Freud and non-Freudian psychologists to find a scientific explanation for such manufacture and to make a science out of the eloquence of folk psychology. Instead he argues that the many ways eloquence is being manufactured to transform somatic markers into conscious states of mind are best accounted for in terms of Wittgenstein's conception of language games. This volume challenges most current thinking about consciousness and mind and will appeal to philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and linguists.

Author : Thomas McCarthy
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 36,8 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262631457

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These lucid and closely reasoned studies of the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, J�rgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty provide a coherent analysis of major pathways in recent critical theory. They defend a position analogous to Kant's - that ideas of reason are both unavoidable presuppositions of thought that have to be carefully reconstructed and persistent sources of illusions that have to be repeatedly deconstructed.McCarthy examines the critique of impure reason from the complementary viewpoints of the attackers and defenders of Enlightenment rationality. He first analyzes the work of Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida to determine what these radical critics have contributed to our understanding of reason and where they have gone wrong. He explores Habermas's theory of communicative rationality, focusing on the attempt to go beyond hermeneutics, the incorporation of systems theory, the implications of discourse ethics for our understanding of political debate and collective decision making, and the relation of political theology to critical social theory.Thomas McCarthy is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of The MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. The analysis and assessment of Habermas's recent work in Ideals and Illusions serves as a sequel to his earlier study The Critical Theory of J�rgen Habermas.

Author : Scott Aikin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 17,39 MB
Release : 2010-11-23
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1136841903

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In the last decade, the familiar problem of the regress of reasons has returned to prominent consideration in epistemology. And with the return of the problem, evaluation of the options available for its solution is begun anew. Reason’s regress problem, roughly put, is that if one has good reasons to believe something, one must have good reason to hold those reasons are good. And for those reasons, one must have further reasons to hold they are good, and so a regress of reasons looms. In this new study, Aikin presents a full case for infinitism as a response to the problem of the regress of reasons. Infinitism is the view that one must have a non-terminating chain of reasons in order to be justified. The most defensible form of infinitism, he argues, is that of a mixed theory – that is, epistemic infinitism must be consistent with and integrate other solutions to the regress problem.

Author : Immanuel Kant
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 178 pages
File Size : 41,33 MB
Release : 2012-06-11
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0486113027

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This 1788 work, based on belief in the immortality of the soul, established Kant as a vindicator of the truth of Christianity. It offers the most complete statement of his theory of free will.

Author : George W. Harris
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 9 pages
File Size : 26,24 MB
Release : 2006-07-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1139457136

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Reason's Grief takes W. B. Yeats's comment that we begin to live only when we have conceived life as tragedy as a call for a tragic ethics, something the modern West has yet to produce. Harris argues that we must turn away from religious understandings of tragedy and the human condition and realize that our species will occupy a very brief period of history, at some point to disappear without a trace. We must accept an ethical perspective that avoids pernicious fantasies about ultimate redemption but that sees tragic loss as a permanent and pervasive aspect of our daily lives, yet finds a way to think, feel and act with both passion and hope. Reason's Grief takes us back through the history of our thinking about value to find our way. The call is for nothing less than a paradigm shift for understanding both tragedy and ethics.

Author : M. F. Burnyeat
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 27,50 MB
Release : 2012-06-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0521750725

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The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.