The Self-Conscious, Thinking Subject: A Kantian Contribution to Reestablishing Reason in a Post-Truth Age

ISBN-13: 9783030795566 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 339 str.

Robert Abele

Spis treści

1. The Primacy of Judgment.

2. Judgment.

3. Synthesis: The Common Form of Judgment and Perception.

4. Synthesis and the Forms of Judgment in Perception.

5. The Unity of Cognition in the Synthetic Unity of Apperception.

6. The Drawbacks of Empirical Metaphoric Reductionism.

7. The Politics of Negative Ontology: Postmodernism.

O autorze

Robert Abele is Professor of Philosophy at Diablo Valley College, USA. He is the author of A User's Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice (2012).  

Blurb

This book argues that the primary function of human thinking in language is to make judgments, which are logical-normative connections of concepts. Robert Abele points out that this presupposes cognitive conditions that cannot be accounted for by empirical-linguistic analyses of language content or social conditions alone. Judgments rather assume both reason and a unified subject, and this requires recognition of a Kantian-type of transcendental dimension to them. Judgments are related to perception in that both are syntheses, defined as the unity of representations according to a rule/form. Perceptual syntheses are simultaneously pre-linguistic and proto-rational, and the understanding (Kant’s Verstand) makes these syntheses conceptually and thus self-consciously explicit.  Abele concludes with a transcendental critique of postmodernism and what its deflationary view of ontological categories—such as the unified and reasoning subject—has done to political thinking. He presents an alternative that calls for a return to normativity and a recognition of reason, objectivity, and the universality of principles.

Robert Abele is Professor of Philosophy at Diablo Valley College, USA. He is the author of A User's Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act (2005); The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq (2009); and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Global Justice (2012).