Current issue

This article is devoted to the problem of the possibility of experience in transcendental idealism. In its classical formulation by Kant, the problem pertains to the correlation between a priori structures of reason and reality. I approach the question of the conditions of the possibility of experience in an alternative way, i.e. as a question about the conditions of its unity, while remaining within the framework of transcendental idealism. The purport of this investigation is to demonstrate how the problem of the unity of experience permeates the problem of the transcendental conditions of its possibility. Proceeding from Kant’s correspondence, the Critique of Pure Reason, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and some modern conceptions of consciousness, I reconstruct the transcendental model of experience in terms of the conditions of its coherence. This model includes the systematic unity of the properties of objects, which is the flip side of the rational unity of cognizing reason. Important conditions of the unity of experiential data are their connectedness due to the homogeneity of time and space (non-empirical intuition), and the organizing work of the a priori forms of sensing, which creates the sequence and coordination of phenomena. The activity of transcendental schemes is described as a more complex, synthetic condition of the unity of experience; as modified forms of spatio-temporal representation, they mediate categories and phenomena, being “homogeneous” with both. At the top of the activity of reason is the most problematic level of the unity of experience, on which intuitions are ordered in accordance with a priori categories. The following conditions of the homogeneity of experience are assessed as being original and going beyond the epistemological problematics: 1) the homogeneity of the consciousness of external things and self-consciousness, and 2) the unity of experience created by the end-goals of the pure application of reason. In conclusion, I examine Kant’s hypothesis that the transcendental affinity of phenomena creates the homogeneity of mental acts, and that objective reality is the key and most telling prerequisite of the homogeneity of experience.

In this article I propose a reconstruction of the link between the concept of the system of philosophy as “the history of self-consciousness” put forward by Schelling in the treatise The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), and one of the key elements of the Kantian critical philosophy, the teaching on the transcendental ideal. Differentiating three meanings of the term “history” in The System, I concentrate on the broadest of these meanings which describes the system as a whole and is expressed by the topos “odyssey of the spirit”. Based on Petr Rezvykh’s hypothesis on the formative significance of this teaching for the early period of Schelling’s work I interpret Schelling’s dialectics of the ideal and the real, the subjective and objective in self-consciousness as a reworking of Kant’s antithesis of the transcendental assertion and transcendental negation. I argue that Schelling’s main method seeks to turn the Kantian critical order of presentation (from the conditioned to conditions) into a systematic one (from the unconditional to the conditioned). I show that the concept of intellectual intuition developed in The System is based on Kant’s distinction of two aspects of the transcendental ideal (the matter of determination and the ground of determination). In conclusion, using the example of the beginning of the ‘first epoch’ of the theoretical part of The System which explores the sensation and its link with the thing-in-itself, I explain how the dialectic of the boundary modeled by Schelling grounds the historicity of self-consciousness and raise the question of the possibility of grounding various strategies of understanding historicity of consciousness on the basis of Schelling’s premises.

In his 1916 book, History as a Problem of Logic, Gustav Shpet undertakes the task of reconstructing the whole Kantian conception of history, previously scattered in various articles and minor works of the critical period. He builds the reconstruction around Kant’s Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective, with a focus on the a priori ‘thread’ in history and not empirical history. Shpet’s general assessment of Kant’s contribution to the development of historical science is sharply negative: Kantianism is hostile to historicity, and it hinders the development of history as a science. An undeniable merit of Shpet’s investigation is that he demonstrates the historical context of Kant’s views — to which end he brings in the works of Christian Wolff, Christian August Crusius, Georg Friedrich Meier, Johann Gottfried Herder, and other European thinkers — analysing, as well, the Kantian concept of mankind (Menschheit). But Shpet does not clearly distinguish Kant’s conception of history as an historical process (Geschichte), and historical science. Further, he pays insufficient attention to Kant’s ethical treatises in clarifying his views on history and its goals.

This article examines the essence of the Copernican turn accomplished by the modern French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, a representative of speculative realism, in his work After Finitude. I use as a starting point the classical definition of the Copernican turn given by Kant in the second introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. I then compare this definition with the “new” interpretation offered by the French philosopher. According to Meillassoux, Kant and the following philosophical tradition (Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology) misinterpreted the true role of the Copernican discovery in the new European science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and turned the objective world into a correlate of consciousness. I subject this assessment of Kant’s philosophy to critical analysis. I compare two points of view — that of Kant and of Meillassoux — on the essence of the Copernican turn and demonstrate the limited character of the latter in comparison with the former. I come to the conclusion that Meillassoux’s critique of the substance of the Copernican turn, as well as his labelling of it as “Ptolemaism” is not only unjustified, but is in many ways in stark contradiction with the real content of the new European science. Proceeding from the Critique of Pure Reason I examine the main postulates of Meillassoux’s anti-correlationist programme, in particular, the problematic character of diachronic judgments as well as decentring and desubjectivation of thinking. In conclusion I note that although Meillassoux’s pro­ject in a number of ways repeats the main intentions of post-structuralism, the call of the speculative philosophy “back to Hume and pre-critical metaphysics” is in a way an answer to the crisis in which post-critical philosophy finds itself today.

Fichte’s doctrine played a significant role in the emergence of Neo-Kantian philosophical projects both in Germany and in Russia. This paper proceeds from the works of Boris Vysheslavtsev, Boris Yakovenko and Henry Lanz and tries to reconstruct the influences exerted by Fichte’s ideas on the philosophical ideas of Russian Neo-Kantians. The historical-philosophical works of Russian Neo-Kantians constitute an integral body which provides an interpretative context of Fichte’s philosophy and forms an inalienable and significant part of Fichte studies in Russia. The main tendency of these works is an attempt to bring Fichte’s doctrine closer to Russian philosophy, to represent his philosophical system in its entirety without dividing it into autonomous periods, drawing attention to the ethical character of his philosophy and stressing the German philosopher’s contribution to the study of the problem of the irrational. The works of Russian Neo-Kantians are characterised by particular attention to Fichte’s ideal-realist ideas, his logicistic approach to absolute being, the attempt to overcome the contradiction between absolute unity and the concrete manifold. Fichte’s idea of the primacy of practical reason, which shaped the image of Fichtean philosophy in Gertman Neo-Kantianism, was taken up and developed in an original way by Russian Neo-Kantians. Vysheslavtsev made a consistent attempt to derive law, the state and economics from the ethical content of epistemology, “the science of knowledge”; Yakovenko suggested interpreting “the science of knowledge” as a teaching on life and freedom, as the philosophical grounding of the Christian idea; Lanz wrote about Fichte’s philosophy in the same vein as “the revolt of morality against theory”, as a philosophy of freedom.