The Kantian Catastrophe?

The Kantian Catastrophe?
Author: Anthony Morgan
Publisher: Bigg Books
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2017-10-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1999841301

Immanuel Kant, the most influential philosopher of the modern age, transformed our entire conception of philosophy. His radical reframing of philosophical questions placed the finitude of the human subject at the centre of philosophical enquiry and, at the same time, left reality in itself forever inaccessible. His impact was to restrict metaphysical pretensions and even to induce real despair. Famously the poet Heinrich von Kleist committed suicide in part due to the profound rupture induced by Kant's 'Copernican revolution'; and, more recently, the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has referred to it as 'the Kantian catastrophe'. This collection of lively and accessible interviews with fifteen top Kantian and post-Kantian philosophers offers a balanced and wide-ranging survey that takes us into the very heart of contemporary debates relating to our Kantian inheritance. It questions the ever-evolving legacy of this giant of modern thought, a legacy that exposes the Janus-faced character of philosophy as it finds itself both obsessed with establishing limits and, at the same time, inexorably drawn to transgress them. Contributions from: Lucy Allais, A.W. Moore, Stella Sandford, Stephen Mulhall, Joseph Schear, Beatrice Han-Pile,Tom Sparrow, Marie-Eve Morin, Bruno Bosteels, Adrian Johnston, Simon O'Sullivan, John Ó Maoilearca, Catherine Malabou, Graham Harman, Ray Brassier

Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing
Author: Gerard Passannante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2019-03-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 022661235X

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

Ontological Catastrophe

Ontological Catastrophe
Author: Joseph Carew
Publisher: Open Humanitites Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2014-10-29
Genre: Idealism, German
ISBN: 9781607853084

"In Ontological Catastrophe, Joseph Carew takes up the central question guiding Slavoj Žižek's philosophy: How could something like phenomenal reality emerge out of the meaninglessness of the Real? Carefully reconstructing and expanding upon his controversial reactualization of German Idealism, Carew argues that Žižek offers us an original, but perhaps terrifying, response: experience is possible only if we presuppose a prior moment of breakdown as the ontogenetic basis of subjectivity. Drawing upon resources found in Žižek, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-Kantian philosophy, Carew thus develops a new critical metaphysics--a metaphysics which is a variation upon the late German Idealist theme of balancing system and freedom, realism and idealism, in a single, self-reflexive theoretical construct--that challenges our understanding of nature, culture, and the ultimate structure of reality."--Publisher's description.

After Finitude

After Finitude
Author: Quentin Meillassoux
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2008-06-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0826496741

After Finitude provides readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy. Author Quentin Meillassoux introduces a philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. After Finitude proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse.

The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux

The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux
Author: Fabio Gironi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Analysis (Philosophy)
ISBN: 9781138703674

This book brings together experts of analytic and continental philosophy to discuss the legacy of Kantianism. It explores the ways in which the philosophy of Sellars can be put into dialogue with the work of Meillassoux, explaining how their stances can be compared thanks to their shared Kantian heritage and interest in the problem of realism.

Quentin Meillassoux

Quentin Meillassoux
Author: Graham Harman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748693475

Along with Meillassoux's startling book on Mallarme's poem 'Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard,' Harman discusses several new English articles by Meillassoux, including his controversial April 2012 Berlin lecture and its critique of 'subjectalism'.

Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making

Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
Author: Graham Harman
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2011-07-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748647538

Quentin Meillassoux has been described as the most rapidly prominent French philosopher in the Anglophone world since Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. With the publication of After Finitude (2006), this daring protege of Alain Badiou became one of the world's most visible younger thinkers. In this book, his fellow Speculative Realist, Graham Harman, assesses Meillassoux's publications in English so far. Also included are an insightful interview with Meillassoux and first-time translations of excerpts from L'Inexistence divine (The Divine Inexistence), his famous but still unpublished major book.

Phenomenology and Naturalism

Phenomenology and Naturalism
Author: Rafael Winkler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351764942

At present, ‘naturalism’ is arguably the dominant trend in both Anglo-American and European philosophy. Owing to the influence of the works of W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Hillary Putnam, among others, naturalism both as a methodological and ontological position has become one of the mainstays of contemporary analytic approaches to knowledge, mind and ethics. From the early 1990s onward, European philosophy in the English-speaking world has been witnessing a turn from the philosophies of the subjects of phenomenology, hermeneutics and existentialism and a revival of a certain kind of vitalism, whether Bergsonian or Nietzschean, and also of a certain kind of materialism that is close in spirit to Spinoza’s Ethics and to the naturalism and monism of the early Ionian thinkers. This book comprises essays written by experts in both the European and the Anglo-American traditions such as John Sallis, David Papineau, David Cerbone, Dan Zahavi, Paul Patton, Bernhard Weiss, Jack Reynolds and Benedict Smith, who explore the limit of naturalism and the debate between naturalism and phenomenology. This book also considers the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy and naturalism as well as the critique of phenomenology by speculative realism. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

Limit Cinema

Limit Cinema
Author: Chelsea Birks
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501352881

Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such 'limit cinema' has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley's psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild's eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.