You can download a .pdf version of this essay HERE.
[F]or … non-Kantian philosophers, there are no persistent problems — save perhaps the existence of Kantians.[i]
1. Kant in the Twentieth Century
More than a decade ago, I wrote this:
Alfred North Whitehead … quotably wrote in 1929 that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”[ii] The same could be said, perhaps with even greater accuracy, of the twentieth-century Euro-American philosophical tradition and Immanuel Kant. In this sense the twentieth century was the post-Kantian century.
Twentieth-century philosophy in Europe and the USA was dominated by two distinctive and (after 1945) officially opposed traditions: the analytic tradition and the phenomenological tradition. Very simply put, the analytic tradition was all about logic and analyticity, and the phenomenological tradition was all about consciousness and intentionality. Ironically enough however, despite their official Great Divide, both the analytic and the phenomenological traditions were essentially continuous and parallel critical developments from an earlier dominant neo-Kantian tradition. This, by the end of the nineteenth century had vigorously reasserted the claims of Kant’s transcendental idealism against Hegel’s absolute idealism and the other major systems of post-Kantian German Idealism, under the unifying slogan “Back to Kant!” So again ironically enough, both the analytic and phenomenological traditions were alike founded on, and natural outgrowths from, Kant’s Critical Philosophy.
By the end of the twentieth century however, and this time sadly rather than ironically, both the analytic and phenomenological traditions had not only explicitly rejected their own Kantian foundations and roots but also had effectively undermined themselves philosophically, even if by no means institutionally. On the one hand the analytic tradition did so by abandoning its basic methodological conception of analysis as the process of logically decomposing propositions into conceptual or metaphysical “simples,” as the necessary preliminary to a logical reconstruction of the same propositions, and by also jettisoning the corresponding idea of a sharp, exhaustive, and significant “analytic-synthetic” distinction. The phenomenological tradition on the other hand abandoned its basic methodological conception of phenomenology as “seeing essences” with a priori certainty under a “transcendental-phenomenological reduction,” and also jettisoned the corresponding idea of a “transcendental ego” as the metaphysical ground of consciousness and intentionality.
One way of interpreting these sad facts is to say that just insofar as analytic philosophy and phenomenology alienated themselves from their Kantian origins, they stultified themselves. This is the first unifying thought behind this [essay], and it is a downbeat one. The second unifying thought, which however is contrastively upbeat, is that both the analytic and phenomenological traditions, now in conjunction instead of opposition, could rationally renew themselves in the twenty-first century by critically recovering their Kantian origins and by seriously re-thinking and re-building their foundations in the light of this critical recovery. Or in other words: Forward to Kant.[iii]
Now let’s provisionally suppose, for the purposes of my argument, that all of that is basically cogent—that is, basically intelligible, defensible, and true.
2. Rorty’s Remark, Anti-Kantianism, and the Kant Wars
In 1982, Richard Rorty insightfully and wittily remarked—see this essay’s epigraph, above—that
[f]or … non-Kantian philosophers, there are no persistent problems — save perhaps the existence of Kantians.
This Rortyan remark, in turn, identifies something that is of essential importance for the history of late modern philosophy (by which I mean the history of European and Anglo-American philosophy after 1781, the date of the publication of the first or A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, and right up to this morning at 6am), namely, what I’ll call anti-Kantianism and the Kant wars.
By anti-Kantianism, I mean the regularly recurring waves of widespread critical rejections of and visceral antipathy towards Kantian philosophy in the history of late modern philosophy.
And by the Kant wars, I mean the intellectual, moral, social-institutional, and political conflicts, divisions, oppositions, skirmishes, and struggles, not only between Kantians and anti-Kantians, but also within Kantianism itself, that have fundamentally determined the development, form, and content of European and Anglo-American philosophy since the late 18th century.
3. The Internal Kant Wars and The External Kant Wars
That last formulation, in turn, implies a distinction between
(i) intellectual and professional-academic, social-institutional struggles inside the Kantian/neo-Kantian tradition, aka the internal Kant wars, and
(ii) intellectual and professional-academic, social-institutional struggles outside the Kantian/neo-Kantian tradition, between Kantians and anti-Kantians, aka the external Kant wars.
Indeed, in some ways the internal Kant wars are even more important than the external Kant , since the ideological “face” that the Kantian tradition shows to the world in general and to non-Kantian or anti-Kantian philosophers in particular, is largely determined by the current social-institutional victors in the struggle to dominate Kant-interpretation, at any given point in the post-Kantian tradition.
4. The Internal Kant Wars
What kinds of Kant-interpretation struggles do I have in mind?
Here’s a working list of eight internal Kant wars:
(i) speculative idealist, and especially absolute idealist, readings of Kant’s metaphysics versus critical idealist and realist readings of Kant’s metaphysics (late 18th century/early 19th century especially; but see also contemporary “Analytic Kantianism”),[iv]
(ii) psychologically-oriented versus anti-psychological (aka “anti-psychologistic,” aka “epistemological”) readings of Kant’s theory of cognition (19th century especially, but also mid-to-late 20th century),
(iii) the Fischer-Trendelenburg controversy about how to read the Transcendental Aesthetic (19th century especially),
(iv) “one-world” (ontological monist) versus “two-world” (ontological dualist) readings of Kant’s noumenon vs. phenomenon distinction (20th/21st centuries especially)
(v) incompatibilist versus compatibilist readings of Kant’s theory of free will (throughout the Kantian tradition),
(vi) Conceptualist versus non-Conceptualist readings of Kant’s theory of cognition (early 20th century—see, e.g., the Cassirer-Heidegger debate at Davos—and 21st century especially)
(vii) intellectualist versus non-intellectualist (aka “affectivist”) readings of Kant’s ethics and theory of practical agency (21st century especially), and
(viii) bourgeois liberal versus socialist readings of Kant’s political theory (19th and early 20th century especially, but with an emerging renaissance in the 21st century).
5. How To Win The Internal Kant Wars: Mind The Gaps
Sadly for Kantians, there are at least ten fundamental gaps in Kant’s Critical philosophy:
(i) formal vs. material in the theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy alike,
(ii) a priori vs. a posteriori in the theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy alike,
(iii) the non-manifest ontology of noumena vs. the manifest ontology of phenomena,
(iv) freedom vs. nature,
(v) scientific knowing (Wissen) vs. faith (Glaube),
(vi) understanding vs. sensibility (that is, concepts/conceptual content vs. intuitions/essentially non-conceptual content),
(vii) the categories vs. all the particular appearances (that are supposed to be) subsumed under them (aka the gap in the Transcendental Deduction),
(viii) pure practical reason vs. affect/desire/emotion in the metaphysics of morals,
(ix) natural mechanism vs. teleology, and
(x) the neo-Hobbesian liberal nation-State, according to “the axiom of right,” and the empirical fact of human egoism vs. the (in effect, even if not by name) social anarchist cosmopolitan ethical community, according to “the axiom of virtue,” a good will, and the Idea of the Highest Good, aka the Idea of God.
Correspondingly, what I have called Kant’s post-Critical philosophy from 1788 through to the end of the 1790s,[v] is all about how to mind those gaps, by which I mean how to bridge them, mediate between them, negotiate them, schematize them, and/or somehow learn how to affirm them and live with them philosophically.
How might Kant’s ten “gap-minding” or transition projects during the post-Critical period from the late 1780s through the 1790s have actually succeeded?
Let me (re)count the ways, as a strategy for winning the internal Kant wars.
First, with respect to the (i)-gap between formal and material in the theoretical philosophy and the practical philosophy alike, and also with respect to the (ii)-gap between a priori and a posteriori in the theoretical and practical philosophy alike, Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates an “impure a priori” dynamic aether in his post-Critical metaphysics of nature, and a structuralist hierarchy of moral principles in his post-Critical practical philosophy.[vi]
Second, with respect to the (iii)-gap between the non-manifest ontology of noumena and the manifest ontology of phenomena, Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates a radical agnosticism about the existence or non-existence of things in themselves together with methodological eliminativism, and an empirical or manifest realism of authentic appearances, in his post-Critical epistemology and ontology.[vii]
Third, with respect to the (iv)-gap between freedom vs nature, Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates a biologically-driven, embodied agency theory of freedom in his post-Critical metaphysics of rational agency.[viii]
Fourth, with respect to the (v)-gap between scientific knowing (Wissen) and faith (Glaube), Kant expicitly or at least implicitly postulates practical foundations for the exact sciences and scientific pietism in his post-Critical epistemology and philosophy of science.[ix]
Fifth, with respect to the (vi)-gap between understanding and sensibility (or between concepts/conceptual content and intuitions/essentially non-conceptual content), Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates strong or essentialist non-conceptualism in his post-Critical cognitive semantics.[x]
Sixth, with respect to the (vii)-gap betweeen the categories and all the particular appearances supposed be to subsumed under them (the gap in the Transcendental Deduction), Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates an affirmation of the gap and also a corresponding doctrine of the necessary limits of the formal and natural sciences in his post-Critical metaphysics of nature and philosophy of science.[xi]
Seventh, with respect to the (viii)-gap between pure practical reason and affect/desire/emotion in the metaphysics of morals, Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates what I call The Affect of Reason and Kantian non-intellectualism in his post-Critical practical philosophy and theory of rational agency.[xii]
Eighth, with respect to the (ix)-gap between natural mechanism and teleology, Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates manifest organicism in his post-Critical metaphysics of nature.[xiii]
Ninth and finally, with respect to the (x)-gap between the neo-Hobbesian liberal nation-State, according to “the axiom of right,” and the empirical fact of human egoism and the in effect, if not by name, social anarchist cosmopolitan ethical community, according to “the axiom of virtue,” a good will, and the Idea of the Highest Good, aka the Idea of God, Kant explicitly or at least implicitly postulates what I call radical enlightenment and Left Kantianism in his post-Critical political philosophy and philosophical theology/philosophy of religion.[xiv]
6. The External Kant Wars
Now what about the external Kant wars?
By my count, so far, there have been at least six waves of anti-Kantianism:
(i) during the early absolute idealist and in particular Hegelian period in the early- to mid-19th century, when Kant was pejoratively labeled a subjective idealist,[xv]
(ii) during the Marxist socialist period prior to the rise of neo-Kantianism, in the mid-19th century, and again during the Russian Marxist-Leninist socialist period, after 1917, when Kant was pejoratively labeled a petit-bourgeois liberal,[xvi]
(iii) during the early period of classical Analytic philosophy in the 20th century, when Kant was pejoratively labeled a logical psychologicist and again a subjective idealist,[xvii]
(iv) during and in the immediate wake of World War I, when Kant—along with post-Kantian German idealism, and Nietzsche—was blamed for initiating the rise of German militarism culminating in the cult-of-the-Kaiser and World War I, especially in the USA and France,[xviii]
(v) during and in the immediate wake of World War II, building on and elaborating the post-World War I tradition of anti-Kantianism, when Kant—again along with post-Kantian German idealism, and Nietzsche—was blamed for initiating the rise of the Nazis, culminating in the cult-of-Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust, especially in the USA, even though Kantians and neo-Kantians, especially those who had been students of Leonard Nelson, had been specifically identified by the Nazis as liberal, socialist, and/or Jewish threats to Nazism, and purged,[xix] and
(vi) most recently, during the early 21st century, with the rise of Analytic metaphysics and multi-culturalist philosophy, when Kant, along with all so-called “Continental” philosophers is not only pejoratively labeled, yet again, a subjective idealist, but also, on his own, and quite specifically, is bitterly and name-callingly labeled a racist, sexist, and xenophobe.[xx]
7. The Most Astoundingly Stupid Thing About Contemporary Professional Academic Philosophy?
Perhaps the most astoundingly stupid thing about contemporary professional academic philosophy is that 99.9% of contemporary professional philosophers are so busy advancing their careers and/or being coercive moralists that they don’t even know the history of their own discipline.
But as I noted above, for anyone who takes even a quick glance at the history of European and Anglo-American philosophy since Kant, that is, at the history of late modern philosophy, it’s self-evident that it’s essentially a series of combative, contested footnotes to Kant: the Kant wars.[xxi]
In fact, so-called Analytic and so-called Continental philosophy are simply forking streams in the neo-Kantian river, streams that emerged as the dominant mid- to late-19th century neo-Kantian tradition gradually fell apart between 1900 and 1945.[xxii]
Post-World War II professional academic philosophers have managed to hide this truth from themselves, in part, by permitting a degraded, flattened-out version of neo-Kantianism to exist in its own little professional academic ghetto as “Kant-scholarship.”
That way, so-called Analytic and so-called Continental philosophers alike can say:
“Look, look!, WE’RE not funny little Kantians running around (e.g., at the most recent International Kant Congress in Oslo, Norway, 6-9 August 2019) clutching copies of the first Critique like Bibles, chanting Kant-quotations at each other, like THEM: we’re TOTALLY different kinds of philosophers.”
Ironically, but perhaps predictably, the flourishing of Kant-scholarship inside its own little professional academic ghetto is sometimes taken by professional academic Kant-scholars to be the great contemporary philosophical pay-off of the classical neo-Kantian tradition.[xxiii]
My view, sharply on the contrary, is that the great contemporary pay-off of the classical neo-Kantian tradition is its demonstration that Kant’s ethics and socialism have a profound elective affinity.[xxiv]
In any case, there’s really only one genuine issue between so-called Analytic philosophy and so-called Continental philosophy, namely: how should we understand the relationship between philosophy on the one hand, and the formal and natural sciences on the other?
So-called Analytic philosophers are generally logic-worshippers and scientistic, whereas so-called Continental philosophers are generally logic-haters and skeptical about the natural sciences.[xxv]
Apart from that, however, the phony divide between so-called Analytic and so-called Continental post-Kantians—who are, really, just Kantalytic philosophers and Kantinental philosophers—is all and only about
(i) the post-World War II neoliberalization of higher education, aka the professional academy, and
(ii) politics, especially professional academic institutional power politics.[xxvi]
8. What Is To Be Done?, Or, How To Win All The Kant Wars
That all being so, then what is to be done in order to win all the Kant Wars?
My own view about that comes in three parts:
(i) that in order to save contemporary philosophy from its current downward spiral into intellectual heat-death and permanent philosophical stasis, then it has to be liberated from the professional academy, arise Phoenix-like from the ashes of the ash-heap of history, and re-create itself as real philosophy, aka borderless philosophy,[xxvii]
(ii) that the revolutionary transformation of contemporary philosophy has to be internal to the post-Kantian tradition and the Kant wars, hence it has to be something very like what I call rational anthropology,[xxviii] and finally
(iii) that the revolutionary transformation of contemporary philosophy also has to be very like
(iiia) what I’ve described in a recent essay, “How to Philosophize with a Hammer and a Blue Guitar: Quietism, Activism, and Emancipatory Political Theory,” in which I defend the view that a particular version of philosophical activism—namely, the thesis that philosophy should be engaged with politics—that Michelle Maiese and I have called “emancipatory political theory” in our recent book, The Mind-Body Politic, is the only rationally justified and morally acceptable version of philosophical activism,
(iiib) especially when emancipatory political theory is elaborated and extended by what I’ve described in another recent essay, “Our Sociable Sociality: The Emancipatory Politics of Everyday Life.”
So take that, Rorty.[xxix]
NOTES
[i] R. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in R. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 90–109, at p. 93.
[ii] A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 39.
[iii] R. Hanna, “Kant in the Twentieth Century,” in D. Moran (ed.), Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 149-203, at pp. 149-150, also available online in preview, HERE.
[iv] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “The Refutation of Absolute Idealism,” Against Professional Philosophy (2 September 2019), available online at URL = <https://againstprofphil.org/2019/09/02/the-refutation-of-absolute-idealism/>.
[v] See also B. Hall, The Post-Critical Kant: Understanding the Critical Philosophy Through the Opus Postumum (London: Routledge, 2014).
[vi] See R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), ch. 8, also available online in preview, HERE;and R. Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 3) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), also available online in preview, HERE.
[vii] See R. Hanna, “Kant, Radical Agnosticism, and Methodological Eliminativism about Things-in-Themselves,” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 2 (2017), available online at URL = <https://www.cckp.space/single-post/2017/05/10/Kant-Radical-Agnosticism-and-Methodological-Eliminativism-about-Things-in-Themselves>.
[viii] See Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, ch. 8; R. Hanna, “Kant, Causation, and Freedom,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36 (2006): 281-306; R. Hanna, “Reason, Freedom, and Kant: An Exchange” (co-authored with A.W. Moore), Kantian Review 11 (2006): 112-132: and R. Hanna, “Freedom, Teleology, and Rational Causation,” Kant Yearbook 1 (2009): 99-142.
[ix] See Hanna,, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, part 2; R. Hanna, “Kant, Scientific Pietism, and Scientific Naturalism,” Revista filosofia Aurora 44 (2016): 583-604, available online at URL = <http://www2.pucpr.br/reol/pb/index.php/rf?dd1=16243&dd99=view&dd98=pb>; and R. Hanna, “Kant, Natural Piety, and the Limits of Science,” in Ensaios Sobre Kant, Sciênzia e Natureza Humana, (ed.) P. Kauark Leite (Rio de Janeiro, BR: Editora Via Verita/Via Verita Books, 2018).
[x] See R. Hanna, “Kantian Non-Conceptualism,” Philosophical Studies 137 (2008): 41-64; and R. Hanna, “Beyond the Myth of the Myth: A Kantian Theory of Non-Conceptual Content,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (2011): 321–396.
[xi] See R. Hanna, “Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, Rogue Objects, and the Gap in the B Deduction,” reprinted in International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19 (2011): 397-413; R. Hanna, “Kantian Madness: Blind Intuitions, Essentially Rogue Objects, Nomological Deviance, and Categorial Anarchy,” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 1 (2016): 44-64, available online at URL = <http://www.cckp.space/#!Kantian-Madness-Blind-Intuitions-Essentially-Rogue-Objects-Nomological-Deviance-and-Categorial-Anarchy/cmbz/576018190cf2c6c572641509>; and R. Hanna, “Kant’s B Deduction, Cognitive Organicism, the Limits of Natural Science, and the Autonomy of Consciousness,” Contemporary Studies in Kantian Philosophy 4 (2019): 29-46, available online at URL = < https://www.cckp.space/single-post/2019/06/17/CSKP4-2019-Kant%E2%80%99s-B-Deduction-Cognitive-Organicism-the-Limits-of-Natural-Science-and-the-Autonomy-of-Consciousness>.
[xii] See R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), also available online in preview, HERE.
[xiii] See R. Hanna, “Kant’s Anti-Mechanism and Kantian Anti-Mechanism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 45 (2014), available online at URL = <http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848614000107>; and Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons, ch. 2.
[xiv] See R. Hanna, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature,” Con-Textos Kantianos 5 (2017), available online at URL = <https://www.con-textoskantianos.net/index.php/revista/article/view/228>; R Hanna, “Why the Better Angels of Our Nature Must Hate the State,” Con-Textos Kantianos 6 (2017), available online at URL = <https://www.con-textoskantianos.net/index.php/revista/article/view/281>; and “Kant and Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered,” Critique (2018), available online at URL = <https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/kant-and-cosmopolitanism-reconsidered/>.
[xv] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Forward to Idealism: On Eckart Förster’s The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy,” Kantian Review 18 (2013): 301-315.
[xvi] See, e.g., V. Chaly, “Kantianism and Anti-Kantianism in Russian Revolutionary Thought,” Con-Textos Kantianos 8 (2018): 218-241, available online at URL = <https://www.con-textoskantianos.net/index.php/revista/article/view/367/562>; and I. Kukulin, “The World War Against the Spirit of Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Germanophobia in Russia in 1914–1915 and the Birth of Cultural Racism,” Studies in East European Thought 66 (2014): 101-121.
[xvii] See, e.g., R. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), esp. chs. 1-2, also available online in preview, HERE.
[xviii] See, e.g., G. Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy (London: J.M. Dent & Sons/New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), available online at URL = <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Egotism_in_German_Philosophy>; and M. Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During The Great War (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996), ch. 4, “The Controversy over Kant,” pp. 106-141.
[xix] See, e.g., H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); B. Blanshard, “Forward,” in L. Nelson, Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1949), p. vi: “One of [Nelson’s] students writes: ‘All Nelson’s pupils who remained in Germany were engaged, as long as they were not imprisoned, in underground or other illegal work against Nazism’”; and also J. Kraft, “Introduction,” in Nelson, Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy, pp. ix-x: “A future political history of Germany will have to record how, out of [Nelson’s] Academy and the youth groups connected to it, came a number of heroic men and women who fought against the National Socialist regime, and who, since the downfall of that regime, have borne with equal courage their share in the struggle for a new and better order in Germany.”
[xx] See, e.g., Z, “Multi-Culti Is Anti-Kanti,” Against Professional Philosophy (23 November 2017), available online at URL = <https://againstprofphil.org/2017/11/23/multi-culti-is-anti-kanti/>.
[xxi] See, e.g., K. Köhnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, trans. R. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991); Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany; M. Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago/La Salle: Open Court, 2000); Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy; Hanna, “Kant in the Twentieth Century”; P. Hohendahl, “The Crisis of Neo-Kantianism and the Reassessment of Kant After World War I: Preliminary Remark,” Philosophical Forum 41 (2010): 17-39; S. Luft and F. Capeillères, “Neo-Kantianism in Germany and France,” in K. Ansell-Pearson and A. Schrift (eds.), The History of Continental Philosophy Volume 3: The New Century (Durham: Acumen, 2010), pp. 47-85; F. Beiser, The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014); S. Crowell, “Neo-Kantianism,” in S. Critchley and W. Schroeder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017), pp. 185-197, available online at URL = <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781405164542>; Chaly, “Kantianism and Anti-Kantianism in Russian Revolutionary Thought”; and J. Heis, “Neo-Kantianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), (ed.) E.N. Zalta, available online at URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/neo-kantianism/>.
[xxii] See note 3 above.
[xxiii] See, e.g., A. Chignell, “Introduction: On Going Back to Kant,” Philosophical Forum 39 (2008): 109-124, at 121-124 esp.; and A. Chignell, “Kant Between the Wars: A Reply to Hohendahl,” Philosophical Forum 41 (2010): 41-49, at 48-49.
[xxiv] Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Leonard Nelson were all serious socialists. And one of the “fathers” of the classical neo-Kantian tradition, F.A. Lange, published an influential book in 1865, Die Arbeiterfrage, “The Worker Question,” that explores basic socialist themes. See, e.g., Luft and Capeillères, “Neo-Kantianism in Germany and France,” p. 50. This elective affinity with socialism, in turn, directly connects the classical neo-Kantian tradition to contemporary Kantian anarcho-socialism. See, e.g., Hanna, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature”; R. Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment: Existential Kantian Cosmopolitan Anarchism, With a Concluding Quasi-Federalist Postscipt,” in D. Heidemann and K. Stoppenbrink (eds.), Join, Or Die: Philosophical Foundations of Federalism (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 63-90, also available online HERE; and R. Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 4) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), also available online in preview, HERE.
[xxv] On scientism, see, e.g., S. Haack, Science and its Discontents (Rounded Globe, 2017). Available online at URL = <https://roundedglobe.com/books/038f7053-e376-4fc3-87c5-096de820966d/Scientism%20and%20its%20Discontents/>. For an attempt to offer a serious alternative to scientism and science-skepticism alike, from a contemporary Kantian point of view, see Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature; and also R. Hanna, “Kant, Nature, and Humanity,” in R. Hanna, Preface and General Introduction, Supplementary Essays, and General Bibliography (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 1) (New York: Nova Science, 2018), essay 2.2, pp. 45-132, also available online in preview, HERE. And for an attempt to offer a serious alternative to logic-worship and logic-hatred alike, from a contemporary Kantian point of view, see R. Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), also available online in preview, HERE.
[xxvi] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “Thinking Inside and Outside the Fly-Bottle: The New Poverty of Philosophy and its Second Copernican Revolution,” in Hanna, Preface and General Introduction, Supplementary Essays, and General Bibliography (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 1), essay 2.4, pp. 147-168.
[xxvii] See, e.g., R. Hanna, “How to Escape Irrelevance: Performance Philosophy, Public Philosophy, and Borderless Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 12 (2018): 55-82, available online at URL = <http://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_7982_en.html>; R. Hanna, “Consequences of Consequences: Against Professional Philosophy, Anarcho-or Borderless Philosophy, and Rorty’s Role,” (April 2019 version), available online HERE; and R. Hanna, “The New Conflict of the Faculties: Kant, Radical Enlightenment, and the Deep(er) State,” (April 2019 version), available online HERE.
[xxviii] See R. Hanna, “Life-Changing Metaphysics: Rational Anthropology and its Kantian Methodology,” in G. D’Oro and S. Overgaard (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017), pp. 201-226, also available online in preview, HERE; Hanna, Preface and General Introduction, Supplementary Essays, and General Bibliography (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 1); Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2); Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 3); Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 4); and R. Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 5) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015), also available online in preview, HERE.
[xxix] I’m grateful to Robert Whyte and Elisabeth Widmer for extremely helpful correspondence about the topics of this essay.
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