The Sleep of Reason: Philosophy’s Crisis, Humanity’s Crisis, and What Should Be Done.

“El sueño de la razon produce monstruos/The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” by Francisco Goya

You can also read or download a .pdf version of this essay HERE.


1. What do Thoreau’s Walden (written during the mid-1840s, published in 1854), Schopenhauer’s “On University Philosophy” (1851), Dewey’s “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917) and Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920/1948), Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918/1922), Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences (1936/1954) and Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason (1947), all have in common?

Well, who wrote the following?

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates…. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not theoretically, but practically.

If this were a question of nothing but advancing philosophy and progressing on the path to truth, then I would recommend it best to stop shadow-boxing carried out in its name at the universities. For these are really not the environment for philosophy done with serious and honest intention, whose place is all too often take by a spruced-up wire puppet dressed in the clothes of a philosopher having to parade like gesticulate like a wooden marionette moved by alien wires. However, if such an academic philosophy wants to supplant real thoughts with incomprehensible, brain-numbing phrases, newly coined words, and egregious ideas, whose absurdities are called speculative … then it turns into a parody of philosophy that brings the real philosophy into disrepute, which has happened in our time. How can even the possibility of the profound seriousness that attaches little value to anything but truth and is the primary condition of philosophy  persist with such goings-on? –The path of truth is steep and long; no one will walk it with a block tied to his foot; rather wings would be necessary. Therefore, I would be in favour of philosophy ceasing to be a trade; the sublimity of its aspiration is not compatible with what that, as the ancients already realized.

[P]hilosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of [humanity].

The scientific dress or the mark of learning adopted by a philosophy is … unimportant. Nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system, and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine…. A philosopher who cannot grasp and command actuality as well will never be of the first rank…. And herein, I think, all the philosophers of [today] are open to a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real standing in actual life…. I look round in vain for an instance in which a modern “philosopher” has made a name by even one deep or far-seeing pronouncement on an important question of the day. I see nothing but provincial opinions of the same kind as anyone else’s….. We must allow ourselves no illusions as to the gravity of this negative result. It is palpable that we have lost sight of the final significance of effective philosophy. We confuse philosophy with preaching, with agitation, with novel-writing, with lecture-room jargon. We have descended from the perspective of the bird to that of the frog. It has come to this, that the very possibility of a real philosophy of to-day and to-morrow is in question. If not, it were far better to become a colonist or an engineer, to do something, no matter what, that is true and real, than to chew over once more the old dried-up themes under cover of an alleged “new wave of philosophic thought”…. Truly it is a poor life’s work to restate once more, in slightly different terms, views of a hundred predecessors on the Will or on psycho-physical parallelism. This may be a profession, but a philosophy it emphatically is not. A doctrine that does not attack and affect the life of the period in its inmost depths is no doctrine and had better not be taught.

 Let us summarize the fundamental notions of what we have sketched here. The “crisis of European existence,” which manifests itself in countless symptoms’ of a corrupted life, is no obscure fate, no impenetrable destiny…. [I]t would have to be shown how the European “world” was born from ideas of reason, i.e., from the spirit of philosophy. The “crisis” could then become clear as the “seeming collapse of rationalism.” Still, as we said, the reason for the downfall of a rational culture does not lie in the essence of rationalism itself but only in its exteriorization, its absorption in “naturalism” and “objectivism”…. The crisis of European existence can end in only one of two ways: in the ruin of a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life, fallen into a barbarian hatred of spirit; or in the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy, through a heroism of reason that will definitively overcome naturalism. 

Philosophical theory itself cannot bring it about that either the barbarizing tendency or the humanistic outlook should prevail in the future. However, by doing justice to those images and ideas that at given times dominated reality in the role of absolutes e.g. the idea of the individual as it dominated the bourgeois era and that have been relegated in the course of history, philosophy can function as a corrective of history, so to speak…. In this function, philosophy would be mankind’s memory and conscience, and thereby help to keep the course of humanity from resembling the meaningless round of the asylum inmate’s recreation hour. Today, progress toward Utopia is blocked primarily by the complete disproportion between the weight of the overwhelming machinery of social power and that of the atomized masses. Everything else the widespread hypocrisy, the belief in false theories, the discouragement of speculative thought, the debilitation of will, or its premature diversioninto endless activities under the pressure of fear—is a symptom of this disproportion. If philosophy succeeds in helping people to recognize these factors, it will have rendered a great service to humanity…. If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate—in short, the emancipation from fear—then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service we can render.

—Actually that’s a trick question, because it seemed to imply that there’s a single author of all six texts.

But in fact, even despite the texts’ self-evident mutual semantic and even stylistic coherence, the first text was written by Thoreau,[i] the second by Schopenhauer,[ii] the third by Dewey,[iii] the fourth by Spengler,[iv] the fifth by Husserl,[v] and the sixth by Horkheimer.[vi]

In any case, the conclusion we must draw is that they’re all saying pretty much the same things about philosophy’s crisis, humanity’s crisis, the nature and implications of the human capacity for reason, and the nature and implications of the sociopolitical phenomenon of enlightenment.

2. Correspondingly, what I want to argue in this passionately Cassandra-like essay is that right here and now, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, in the age of the “military-industrial-university-digital complex,” there’s a global sociopolitical crisis of reason and enlightenment that’s also directly mirrored in contemporary philosophy, that I’m calling The Sleep of Reason,  following the motto of the famous 43rd print in Francisco Goya’s cautionary masterpiece in the shape of an album of 80 aquatint etchings, Los Caprichos (1799).

Moreover, and more precisely, The Sleep of Reason is not only every bit as dire and urgent as the various mirroring philosophical-and-sociopolitical crises of reason and enlightenment described by Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Dewey, Spengler, Husserl, and Horkheimer, but also actually even more dire and urgent, since its direct contemporary consequences are

(i) skeptical relativism and nihilism about theoretical reason (especially including the cynical debunking and rejection of universal normative principles of logic, truth, and knowledge) and practical reason (especially including the cynical debunking and rejection of universal normative principles of morality and politics) alike, and

(ii) worldwide political neoliberalism, shared by democratic and non-democratic nation-States alike, all driven by background dogmatic assumptions of psychological and ethical egoism, and

(iii) identitarian tribalism that’s equally evident and equally virulent on the “conservative” so-called Right, in the “commonsensical” so-called Center, and on the “liberal-progressive” so-called Left,[vii] and  

(iv) the worldwide emergence of neo-fascism, that conjointly yield

(v) global militarism with really possible nuclear warfare consequences for everyone everywhere, global xenophobia with life-threatening consequences for millions of immigrants and refugees, and global climate change denial with catastrophic environmental consequences for everyone everywhere, that in turn conjointly yield

(vi) an equally catastrophic and tragic near-future existential threat to humanity, in not only the spiritual, individual or personal, and ontogenetic sense of a moral threat, but also the biophysical, collective or species-level, and phylogenetic sense of a mortal threat.

In short, if something isn’t done right here and right now to deal with this 21st century philosophical and sociopolitical crisis of reason and enlightenment—The Sleep of Reason—then this time around, we’re all really and truly forever fucked.

3. In my view, here’s what’s produced The Sleep of Reason on the sociopolitical side.

In the 17th  and 18th centuries, the official enemies of the classical Enlightenment were

(i) any kind of Scholastic, theistic metaphysics, including classical Rationalist metaphysics in the Leibniz-Wolff tradition,

(ii) the oppressions of tyrannical, war-mongering, despot-governed/monarchical States, and

(iii) the hegemonic ideology[viii] of State-enabled and State-supported religions of any kind.

Voltaire’s Candide, e.g., famously, satirically, and metaphilosophically[ix] unloads on all of these targets.

But during the 19th and 20th centuries, these erstwhile official enemies of the classical Enlightenment gradually faded away and morphed into a mainstream cultural, social, and political world characterized by

(i*) anti-metaphysical, atheistic, scientific materialism and mechanism,

(ii*) the oppressions of militaristic imperialist States—whether nationalistic, fascist, communist, or otherwise totalitarian, and 

(iii*) the hegemonic ideology of State-enabled and State-supported capitalism and technocracy,

while at the same time, a fideist, anti-scientific, theistic or least mysticism-friendly, tribalist, irrationalist counter-Enlightenment[x] gradually emerged, that was explicitly in contradictory opposition to the classical Enlightenment.

Correspondingly, however, the highly paradoxical character of this “dialectic of Enlightenment” has been pointed up by the most insightful philosophical critics of the classical Enlightenment and enlightenment thinking, from Jacobi, to the German and British Romantics, to Nietzsche, to Spengler, to Heidegger and Husserl, to the neo-Marxist Frankfurt school theorists (especially Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, and Marcuse), to Camus (in The Rebel), and well beyond.

These critics have correctly observed that insofar as the classical Enlightenment and enlightenment thinking are grounded on a conception of reason that’s

(i) essentially skeptical, scientistic, and technological, as well as

(ii) purely instrumental and egoistic, and also

(iii) thoroughly liberal or neoliberal,

then in fact classical Enlightenment and enlightenment thinking lead directly or at least ultimately to

(iv) moral relativism or outright anti-moral debunking-strategies, and

(v) the deterministic or otherwise mechanistic denial of free will and of all non-instrumental values (whether religious, otherwise spiritual, or moral),

and even worse than that, to a world in which the leading proponents of  classical Enlightenment, in a highly self-interested, opportunistic way, actually

(vi) obediently accommodate or even directly collaborate with various kinds of oppressive, militaristic imperialist States and their State-enabled capitalism and technocracy.

So what starts out as the pantheism of Spinoza or the deism of the French philosophes and legitimizes tolerance, ends up as the nihilism of Marquis de Sade or Max Stirner and legitimizes torture or terrorism.[xi]

Or in other words, the essentially skeptical, scientistic, instrumentalist, egoistic, liberal/neoliberal, opportunist, accommodationist, or even collaborationist classical Enlightenment—which I’ve called Enlightenment Lite[xii]—is every bit as as intellectually, morally, and politically rebarbative as the counter-Enlightenment.

An astoundingly perfect contemporary example of Enlightenment Lite is Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.[xiii]

4. Again in my view, here’s what’s produced The Sleep of Reason on the philosophical side.

One of most depressing and also most striking things about contemporary professional academic philosophy is its fragmentation, and correspondingly, the mutual isolation of professional philosophers as individuals and also as members of philosophical groups.

It seems that, paradoxically, the more easily professional philosophers are able to communicate with one another, the less they actually do so for real philosophical purposes, and the less they actually share as thinkers and moral agents who are supposedly personally and collectively committed to philosophy as a way of life, or life-project, and not just a “job.”

Indeed, sometimes even professional philosophers working on exactly the same topics are essentially isolated from one another.

A perfect example is phenomenology, as anticipated by Brentano, but in effect created or discovered by Husserl.

It is a sad but true fact that on the one hand, professional so-called Continental philosophers working on phenomenological  topics from the standpoint of the Brentano-Husserl-Meinong-Heidegger-Sartre-Merleau-Ponty tradition, and on the other hand, contemporary so-called Analytic professional philosophers working on “sensory phenomenology,” “cognitive phenomenology,” “agentive phenomenology,” “phenomenal intentionality,”[xiv] etc., have virtually nothing to do with one another. 

Why?

One might think that this divisive situation is simply an unhappy consequence of the by-now almost complete dominance of academic professionalization and specialization in contemporary philosophy, combined with natural “in-crowd” and “out-crowd” effects of social clustering and social exclusion.

And to some extent, it is precisely those things.

But I think that there is also a deeper reason for the widespread state of fragmentation and mutual isolation in contemporary professional academic philosophy—to be sure, papered over by many academic administrative and careerist happy faces ☺, as people grind their way through the gradschool-PhD-job-tenure- and-promotion system—that Husserl was able to identify and address in the Crisis of European Sciences, and one that we should be equally worried about today.

And, in turn, I think that this deeper reason pointedly exemplifies the deepest and most synoptic reason, also identified and addressed by Husserl in the Crisis, for being similarly worried about not just European but also world-culture from the 17th to the 21st centuries, and about the rational human condition in the 21st century.

Both Kant[xv] and Husserl recognized that it is philosophically necessary to deny “scientific knowing” (Wissen) in order to make room for rational “faith” (Glaube) (Critique of Pure Reason Bxxx), in view of what they regard as the two fundamental philosophical mistakes of philosophy as they knew it in the 18th and 20th centuries respectively, namely, noumenal realism (or what Husserl calls “objectivism”) and explanatory and ontological natural-scientific materialism or physicalism (or what Husserl calls “naturalism”).

These two fundamental philosophical mistakes, in turn, jointly constitute scientism.

Now from our own 21st century point of view, it is easy to see that objectivism, naturalism, and scientism are the pervasive default assumptions of mainstream Logical Empiricist/Positivist and post-Positivist analytic philosophy, from 1929, when the Vienna Circle published their revolutionary manifesto, “The Scientific Conception of the World,”[xvi] through post-World War II Anglo-American philosophy, right up to this morning at 6am.

Husserl saw this more clearly than any other 20th century philosopher, in part because Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology were primary critical targets of the Circle, but also more fundamentally because Husserl fully recognized that scientism and transcendental phenomenology are directly opposed to one another, and indeed are strict contraries: if objectivism (as anti-phenomenological) and naturalism (as anti-transcendental) are true, then transcendental phenomenology is false, and conversely.

Correspondingly, the pervasive scientistic default assumptions also account for the pervasive fragmentation and mutual isolation in contemporary philosophy, insofar as they have determined not only the longstanding and all-too-familiar “Continental divide” between historically-oriented philosophers in the post-Kantian European tradition, on the one hand, and Analytic philosophers on the other, but also a less noticed, yet perhaps even more insidious and invidious survivalist divide.

More precisely, it is simply a sad fact that if you want to survive in contemporary professional philosophy, then you do not challenge the Analytic mainstream by challenging objectivism, naturalism, or scientism, but  instead you must implicitly or explicitly acknowledge its dominance, by either quietly retreating into your own little sphere of historical specialists, or even more effectively, by actually joining forces with the Analytic mainstream under the non-threatening, accommodationist flag of a specialization in some sub-area of “value theory.”

The point is, that as long as you never directly challenge the philosophical hegemonic ideology or institutional power of the scientistic Analytic mainstream, and also manage to avoid offending the multiculturalist coercive moralists who aggressively police the professional academy,[xvii] then you’ll be in good shape professionally.

But at the same time, the entire situation produces pervasive intellectual alienation,  anomie, and inauthenticity, from anxious would-be graduate students obsessively read- ing the philosophy blogs to find out what they should be thinking and doing, all the way to cynical, embittered full professors merely putting in time and punching the clock until their pension-funds permit them to retire without risking old-age poverty.

More generally, as Jeff Schmidt has shown in his cogent and incisive critical analysis of salaried professionalism, especially including the professional academy,[xviii]  late 20th and early 21st century professional academic philosophers are ideologically controlled, obedient, rule-following, self-censoring, playpen-creative thinkers who consistently avoid any political engagement, lest it attract the ire of their university administrator bosses, or the ire of the people outside universities who fund private or public universities, or the ire of coercive moralistic colleagues—and thereby face complaints, reprimands, punishment, or even dismissal, thereby irreparably harming or even outright destroying their careers and professional reputations.

5. So, what should be done about The Sleep of Reason?

First, on the philosophical side, my view about what should be done 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,[xix] which holds that real, borderless philosophers are rational rebels for humanity,

(ii) that the revolutionary transformation of contemporary philosophy has to be internal to the post-Kantian tradition and to what I’ve called “the Kant wars,”[xix] hence it has to be something very like what I call rational anthropology,[xxi] 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 the Mind-Body Politic,” 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 the mind-body politic in our recent book, The Mind-Body Politic, is the only rationally justified and morally acceptable version of philosophical activism,

(iiib) especially when the mind-body politic is elaborated and extended by what I’ve described in another recent essay, “Our Sociable Sociality: The Emancipatory Politics of Everyday Life.”

And second, on the sociopolitical side, my view about what should be done about The Sleep of Reason flows directly from this thesis:

neither the ideologues of Enlightenment Lite nor the ideologues of the counter-Enlightenment have actually faced up to and grappled with Kant’s sharply third-alternative conception of Enlightenment and enlightenment thinking, which I’ve called Radical Enlightenment or Heavy-Duty Enlightenment.[xxii]

More precisely, according to Kant’s conception of Radical or Heavy-Duty Enlightenment, 

(i) reason as a whole is not monolithic, but instead basically articulated into

(ia) theoretical (i.e., logical, mathematical, or natural-scientific) reason, and

(ib) practical (i.e., pragmatic, moral, or political) reason, and

(ii) in both cases, reason is essentially limited by, and indeed also partially constituted, by human sensibility and its animal embodiment, which yields not only

(iii) a radical agnosticism about any and all “things-in-themselves” or noumenal substances, especially including God, which says that, as a result of reason’s essential limitation and partial constitution by sensibility and animal embodiment, we know a priori that we can neither know the nature of such entities nor prove their existence or non-existence, but yields also, in turn,  a general conception of human reason as

(iv) fundamentally and primarily practical in a non-instrumental, non-egoistic, and non-hedonistic way, and inherently guided by categorical imperatives—i.e., universal unconditionally obligatory moral principles—in a lifelong project of rational human agency that inherently includes

(v) an existential, life-changing “revolution of the heart” or “revolution of the will,” that fully orients our theoretical and practical reason alike to wholehearted, autonomous, active engagment with our individual and collective “human, all-too-human” real-world moral and political problems, in a way that is

(vi) fully dignitarian, anti-Statist, and highly critical of capitalism, indeed, anarcho-socialist,[xxiii] and that as a consequence, this ramified, rich, and robust Kantian conception of reason is

(vii) pro-scientific, but only within the limits of human sensibility and pure practical reason, so that given those limits, we must deny unconstrained mechanistic scientific knowing (Wissen) in order to acknowledge and affirm our moral faith (Glaube) in the dignity of individual human lives (the existential point of view) and in the global ethical community of humanity (the cosmopolitan point of view) alike.

Elsewhere, and especially in my recent five-book series, THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION,[xxiv] I’ve unpacked and defended (i) through (vi) in detail and at length, and in my recent essay, “The End of Mechanism: Kant, Science, and Humanity,” I’ve also unpacked and defended (vii).

6. My conclusion, then, is that right here and right now we simply have no choice at all but to wake the fuck up from The Sleep of Reason, and get our radical or heavy-duty enlightened act together, both as real, borderless philosophers who are rational rebels for humanity—that is, as rational anthropologists pursuing the mind-body politic—and also as rational human sociopolitical animals, before it’s too late for all of us.

NOTES

[i] H.D. Thoreau, “Walden,” in H. D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1960), pp. 1-227, at p. 9.

[ii] A. Schopenhauer, “On University Philosophy,” in A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. S. Roehr and C. Janaway( Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 125-176, at p. 174.

[iii] J. Dewey, “The Need for A Recovery of Philosophy,” in J. Dewey (ed.), Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Holt, 1917), pp. 3-69, at p. 65.

[iv] O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. C.F. Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), pp. 41-43. I’m grateful to Matt Andersson for drawing my attention to this text. See also H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), ch. 3.

[v] E. Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” in E. Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 269-299, at p. 299.

[vi] M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 186-187.

[vii] For critical analyses of identitarianism, see, e.g., K.A. Appiah, “Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself,” The New York Times (10 August 2018), available online at URL = <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/10/opinion/sunday/speak-for-yourself.html>; K.A. Appiah, The Lies That Bind. Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture (New York: Liveright, 2018); R. Hanna, “Identity Ad Absurdum: A Critique of the Cultural Appropriation Argument,” Against Professional Philosophy (21 June 2019), available online at URL =  <https://againstprofphil.org/2019/06/21/identity-ad-absurdum-a-critique-of-the-cultural-appropriation-argument/>; and R. Hanna and O. Paans, “On the Permissible Use of Force in a Kantian Dignitarian Moral and Political Setting, Or, Seven Kantian Samurai,” forthcoming in Journal of Philosophical Investigations 13 (2019), also available online in preview, HERE.

[viii] I’m using “a hegemonic ideology” in a broadly Marxist or at least neo-Marxist way, to  mean any system of more-or-less mind-controlling, often unreflectively-held, and generally pernicious beliefs, images, and affects—aka “a narrative”—that’s imposed, or at least importantly enabled, by a dominant social group that possesses the power of coercion and also controls its means.

[ix] See, e.g., Z (aka R. Hanna), “Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin,” Against Professional Philosophy (20 February 2017), available online at URL = <https://againstprofphil.org/2017/02/20/il-faut-cultiver-notre-jardin/>.

[x] See, e.g., I. Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in I. Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1980), pp. 1-24.

[xi] See, e.g., A. Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. A. Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956), part II.

[xii] 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>.

[xiii] S. Pinker, Enlightenment Now (New York: Allen Lane, 2018).

[xiv] See, e.g., T. Bayne and M. Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011); and U. Kriegel (ed.), Phenomenal Intentionality, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013).

[xv] See, e.g., R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon/OUP, 2006), also available online in preview, HERE.

[xvi] See The Vienna Circle, “The Scientific Conception of the World,” available online HERE.

[xvii] See, e.g. R. Hanna, “How to Philosophize with a Hammer and a Blue Guitar: Quietism, Activism, and Emancipatory Political Theory,” (September 2019 version), section 6, esp. p. 22, available online HERE.

[xviii] See J. Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

[xix] 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.

[xx] See R. Hanna, “How To Win The Kant Wars” (September 2019 version), available online HERE.

[xxi] 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; R. Hanna, Preface and General Introduction, Supplementary Essays, and General Bibliography (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 1) (New York: Nova Science, 2018),  also available online in preview, HERE.; 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; 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; 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; 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.

[xxii] See Hanna, “Exiting the State and Debunking the State of Nature”; and 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.

[xxiii] See R. Hanna, “Statism, Capitalism, and Beyond,” (June 2019 version), available online HERE; Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism and Anarchism, esp. parts 2-3; and Hanna, “Radical Enlightenment.”

[xxiv] See note [xxi] above.


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