Abstract: 1 gunshot is not a war, 2 gunshots are not a war… are 1 million gunshots a war? There is no such thing so investigated as war and, at the same time, still so outcasted theoretically. Ambiguity, vagueness and logical conundrums lay unsolved in the very hardcore of the several theories that considered war from a general perspective and, then, philosophically committed explicitly or implicitly. It is not the experience and observational data we lack but the general ability to generalize and expand our knowledge beyond what we can directly observe empirically and historically. Sorites arguments are everywhere in war theories: vagueness and ambiguities of many shapes inform the literature. Only a philosophical account of war can solve some of those issues: an ontology of war is needed to bring light into the heart of darkness.
Tag: Metaphysics
Dalla «Critica della ragion pura» all’alogica razionale. Karl Jaspers e l’interpretazione esistenziale della «Dialettica trascendentale»
Abstract: In the Transcendental Dialectic Kant reflects on the faculty of reason and its illusory claim to be able to get to know the thing-in-itself. Through paralogisms, antinomies and ideals Kant shows that the unifying aspiration of reason fails in the search for objective knowledge, but nevertheless plays an indispensable role in human progress, thanks to its regulative value. Jaspers recovers Kantian reflection to fight idealism and scientism and reads Kant in the light of the kierkegaardian and nietzschean enhancement of existence. In Philosophy Jaspers outlines a path in which the limits encountered by man in the search for a foundation lead to a fragmentation of knowledge and the different modes of existence must be kept in constant dialogue through reason, in order to experience the «Umgreifende». Hersch starts from Jaspers to elaborate a kantian ontology in which man’s essence is to make and create his own reality, giving shape to matter through his own grip. Man can not arrive at objective knowledge, but reason nevertheless pushes the subject to constantly overcome himself in free creation, to build that authenticity promised to him by his own nature. At the end of the path a “rational a-logic” is elaborated in which metaphysics is directly linked to praxis and capable of maintaining a dialectical relationship with the irrational.
Transcendental Philosophy in Scotus, Kant, and Deleuze: One Voice Expressing Difference
Abstract: This paper traces a common thread in John Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant, and Gilles Deleuze: the search for a truly transcendental philosophy. Scotus was the father of transcendental philosophy, Kant transformed the discipline into transcendental idealism, and Deleuze further transformed it into transcendental empiricism. Kant saw previous transcendental philosophy (which he called transcendental realism) as being transcendent, as it purported to give access to things in themselves. In place of this, Kant put forth transcendental idealism, in which we only have access to appearances. Deleuze saw Kant’s transcendental idealism as transcendent, as it dealt with the transcendental on the level of conception, which Deleuze saw as empirical. In place of this, Deleuze put forth transcendental empiricism, in which the transcendental pertains only to the realm of immanence, out of which the empirical arises. All three thinkers share a common tradition, transcendental philosophy. Further, they shared a common goal, that of making the transcendental immanent, even though they expressed this goal differently.
