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.

The Time of Catastrophe

The Time of Catastrophe
Author: Christopher Dole
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317013867

If catastrophes are, by definition, exceptional events of such magnitude that worlds and lives are dramatically overturned, the question of timing would pose a seemingly straightforward, if not redundant question. The Time of Catastrophe demonstrates the analytic productiveness of this question, arguing that there is much to be gained by interrogating the temporal conceits of conventional understandings of catastrophe and the catastrophic. Bringing together a distinguished, interdisciplinary group of scholars, the book develops a critical language for examining 'catastrophic time', recognizing the central importance of, and offering a set of frameworks for, examining the alluring and elusive qualities of catastrophe. Framed around the ideas of Agamben, Kant and Benjamin, and drawing on philosophy, history, law, political science, anthropology and the arts, this volume seeks to demonstrate how the question of 'catastrophic time' is in fact a question about something much more than the frequency of disasters in our so-called 'Age of Catastrophe'.

Law and Catastrophe

Law and Catastrophe
Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2007-06-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780804768344

The study of catastrophe is a growth industry. Today, cosmologists scan the heavens for asteroids of the kind that smashed into earth some ninety million years ago, leading to the swift extinction of the dinosaurs. Climatologists create elaborate models of the chaotic weather and vast flooding that will result from the continued buildup of greenhouse gases in the planet's atmosphere. Terrorist experts and homeland security consultants struggle to prepare for a wide range of possible biological, chemical, and radiological attacks: aerated small pox virus spread by a crop duster, botulism dumped into an urban reservoir, a dirty bomb detonated in a city center. Yet, strangely, law's role in the definition, identification, prevention, and amelioration of catastrophe has been largely neglected. The relationship between law and other limiting conditions—such as states of emergency—has been the subject of rich and growing literature. By contrast, little has been written about law and catastrophe. In devoting a volume to the subject, the essays' authors sketch the contours of a relatively fresh, yet crucial, terrain of inquiry. Law and Catastrophe begins the work of developing a jurisprudence of catastrophe.

Reading Walter Benjamin

Reading Walter Benjamin
Author: Richard J. Lane
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2005-07-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780719064371

This book explores the persistence of absolute in Benjamin's work by sketching out the relationship between philosphy and theology apparent in his diverse writings, from the early youth movement essays to the later books, essays and fragments. Lane examines Benjamin from two main perspectives: a history-of-ideas approach situating Benjamin in relation to the new German-Jewish thinking at the turn of the twentieth-century, as well as the German youth movements, Surrealism and the "Georgekreis"; and a conceptual approach examining more critical issues in relation to Benjamin and Kant, modern aesthetics and narrative order.

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.