Aesthetic Reason And Imaginative Freedom

Shows the relevance of Schiller’s thought for contemporary philosophy, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This book seeks to draw attention to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a philosophical thinker in his own right. For too long, his philosophical contribution has been neglected in favor of his much-deserved reputation as a political playwright. The essays in this collection make two arguments. First, Schiller presents a robust philosophical program that can be favorably compared to those of his age, including Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, and Hegel, and he proves to be their equal in his thinking on morality, aesthetics, and politics. Second, Schiller can also guide us in our more contemporary philosophical concerns and approaches, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. Here, Schiller instructs us in our engagement with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, and others. María del Rosario Acosta López is Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She has published several books, including La tragedia como conjuro: el problema de lo sublime en Friedrich Schiller. Jeffrey L. Powell is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University and the editor of Heidegger and Language.

In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant's aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant's account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant's contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency provides a novel interpretation and rational reconstruction of Kant's doctrine of freedom. Markus Kohl shows how Kant defends the belief that we are free from foreign (natural and super-natural) causes as a presupposition of all meaningful human activity. While this interpretation focuses on the essential role that freedom of will plays in our moral agency, it also examines how our status as rational cognitive agents hinges on our freedom of thought, and why our aesthetic engagement with beauty requires our freedom of imagination. Kohl thereby gives a compelling sense of Kant's estimation that freedom is a "cardinal point"--even the "keystone"--of his entire critical philosophy. Kant's doctrine of freedom emerges in this account as a systematic critique of a naturalistic worldview which regards all our capacities, representations, and actions as the causal upshot of natural laws and forces. Kant holds that the naturalistic worldview fatally undermines our self-conception as rational agents. This critique of naturalism culminates in the argument that naturalistic cognizers cannot explain away our freedom from natural forces because they must presuppose such a freedom in their own cognitive efforts to devise rationally valid naturalistic theories.

This volume of essays on the philosopher John Sallis assesses his wide ranging and genuinely original contribution to philosophy. Along with the response to the essays by Sallis, these essays indicate directions for the future of philosophy.

Imagination is a complex and ambiguous culture-making power, which, while central to politics, is a rather marginal concept in contemporary political theory. By drawing on works of modern and contemporary Continental political philosophers, this book addresses how imagination can be both a source of freedom and domination in liberal-democratic politics, and argues for a benign public employment of images and narratives in a global world of diverse cultures. The challenge is not to keep contemporary politics clear of images, but to better distinguish between benign and malign uses of creativity in the public realm. This distinction is important because the language employed by the participants in the complex cultural dialogue that characterizes modern plural societies is constituted by metaphors and myths, which form their perceptions and sensibilities. The embedment of communicative practices in a society’s imaginary brings an ambivalent psychological and emotional potential into democratic politics. Modern liberal-democracies can shift the public employment of imagination either in a direction that increases the autonomous capacity of individuals to engage culture and language in a creative and interactive manner in the construction of their identities, or in a direction that increases fascination with images and myths and, consequently, the escapist desire to pull these out of the living dialogue with others. Turning the public work of creativity in the first direction requires a conscious change in the modern social imaginary. This can be achieved through the aesthetic cultivation of an ethical productive imagination: both analogical and explorative, both empathic and reflective. While capable of creatively giving utopian impetus to politics, this imagination would also stir the individuals’ responsiveness to the particularity of others and to their capacity to be equal and free partners in the making of a common world. An important avenue in achieving this objective in modern liberal-democracies will be provided by the capacity of literary works to open up public spaces of dialogue. There the renewal of the metaphors and myths that frame individual and collective identities in a society can have transformative effects that increase the individuals’ ability for cross cultural understanding.

Critique has been a central theme in the German philosophical tradition since the eighteenth century. The main goal of this book is to provide a history of this concept from its Kantian inception to contemporary critical theory. Focusing on both canonical and previously overlooked texts and thinkers, the contributors bring to light alternative conceptions of critique within nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, which have profound implications for contemporary philosophy. By offering a critical revision of the history of modern European philosophy, this book raises new questions about what it means for philosophy to be "critical" today.

Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets' contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses.

Friedrich Schiller is justly celebrated for his dramas and poetry. Yet, above all, he was a polymath, whose writings enriched a range of fields including history and philosophy. Until now, no comprehensive accounting of this philosophy has been undertaken. The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller makes good this desideratum, treating Schiller's poetry, prose, and dramatic work alongside his philosophical writings and reviewing his thought not only in connection with those who influenced him, such as Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte, but also those he anticipated, such as Hegel, Marx, and the Neo-Kantians. Topics treated in this volume include Schiller's philosophical background, his theoretical writings, Schiller's philosophical writing in light of his entire oeuvre, and Schiller's philosophical legacy. The Handbook also includes an overview of the main topics Schiller addressed in his philosophical writings including philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, moral philosophy, politics and political theory, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of education. Bringing together the latest research on Schiller and his thought by leading scholars in the field, the Handbook draws attention to Schiller's undiminished importance for philosophical debates today.