Fanon

Abstract

I argue that Franz Fanon can usefully be situated in the tradition of German Idealism in the sense that he takes from Kant and especially Hegel the conception of agency as something to be achieved through struggle for the ideal of humanity as self-determining. Fanon sees the suffering cased by colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as deriving from the systematic deprivation of agency by the colonial power. Using the work of Hegel, Fanon seeks to reconstruct the emancipatory project of the black man in close analogy to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The violence which Fanon sees as unavoidable in such a struggle is not violence for the sake of violence but, following Hegel, the violence that constitutes the subject in the first place.     

Kant’s Project of Perpetual Pacification

Richard Tuck locates a conundrum in the Hobbesian world view. Whereas the nation-state is desired to effect the pacification of the domestic sphere, a world state and the promise of global pacification is feared. Kant’s strong program for perpetual peace is presented as a moral imperative to establish through legal means a world republic based on reason and individual autonomy. Kant emphasizes the empirical impossibility of a world republic and hence advocates the weaker program of a world federation of states. This essay argues not the empirical but the logical impossibility of Kant’s strong program and by extension any program of perpetual peace that claims to be essentially different from ‘mere’ peace as truce. In so doing this essay distinguishes between political theory based on the assumption of the ontological priority of peace and political theory based on the assumption of the ontological priority of violence and argues for the necessity of thinking the latter.

空间观念的理论生成与话语转义——以康德的“先验空间”到“具身化”为例

康德针对绝对空间展开的继承性批判成为重构空间思想的必由路径,他用“绝对纯粹”来替代“神秘经验”,这是一个非神学的空间阐释框架,被誉为“哥白尼式革命”。在划清和传统空间观念的界限之后,康德以“经验”和“先验”为视角来廓清自己的理论构想并论证得出空间的重要属性：经验实在性和先验观念性。从这一结论亦不难看出康德对大陆理性主义和英国经验主义的贯通融合,即主体凭借空间化的表象,将内感官之“我”视为审美对象,这实际是上承“先验感性”中的论述。除此之外,康德空间观已预设了现象学的基本判断,这实际上开启了空间研究从经验性走向境域化、从形而上走向“具身化”的可能性。     

The Preference for Indirect Harm

We presented subjects pairs of hypothetical scenarios. The action in each scenario harmed some people in order to aid others. In one member of the pair, the harm was a direct result of the action. In the other member, it was an indirect byproduct. Subjects preferred the indirect harm to the direct harm. This result could not be fully explained in terms of differences in judgments about which option was more active, more intentional, more likely to cause harm, or more subject to the disapproval of others. Taken together, these findings provide evidence for a new bias in judgment, a tendency to favor indirectly harmful options over directly harmful alternatives, irrespective of the associated outcomes, intentions, or self-presentational concerns. We speculate that this bias could originate from the use of a typical but somewhat unreliable property of harmful acts, their directness, as a cue to moral evaluation. We discuss the implications of the bias for a range of social issues, including the distinction between passive and active euthanasia, legal deterrence, and the rhetoric of affirmative action.     

Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self-Consciousness from Kant to Kierkegaard

Abstract

In the development of modern philosophy self-consciousness was not generally or unanimously given important consideration. This was because philosophers such as Descartes, Kant and Fichte thought it served as the highest principle from which we can ‘deduce’ all propositions that rightly claimed validity. However, the Romantics thought that the consideration of self-consciousness was of the highest importance even when any claim to foundationalism was abandoned. In this respect, Hölderlin and his circle, as well as Novalis and Schleiermacher, thought that self-consciousness, itself, was not a principle but must be ranked on a minor or dependent level, and presupposed the Absolute as a superior but inaccessible condition or ground. This reservation did not hinder them from recognising that the foundationalist Fichte was the first to have shown conclusively that from Descartes, via German Rationalism and British Empiricism, up to Kant, self-consciousness was misconceived of as the result of an act of reflection by which a second-order act bent back upon a first-order act that is identical to itself. This conception entailed circular entanglements and infinite regresses, and was too high a price to pay. Whereas Fichte thought pre-reflexive self-awareness was a philosophical principle, the Romantics and their vehement critic Kierkegaard, abandoned the idea of self-consciousness as a foundational starting point of philosophy. Instead, they founded self-consciousness on transcendent Being, a prior non-conceptual consciousness (‘feeling’) and reproached Fichte for having fallen back into the repudiated reflection model of self-consciousness.     

Kant's Perpetual Peace and Its Hidden Sources: A Textual Approach

The problem of Kantâ‐?s sources in Perpetual Peace has never before been dealt with in a systematic fashion. As some commentators have already noticed, Kant seldom quotes his sources in Perpetual Peace and in quite a number of other works. The purpose of the present research note is to analyze the Kantian text and to find philological traces of the various authors that we believe have been important to Kantâ‐?s work in the field of political philosophy. With this in mind, a methodology has been elaborated which includes three aspects: a textual and comparative analysis, a consistency analysis and a contextual analysis. These three approaches combined should allow us to systematically shed light on the key role played by Emer de Vattelâ‐?s famous book The Law of Nations (1758) and, more unexpectedly, by the Federalist Papers, in particular articles No. 10, 14 and 51 written by Madison.     

Kantian cosmopolitanism and its limits

The cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment was mostly a limited matter of a Eurocentric anti-nationalism promoting the ideal of Europe as an harmonious system of balancing states. Against this background, Kant’s cosmopolitan vision stands out as more inclusive because, far from restricting its concerns to Europe, it proposes to bring all of humanity together by locating its different sections in a developmental framework that runs from the most primitive of human conditions to the fullest development of Man’s moral and intellectual capacities. Like the developmental schema posited by Voltaire and the Scottish Enlightenment, this vision locates most of humanity at some distance behind Western Europe. It produces the appearance of a cosmopolitan inclusiveness by means of an equally cosmopolitan differentiation.     

康德和黑格尔刑罚论品读

康德的刑罚论和黑格尔的刑罚论分别表达了他们的刑法思想。康德和黑格尔的刑罚论以正义为价值追求,以报应为理论主线,其理论精髓仍然有益于当今的刑法理论和刑法实践。     

对话与批判——康德、黑格尔、列宁对四个哲学问题的认识

本文从自在之物、理性认识能力、二律背反和主客体关系等几个具体方面,分析康德、黑格尔和列宁在哲学之路上跨越时空的对话,以及他们之间就这些问题的先后批判关系。