Kant-Conference 2024
International Kant-Conference @University Roma_3, 13–14th December 2024
Keywords: Kant's 300th anniversary, conference, gender, logic, German Idealism, reception of Kantian philosophy.
Under the trilingual motto “Kant-siderazioni/ Kant-siderationen/ Kant-siderations”, an international group of researchers from Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and the U.S.A. met at the end of the year at the University of Roma Tre to discuss sources, interpretations, and contemporary research approaches in honorem natalis diei Immanuelis Kantii (1724/2024). The event was organized by Francesca Iannelli, Chair of Aesthetics, together with Gabriele Schimmenti (Philosophy of Art), supported by Jörg Hüttner and Martin Walter. The conference aimed to address three central topics: Firstly, new, unpublished sources of Kant’s thought were discussed, in particular new sources on logic and Kant’s relationship to his own sources. Secondly, various interpretations of Kant and his reception in the 19th - and
20th -century thought was discussed in a European context. Thirdly, the focus was on new interpretations and the contemporary and transdisciplinary resonances of Kantian philosophy, both in the artistic and scientific fields. The conference concluded with a think tank on Kant’s language, in particular the language of negativity in relation to its sources (Baumgarten, Wolff) and its impact (Obereit, Jacobi: Nihilism). This enabled a collective reflection on the relationship between Kant’s language and the mediation of philosophy.
The conference was opened by Klaus Vieweg (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena), with thoughts on Kant’s architectonics of reason and its connection with the search for a “first principle of all knowledge”: The modern embarrassment about the beginning – Hegel and transcendental philosophy. Starting from Kant, Vieweg traces Reinhold’s and Hegel’s questions on the determination of the philosophical beginning as well as the challenges and criticisms that derive from these approaches. Through Kant’s critique of the metaphysics that preceded him and his attempt to initiate a new, scientific, i.e., critically purified metaphysics. This attempt is linked to the need for an architectonic that unites all the insights of metaphysics in a deductive system. Hegel and other Kantians criticized that although Kant formulated a claim, he by no means offered a clear derivation or system. It was Hegel in particular who put
his finger in the wound. He diagnoses an embarrassment in modern philosophy with regard to systematics and deductive construction. Hegel was preceded by Reinhold’s Theory of consciousness. As is well known, Reinhold regards Kant’s philosophy as a theory of consciousness, focused on the faculty of imagination. However, this approach also leads back to an unreflected dogmatism, which Kant sought to overcome. Hegel learned from Johann Friedrich Flatt and other Tübingen teachers that the search for an absolute principle can lead to an infinite regress of reasoning. According to Hegel, the “fact of consciousness” in Reinhold and later Fichte cannot serve as a criterion of truth, as it is subjective. Thus, Reinhold’s fundamental proposition remains problematic and cannot be regarded as a ground of truth. This is where Hegel’s revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism comes to the fore. Hegel had taken from Fichte his criticism of Kant’s approach to the self-determination of thought. According to Fichte, Kant did not provide a stringent deduction of the categories from thought itself. However, Hegel did not stop there and reinterpreted the transcendental ego, as it had to guarantee the unity of subjectivity and objectivity. Nonetheless, it was Fichte who made the demand for a scientific philosophy based on an unconditional principle and requiring the deduction of the categories. Kant remained in the position of Aristotle, who had “collected” the categories empirically, without noticing this. Hegel, therefore, sees in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre the first reasonable attempt to derive the categories, at least the first clear addressing of the problem. However, Fichte’s dual structure of consciousness must also be abolished. Once again, it is skepticism that represents the necessary step towards the self-examination of consciousness and is capable of breaking down this dual structure in the first place. The demand for the beginning can thus be formulated as follows: Philosophy should examine itself, without external criteria, to avoid dogmatism. Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte have not yet been able to fulfill this demand due to hidden presuppositions that would be attached to their system.
Martin Walter (Munich): Kant’s New Lectures on Logic. Their value as sources for Kant research and influence on the emergence of German Idealism. In addition to the Logic-fragment
Anonymous-Born, a plagiarism similar to the Logic of Hechsel, and the Logic of Krause-Grunert, Walter discusses in particular the Logic of Volckmann, which was copied between 1783 and 1784. Its text is as yet unpublished (forthcoming: jena-sophie, vol. 6, Paderborn/Leiden: Fink-Brill) and represents a hybrid of the text of the Logik Hechsel and the Wiener Logik. In addition to the reflections on logic, the much more extensively elaborated
lectures on logic – since Kant himself is not known to have published any logic of his own – are indispensable for an understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. Walter can show how Kant’s degrees of clarity (Refl 2394; AA 16: 342) coincide with Fichte’s gradual formation of his “Pragmatic History of the Human Spirit” (GA 1,2: 365 sq.) and therefore be assumed to be based on a reading of the then widely disseminated logic transcripts of Kant’s lectures. Furthermore, Schelling's recourse to the form of reduplicative judgments (A, insofar as it is A, is B) as a logical self-reinforcement can be traced back to Grunert-Krause's logic, as this was circulating in Jena around 1800.
Bruno Haas (Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne): L’oggetto come modello scientifico: il contributo di Kant. Haas presents basic assumptions of his interpretation of Kant’s object as a
mathematical-modeling reference correlate. He shows how an "object" in the context of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is not constituted as an a priori given, but as the result of the application of forms of thought in a reciprocal relationship (reference). Such a correlate represents the "empirical object" as its representative and occupies a logical place as an element in the formation of a theory. Objects of this system of theory, or this model, are not independent, but have meaning as a result of structured references, e.g., quantitative relations and numerical schemes to one another – think of Kant's Section on principles. According to Haas, Kant’s philosophy thus becomes the origin of a new epoch of scientific activity: modeling science, which does not naively isolate its objects, but thinks of them in a reciprocal context of meaning. Kant does not provide a tool for the analytical description of individual objects, but a constitutional theory of objectivity. As a steps to get into Kant's way of thinking of modeling object formation, Haas describes the problem of a priori synthesis as a paradoxical paradigm, an irresolvable contradiction, – insofar as conceptually every expression, every answer will always already consist of analytical parts. But while we are considering this paradox, we are already within Kant's model of meaning and are engaging in self-thematization, i.e., we have already taken the step into Kant's thinking with the question of synthetic a priori.
Stefano Bacin (Università degli Studi di Milano Statale): Kant's Arguments against Universal Practical Philosophy. In his lecture, Stefano Bacin concentrates on the explanation of a passage from the preface to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which Kant declares: "One does not think that what is demanded here is already to be found in the propaedeutics of the famous Wolff before his moral philosophy, namely in what he calls "general practical worldly wisdom", and that it therefore is not a completely new field to enter here. By distancing himself from the "standard view", Bacin attempts to show that Kant's aim was rather a profound break with the previous approaches to a "universal practical philosophy" – a conception that has been advocated not only by Wolff, but also by authors such as Baumgarten. For Kant, it is therefore a matter of emphasizing his structural change rather than adapting Wolff's perspective. Of course, this doesn’t deny continuity with previous projects, but rather accentuates the originality of Kant's perspective, which consists precisely in opening up a "new field". Kant thus wants to overcome a conception of morality based on rules by means of which the will is actually a posteriori determined. Instead, the aim is to identify the rules a priori according to which the will should determine itself: This alone guarantees that the human being is an autonomous being.
Douglas Moggach (University of Ottawa) has examined Kant's legacy in the context of what has been termed post-Kantian perfectionism. Drawing on the interpretations of Ernst Cassirer
and Paul Redding, who see Leibniz as the founder of German idealism, Moggach attempts to show that the theory of political freedom within idealism was fundamentally shaped by the Kantian idea of autonomy. In contrast to Paul Guyer's interpretation (albeit in some continuity with it), which sees Kant as a form of moral perfectionism, Moggach argues that Kant's influence on German idealism should rather be understood in terms of a legal-political perfectionism based on the concept of autonomy. Thanks to Kant’s influence, German idealism was able to rethink the idea of freedom in a new and original way. Moggach shows that four major changes were brought about by the post-Kantian revolution: 1) a shift in focus from happiness or prosperity in pre-Kantian perfectionisms to freedom in post-Kantianism; 2) a
move away from the notion of natural or given ends to historical conceptions of the self and its 3ends; 3) the shift from a presupposition of social and value-based homogeneity to a recognition of the diversity of interests and ends; 4) the replacement of the notion of an implicit harmony of interests with a conception of conflict and incommensurable ends. These changes form a common feature of post-Kantian philosophies, even if they are expressed differently by the individual authors of this modern philosophical turn (from Schiller through Hegel to Marx).
Fabio Ciracì (Università Salento/Lecce): Kant nella Schopenhauer-Schule: Hartmann, Bahnsen, Mainländer. Ciracì describes selected metaphysicians of the Schopenhauer school who considered themselves particularly influenced by Kant. What they have in common is the adoption of the dualistic conception of phenomenon and noumenon, the link back to Schopenhauer's prioritization of the will, and the differently answered question of the relationship between reason and irrationality. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, as a "philosopher of the unconscious", attempts to reconcile Kant's philosophy with an evolutionary view of suffering. On the other hand, Julius Bahnsen emphasizes the "real-dialectical" contradictoriness of the world, an insurmountable "world negativity" of the will that divides itself everywhere. A will "that wants what it does not want and does not want what it wants". Finally, Philipp Mainländer radicalizes the nature of the world into a nihilistic "will to death", which culminates in an affirmation of suicide. Although Mainländer's exaggeration into an "absolute nothingness" is not found in either Kant or Schopenhauer, its metaphysical extravagance means that it can be classed with the current that Liebmann (Kant and the Epigones) called Schopenhauer's "transcendental tendency".
Leonhard Möckl (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Erlangen): Kantian Echoes in Science. Möckl is questioning the transversality of the concept of the hypothesis, which has been omnipresent in all disciplines, both in science and in the humanities, since Kant's "Copernican Revolution", but is also mysterious and difficult to grasp. Firstly, the hypothesis needs to be related to the current state of knowledge and be present in the scientific community, but its formulation must also have a non-rational aspect. Secondly, in this dichotomous state, the hypothesis is immediately revoked at the moment of its formulation or subjected to casuistry, as it is not intended for eternity, but always for cases. Or its relevance for the current state of knowledge remains if the hypothesis later turns out to be true. Or its non-rational aspect remains if the hypothesis is disproved. When formulating the hypothesis, both cases are possible outcomes. In this formulation, rationality and non-rationality collide twice. However, the conflict between these two categories cannot be resolved within the position of the categories' rationality and non-rationality. If preference is to one of the two opposing categories, paradoxes arise, for example, in the question of responsibility in scientific research (ethics of faith vs. ethics of responsibility). According to Leonhard Möckl, the hypothesis should therefore always be traced back to its radically individual origin.
Helga Varden (University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign): Sex, Love, and Gender. Some Kantian Themes. Based on a critique of Kant's practical philosophy, in particular his emphasis on universality in morality, Varden examines the possibility of a universal sexual ethic that can integrate all possible individual cases and sexual minorities. Previous interpretative approaches have assumed that Kant's focus on universalizable maxims and acting out of duty neglects the importance of individual differences and social identities. This critique concerns various4aspects of normativity, including the roles of sexuality and gender as well as different types of relationships and historically situated legal-political systems, such as marriage, among others. Varden argues that Kant's philosophy neither advocates hyper-reflective, alienating ways of life nor attempts to justify Kant's own prejudices, which shine through in many of his writings, in the name of a universal morality. Instead, Kant's theory of freedom sets the moral framework within which "non-moralizable aspects" of human nature are considered and can therefore be integrated. Kant's universality theories of freedom and their relationship to social phenomena such as religious, gender, and cultural differences require a systematic integration of Kant's moral philosophy and anthropology. A complete practical philosophy requires a moral anthropology that examines the subjective conditions of human nature, insofar as these can indicate factors that facilitate or hinder the fulfillment of moral laws. In this light, Kant's philosophy recognizes the importance of cultural and historical contexts, but they do not serve as a basis for moral reflection. Instead, morality should set the framework within which culture is developed and justified. Accordingly, Kant's approach allows for the integration of people's unreflected and reflected modes of existence. Kant's theory of freedom thus provides the integrative framework within which "non-moralizable aspects" of human nature are given a necessary space so that the significance of individual differences and social identities is not neglected. Varden's approach is a genuine normative alternative to Judith Butler's performatively argued theory and is therefore suitable for making Kant more relevant to debates
in gender theory and sociology from their current emotivist standpoints.
Francesca Iannelli (Roma Tre University): Kant in the cinema: Kantian resonances in Interstellar. In her contribution, the host Francesca Iannelli, examines a trend of recent decades in which there have been repeated attempts to alternately explore the connections between philosophy and cinema. According to some interpreters, the medium of the blockbuster allows for a more effective representation of philosophical conundrums and a more intense involvement of the audience. Cinema is, therefore, a valuable tool for making philosophy less elitist but more captivating. Another opportunity of this connection is to find new ways and new (visual) languages for teaching an old discipline that wants to renew itself while remaining a guide and guardian of the present. The aim of Iannelli's contribution was therefore to examine the cinematic transgressions of Kantian philosophy. However, Iannelli focused on one director in particular: Christopher Nolan. There is certainly no shortage of scholarly publications about him that examine a "philosophy" attributed to him. Iannelli limits herself to "Interstellar" (2014) and compares this dystopian science fiction film with certain positions of thought that Kant circled in 1786 in the essay "Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?". It thus offers some stimulating food for thought for re-reading the Spinozism controversy today and exploring the nocturnal atmosphere of the supernatural "differently".
Gabriele Schimmenti (Roma Tre University): Alcune traiettorie del marxismo-kantiano: i casi Sohn-Rethel e Colletti. Schimmenti has dealt with the legacy of Kant within the history of Marxism, in particular in the reflections of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Lucio Colletti, and proposed to widen the historiographical category of "neo-Kantian Marxism" into a broader category of "Kantian-Marxism". Kantian Marxism represents a phenomenon of longer duration and encompasses not only the neo-Kantian thinkers in the narrower sense, but also a wider spectrum of philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. Schimmenti shows that an essential characteristic of Kantian Marxism is grounded in its reference to Kant for the interpretation or integration of historical materialism in the endeavor to find an antidote to Hegelian philosophy. Within this continuity, the "first wave" of Kantian Marxism concentrated on Kant's practical philosophy, while the "second wave" focused on theoretical philosophy. Schimmenti then analyzed how Sohn-Rethel's and Colletti's conceptions of Marxism applied Kant's philosophy of knowledge to correct Hegel's interpretations of Marx. While Sohn-Rethel supplements Marx with Kant's epistemology and epistemological problems, Colletti pursued the intention of overcoming the aporia of the concept of contradiction in Marx, which Colletti himself regarded as problematic, by returning to Kant's concept of real repugnance.
Jörg Hüttner (Università Salento/Lecce): Kant's Language of Negativity. Hüttner's research on Kant's notions of nothing goes back to his Munich master's thesis (2015), in which Dieter
Henrich also took an interest. Most works on the Critique of Pure Reason omit or ignore Kant's nothingness table, which forms the transition from transcendental analytic to transcendental dialectic: ens rationis, ens imaginarium, nihil privativum, and nihil negativum (KrV, B 346 sq.). Hüttner's final lecture spans an arc from Kant's early work Introduction to the Negative Quantities, via his usage of negative language (negation particles, privations, types of contradictories) to the Critique of Pure Reason with the aforementioned systematic table, which Kant describes in a reflection as the "conclusion of ontology" and thus gives it a central position in his system. From there, he discusses its effect on Kant's contemporaries and successors. In particular, G.S.A. Mellin's synthesis of the nothingness and category tables into a Superkategorientafel, as Hüttner paraphrases a complete table of all Kantian categories, deserves some future attention from a systematic point of view. Mellin first implements Kant's assertion that after the division of nothingness, "the concurrent division with something is to be indicated by itself" (KrV, B 348). Mellin has thus taken up Kant's hint in a remarkable way and developed his approach further than all other interpreters of the Critique. Hüttner outlines Jakob Hermann Obereit's critical-polemical objections to Kant's destruction of Wolff's metaphysics as a further negative linguistic radiation. With "Allnichts" and "Nihilism" (1787), even before Jacobi's use against Fichte (1799), Obereit, once still a student of Wolff in Halle, rejects nihilistically Kant's rejection of the proofs of God. It was therefore not necessary to advance to Hegel in order to systematically begin with being and nothingness, Kant's Noumenology of the spirit – concludes Hüttner with some wit – provided sufficient material.
The conference would not have taken place without participation of the following organizers and sponsors: the host institution Università degli Studi Roma Tre, with the kind support and grateful sponsorship of (I) the Direzione-Generale Educazione, Ricerca e Istituti culturali; (II) the Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca; (III) NextGenerationEU; (IV) the PRIN-20224KFTLP Project "Hegelian Constellations of the Feminine: a Hyper Archive for an Inclusive Bildung"; (V) the Italia Domani Piano nazionale di ripresa e resilienza (PNRR) and (VI) the Società Filosofica Italiana (Sezione Romana).
Francesca Iannelli, Gabriele Schimmenti, Martin Walter & Jörg Hüttner.