tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5200276.post5313669738067372188..comments2023-12-28T06:30:48.808-05:00Comments on The Rule of Reason: Kant vs. HistoryUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5200276.post-78209173937610331182007-11-06T12:18:00.000-05:002007-11-06T12:18:00.000-05:00The Father of Historical Transcendentalism in Amer...The Father of Historical Transcendentalism in America<BR/><BR/>I would start with taking a look at George Bancroft and his oration, The Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion which can be found in Literary and Historical Miscellanies by George Bancroft. It can also be found in Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy, Edited by Joseph L. Blau.<BR/><BR/>Russel B. Nye has this to say about George Bancroft in his biography George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel<BR/><BR/>The 1835 oration, The Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion, provided an exposition of the philosophy that motivated all of Bancroft's constructive thought in politics, incriticism, and most of all, in his writing of history.(p. 100)<BR/><BR/>But when Bancroft spoke in Williamstown, there were as yet no transcendentalists. Emerson, who was to become the leader of the movement, was simply a retired Unitarian minister living and writing in concord; his essay, Nature, the seed from which the philosophy grew in Massachusetts, was not to appear for another year. Emerson had read Coleridge, Swedenborg, Plato, and a smattering of German philosophy; his ideas were forming in 1835. Bancroft, saturated in idealistic and transcendental philosophy since 1817, had studied with Schleiermacher, had read Kant, Novalis, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling, Hegel, and the other Teutonic romantic thinkers who first gave the system its shape. What Emerson, Ripley, Thoreau, Dwight, Clarke, Osgood, Brownson, and the other New Englanders knew later at secondhand, Bancroft knew fifteen years earlier; he had become acquainted with the essentials of New England transcendentalism before they had left the shores of Europe to take on an American coloring.(p. 101)<BR/><BR/>Russel B. Nye's biography on Bancroft was awarded the second Alfred A. Knopf Fellowship in Biography.<BR/><BR/>Two books listed in the General Biography are from J.W. Burgess, The Middle Period, 1817-1858 and Reconstruction and the Constituton, 1866-1876. Both books are on Scott Powell's recommended reading list.Rick Wilmeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10658951650604037445noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5200276.post-24757013249994236482007-11-06T09:37:00.000-05:002007-11-06T09:37:00.000-05:00"[...] a duel between Columbus and Kant; that is, ..."[...] a duel between Columbus and Kant; that is, between men animated by rational ideas toward action and the proponents of a philosophy that says all man's ideas are inherently suspect simply because they come from man."<BR/><BR/>Strictly speaking, Kant distinguished between "ideas" and "concepts." Kant did not say all of man's ideas are suspect. To the contrary, he said that certain ideas (used in a semi-Platonic sense) were crucial to understanding anything about the world of appearances. Which ideas are those? The ideas that come, mysteriously, <I>a priori</I> from inside the mind <I>somewhere</I> and <I>somewhow</I>. Examples are "space" and "time" -- which are ideas, Kant says, which we <I>impose</I> on appearances in order to create objects. They are ideas having "necessity," an abstraction which we could never induce from the contingent world of appearances. (This is the payoff of holding [false] dichtomies such as necessary vs. contingent.)<BR/><BR/>See, for example, Kant's discussions in the "Transcendental Dialectic" section of <I>Critique of Pure Reason</I> beginning c. B366, but especially at B370.<BR/><BR/>Scott Powell's main point remains: Kant disintegrated reason, making it largely impotent as a faculty of being able to abstract from sense-perception and therefore come to know reality -- or, in this case, past reality, that is, history.<BR/><BR/>Burgess Laughlin<BR/>www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com<BR/><BR/>P. S. Howard Caygill, <I>A Kant Dictionary</I>, in the "idea" entry, has a three-page summary of the historical uses of "idea," from Plato onward, as well as Kant's various and confusing multiple uses of that term.Burgess Laughlinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13865479709475171678noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5200276.post-9913401453517949932007-11-04T00:33:00.000-04:002007-11-04T00:33:00.000-04:00Against such odds, only history's greatest philoso...Against such odds, only history's greatest philosophy--Ayn Rand's--can save the world. And given the SUCCESS of ARI's programs to increase readership of her books, I am very hopeful. <BR/><BR/>It is an ominous sign to the other side (if they had the wit to comprehend it) that their days are numbered.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5200276.post-35896810328501659342007-11-03T14:25:00.000-04:002007-11-03T14:25:00.000-04:00They teach history in school? I didnt know that.They teach history in school? I didnt know that.Apollohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701446110959016481noreply@blogger.com