This essay addresses the questions of whether the givenness of God is something possible, intelligible—and, if so, what such givenness might involve. In the interest of situating these questions in historical context, I first summarize Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Habermas’s respective accounts of the relationship between belief in God and philosophical knowledge. I then further situate critical philosophy’s appropriation of God by way of a discussion of how some of this appropriation’s fiercest critics—existentialists such as Sartre, Shestov, and Kierkegaard—object to its (...) gambit of using God to serve moral and cultural goals even as it denies God’s actual existence. Though this objection is a salient one, it leaves something to be desired. For although the existentialists may demonstrate what is misguided about the philosophers’ God, they do not have anything especially compelling to say about whether or how God can be given experientially. I address this aporia by exploiting what I take to be a happy intersection between the phenomenological conception of the saturated phenomenon and two moods—agape love and ecstatic joy—the mystical tradition frequently attributes to the nature of divine givenness. I argue that, when mystical experience is situated within the framework of saturated phenomena rather than within the Kantian enclosures of phenomenality, two intriguing possibilities emerge. First, it seems plausible that the religious experience of the mystic can, in principle, involve the very givenness of God that Kant and his heirs denied to be possible. Second, though phenomenology has yet to provide a complete positive portrait of the religious life, the mystical tradition emerges as a legitimate, invaluable source with which such a phenomenological portrait might begin. (shrink)

SummaryAn accurate framework for interpreting Kant's theory of knowledge must clearly distinguish between the six terms he uses to describe the various stages in the epistemological development of the‘object’of knowledge. Kant portrays the object transcendentally in the first Critique as passing from an unknowable‘thing in itself through the intermediate stage of being a‘transcendental object’, and finally attaining the ideal status of an‘appearance’. When the object is considered empirically, it passes through three corresponding stages: the‘phenomenon’is the real object as known in (...) experience, the‘negative noumenon’limits our knowledge to its intuitive manifestation, and the‘positive noumenon’is that aspect of the known object which remains ultimately transcendent. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se propone estudiar la recepción que Hegel realiza de la apercepción trascendental kantiana. Tal estudio nos permitirá comprender tanto las críticas que Hegel presenta contra el tratamiento kantiano de la apercepción, como la manera en que Hegel se apropia de ella y la utiliza para impulsar una crítica contra la lógica trascendental. Sostendremos que el tratamiento hegeliano de la apercepción consiste en diversos puntos: en primer lugar, revelar el verdadero significado filosófico que Kant no habría advertido en (...) su descubrimiento de la apercepción; en segundo lugar, mostrar que la lógica trascendental posee una concepción incompleta de las categorías puras y del pensar puro; en tercer lugar, nos proponemos mostrar que el estudio del tratamiento hegeliano de la apercepción trascendental como crítica a la lógica trascendental permite comprender la propia lógica especulativa hegeliana como una reelaboración de los límites epistemológicos del pensar puro y de la concepción del objeto de conocimiento. (shrink)