Kant used transcendental reflection to distinguish in judgment what belongs to its form and what to its material. Regarding the form of judgment, Buchdahl’s work highlights the analogies between the different levels of judgment in Kant’s transcendental ontology. He uses the explicit contingency of judgments of the system of nature to illuminate the contingency of judgments of objects in general. In the Critique of pure reason, Kant had left much of the work of judgment to the unconscious imagination. Fichte and (...) Schelling attempted to make conscious and determinate the work of the unconscious imagination, but found themselves unable to avoid a reflexive regress in trying to objectify and provide a foundation for the activity of the self in judgment. Buchdahl also clarifies the role Kant gave to the object in judgment, as the indeterminate ‘thinghood’ remaining once all forms of cognition are abstracted. Fichte represented this objective side of consciousness as the not-I, as the limit of the activity of the I, as an unconscious, alien element within consciousness. Schelling struggled to illuminate this unconscious object in judgment, to provide a construction of nature, without dissolving its positive presence into abstract formulations. In pursuing relentlessly Kant’s critique of judgment, Fichte and Schelling exposed its opaque points and problematized the ambition to build a complete system of philosophy.Author Keywords: Kant; Fichte; Schelling; Judgment; Imagination; Naturphilosophie. (shrink)

With the help of the natural history of “zero,” and the use of “zero” as a starting point, one may consider two types of metaphysics. On the one hand, the epistemological metaphysics, based on the perceptual/rational dichotomy, is related to the zero as a vacancy between numbers. On the other hand, the genetic metaphysics, based on the dichotomy of source-evolution (or origin and derivate), has much to do with the zero as a number between negative and positive numbers. In this (...) respect, zero represents the horizon of metaphysics: we can forever approach it, but we cannot ultimately arrive at it. Though serving as the point of convergence and divergence for all relationships, zero has no definable content of its own. Such is the essence of zero, and of metaphysics as well. (shrink)

Two major twentieth century philosophers, of East and West, for whom the nothing is a significant concept are Nishida Kitarō and Martin Heidegger. Nishida’s basic concept is the absolute nothing upon which the being of all is predicated. Heidegger, on the other hand, thematizes the nothing as the ulterior aspect of being. Both are responding to Western metaphysics that tends to substantialize being and dichotomize the real. Ironically, however, while Nishida regarded Heidegger as still trapped within the confines of Western (...) metaphysics with its tendency to objectify, Heidegger’s impression of Nishida was that he is too Western, that is, metaphysical. Yet neither was too familiar with the other’s philosophical work as a whole. I thus compare and assess Nishida’s and Heidegger’s discussions of the nothing in their attempts to undermine traditional metaphysics while examining lingering assumptions about the Nishida–Heidegger relationship. Neither Nishida nor Heidegger means by “nothing” a literal nothing, but rather that which permits beings in their relative determinacy to be what they are and wherein or whereby we find ourselves always already in our comportment to beings. Nishida characterizes this as a place that negates itself to give rise to, or make room for, beings. For Heidegger, being as an event that clears room for beings, releasing each into its own, is not a being, hence nothing. We may also contrast them on the basis of the language they employ in discussing the nothing. Yet each seemed to have had an intuitive grasp of an un/ground, foundational to experience and being. And in fact their paths cross in their respective critiques of Western substantialism, where they offer as an alterantive to that substantialist ontology, in different ways, what I call anontology. (shrink)

Since the seminal 1955 habilitation by Heidegger's pupil, Walter Schulz, it has become an open secret that Schelling's philosophy, more than that of any of the other German Idealists, is an immediate antecedent to Heidegger's thought. For this reason, it is all the more fascinating that to this day research is still lopsidedly concerned with the interpretation of Heidegger's reading of Schelling's Freedom Essay and that a thorough and overarching investigation into the idealistic inheritance of Martin Heidegger's thought remains wanting. (...) The same applies to the debates that Heidegger's students began in the twentieth century. The traditions of modern nature ethics and the criticism of technology, which derive from Schelling, were interpreted and mediated through Heidegger to his students Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, and Günther Anders. This essay attempts to delineate some of the basic features of a more bilateral or dialogical relationship between these two philosophers and to more fully appreciate Heidegger's relationship to German Idealism in general and Schelling in particular. (shrink)