Instead of a ?meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a ?return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of ?meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as ?merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is (...) recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an ?autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One. (shrink)

It is occasionally claimed that the important work of philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians in the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries made Kant’s critical philosophy of geometry look somewhat unattractive. Indeed, from the wider perspective of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the replacement of Newtonian physics with Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the rise of quantificational logic, Kant’s philosophy seems “quaint at best and silly at worst”.1 While there is no doubt that Kant’s transcendental project involves his own conceptions (...) of Newtonian physics, Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian logic, the issue at stake is whether the replacement of these conceptions collapses Kant’s philosophy into an unfortunate embarrassment.2 Thus, in evaluating the debate over the contemporary relevance of Kant’s philosophical project one is faced with the following two questions: (1) Are there any contradictions between the scientific developments of our era and Kant’s philosophy? (2) What is left from the Kantian legacy in light of our modern conceptions of logic, geometry and physics? Within this broad context, this paper aims to evaluate the Kantian project vis à vis the discovery and application of non-Euclidean geometries. Many important philosophers have evaluated Kant’s philosophy of geometry throughout the last century,3 but opinions with regard to the impact of non-Euclidean geometries on it diverge. In the beginning of the century there was a consensus that the Euclidean character of space should be considered as a consequence of the Kantian project, i.e., of the metaphysical view of space and of the synthetic a priori character of geometry. The impact of non-Euclidean geometries was then thought as undermining the Kantian project since it implied, according to positivists such.. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a formal interpretive account of Jean Piaget’s theory of the morality that regulates social exchanges, which we call interactional morality. First, we place Piaget’s conception in the context of his epistemological and sociological works. Then, we review the core of that conception: the two types of interactional moralities that Piaget identified to be usual in social exchanges, and the role that the notion of respect-for-the-other plays in their definition. Next, we analyze the main features of (...) social exchanges that are subject to each of those two types of interactional moralities. Following, we formalize Piaget’s account of how the two types of interactional moralities can be put to regulate social exchanges in which values, norms, beliefs, and goals are exchanged, so that interactional commitments can be established among the participants. Then, we sketch a moral reasoning system able to support formal reasonings about interactional moralities. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the overall formal model of interactional moralities that resulted from our study by applying it to the explication of some of the conclusions achieved by Piaget in his moral studies about children games. (shrink)

In the "Transcendental Aesthetic" of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant offers an argument for transcendental idealism. This argument is one focus of the longstanding controversy between "one-world" and "two-world" interpretations of the distinction between things in themselves and things as they appear. I present an interpretation of the argument of the "Aesthetic" that supports a novel "one-world" interpretation. On this interpretation, Kant is concerned with the mind-dependence of spatial and temporal properties; and with the idea that space and time (...) can be identified with mental objects. I end by arguing that, for Kant, even on a "one-world" interpretation, we do not know the nature or even the existence of mind-independent things. (shrink)

This essay looks at the relationship between formative aesthetics, language and the historical anticipation that begins with Antonio Gramsci's discussion of Kant's idea of noumenon. In Gramsci both education (as formazione) and aesthetics stem from a concern for power in terms of the hegemonic relations that are inherent to history as a political horizon. The title cites Gramci's suggestion that Kant's noumenon should be read as a proviso set apart by a ‘relative ignorance’ of reality [‘relativa ignoranza’ della realtà] to (...) be resolved by a future science. Yet far from another epistemological layering, a future science must also resolve those hegemonic relations of power that emerge from formation as a political act figured in the agonistic character of language as lingua and linguaggio. Further down the lane of our ‘relative ignorance’ we are confronted by a Post-Taylorist condition that precludes any false hopes of a reversal of society's educational, economic and political misfortunes. Yet, while Post-Taylorism confirms that this state of affairs is irreversible, a deeper inquiry into the aesthetic-agonistic character of formation could afford us answers that are in no way solutions but, because adept to struggle and are characteristically aesthetical, might provide an understanding of the logic of irreversibility. Because it remains conscious of its ‘relative ignorance’, this assumption offers a hopeful approach that comes to us sideways; thereby avoiding the predicament of what Lyotard and Thébaud regarded as a condition where ‘the prescriptive is derived from the descriptive’. (shrink)