The article explores how normative notions of emotions and interaction are active in constructions of the categories of "human" and "animal" in different discourses about autism: scientific and autobiographical. In the scientific discourse of autistic emotionality, a deficit perspective of autism is central. The general affective deficit discourse relies on normative discursive notions of "huma...

Kant famously claims that autonomy is the ground of dignity. If he is correct about the grounding relationship, then doubts about our autonomy entail doubts about our dignity. Here, I attempt to show that Kant is sensitive to this problem, and invokes the ‘fact of reason’ (Faktum der Vernunft) as the key piece of evidence for our autonomy, and therefore our dignity. But as is well known, Kant’s...

Working within frameworks drawn from the writings of Immanuel Kant, Alfred Schutz, and Kenneth Burke, this article examines the role that diagnostic categories play in autobiographical accounts of illness, with a special focus on chronic disease. Four lay diagnostic categories, each with different connections to formal medical diagnostic categories, serve as typifications to make sense of the w...

With the Enlightenment, philosophers in the West recognized that the immediate given of perception is a mental image or representation, not an extra-mental object. That insight raised a pressing, epistemological question: to what degree, if any, do those mental images represent an extra-mental state of affairs? To phrase the question in slightly different terms: in what manner (if any) and to w...

In recent decades, beauty has become a largely unfashionable, even offensive notion within art and philosophy. As Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, has pointed out, this offence has a twofold sense. Firstly, the ‘beautiful’ has been dismissed as philosophically insignificant in comparison to the ‘sublime’ by an intellectual tradition tracing itself back to Immanuel Kant’s Critiqu...

Brain time and phenomenological time (draft) As 'tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the idea of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time...-David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature ... space and time ... are therefore pure intuitions that lie a priori at the basis of the empirical. ... they are mere forms of our sensibility, wh...

In his article "Literary Geography and Comparative Literature" César Domínguez analyzes the relevance of political and linguistic frameworks for comparative literary historiography in the context of the European Union. Domínguez's discussion is based on the notion of geoculture whose theorization from Immanuel Wallerstein's perspective presents paradigms of interest to comparative literature. T...

“IF MY THESIS IS CORRECT, KANT WAS RIGHT”: REVISITING KANT’S ROLE WITHIN MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT Although Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue is famous for its critique of the Enlightenment project in moral theory, and although Immanuel Kant is usually considered the greatest protagonist of that project, Kant’s role within the argument of After Virtue is far less clear t...

Authored by Vladimir Kaye, MD, Consulting Staff, Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry, Hoag Hospital Coauthored by Murray E Brandstater, MBBS, PhD, Chairman and Program Director, Professor, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Loma Linda University School of Medicine Edited by Virginia Simson Nelson, MD, MPH, Chief, Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Physical Medicine...

Metapolitics is not politics by other means. It is neither a ―strategy‖ to impose intellectual hegemony, nor an attempt to discredit other possible attitudes or agendas. It rests solely on the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in collective consciousness and, more generally, in human history. Through their works, Heraclitus, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes,...