Amy Schmitter: “Fiat, or . . . let us make man:” Hobbes on artifice, persons and powers

Rüdiger Campe: “The Fable Continued: The Palace of the Many Worlds in Leibniz's Theodicy”

Lisa Shapiro: “What is a philosophical work?”

Abstract: 

This paper starts from the assumption that the history of philosophy has a problem. We are stuck in a bit of a rut in thinking of the central figures in the early modern period as the seven of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and, of course, Kant. One problem with this list is its homogeneity:  the early modern period was full of women actively engaged in philosophy, and yet most of us do not read any women thinkers of the period. One potential reason for this is that these women often did not write philosophical treatises, though occasionally they did. Much of the philosophical writings is contained in plays, poems, novellas and short stories, not to mention polemics. I want to problematize the discounting works of fiction, and other genres, as non-philosophical simply in virtue of the genre of writing. However, if we are to count works written in a wide range of genres as philosophical, we still need to be able to distinguish what does make these works philosophical. I want to suggest that there are two complementary marks of a philosophical work: (a) its engagement with a set of properly philosophical or philosophically canonical questions and (b) our ability to deploy a philosophical method — identifying assumptions, implications, arguments — in reading the work.

Conference paper: "What is a philosophical work?"

Biography:

Lisa Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy at Simon Fraser University. She has published extensively on various aspects of the passions in early modern philosophy, with particular attention to Descartes and Spinoza, and is co-editor of Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and editor and translator of The Correspondence of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Rene Descartes. Current projects include investigating the cognitive dimensions of pleasure in the history of philosophy and integrating the writings of early modern women thinkers into the philosophical canon.

Leroy Searle: "Philosophy, Vision, and Poetic Construction: William Blake and J. M. Coetzee's Foe"

• Conference paper: "Philosophy, Vision, and Poetic Construction: William Blake and J. M. Coetzee's Foe"

Victoria Kahn: "A History of Fiction: Some Vignettes"

Abstract: 

This paper takes up the claim on the part of historians of the novel that fiction should be equated with narratives of nonreferential (in the sense of having no historical referent) invented characters. I argue instead that fiction is best thought of diacritically in contrast to claims of philosophical truth. Fiction in this view is equivalent to literature. I also argue that fiction should not be thought of ontologically but as a readerly and writerly practice. I explore these claims through short discussions of Plato, Saint Augustine, Philip Sidney, Hobbes, Spinoza and Kierkegaard.

• Conference paper: "A History of Fiction: Some Vignettes"

Victoria Kahn is Professor of Comparative Literature and Hotchkis Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Renaissance and early modern literature. She is the author of Rhetoric, Prudence and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Cornell, 1985); Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, 1994); Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-74 (Princeton, 2004); and The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago, 2014).

Michael A. Rosenthal: “Measures, Models, and Narratives: ‘Beings of Reason’ and the Limits of Spinoza’s Rationalism”

Abstract: 

There is little question that Spinoza is a rationalist who privileges reason over the imagination in his epistemology.  As he describes it in one of his first writings, true knowledge of the world depends on the emendation of the intellect, a process in which the rational ideas that we acquire replace the inadequate ideas based on the imagination.  However, despite his radical rationalist program, Spinoza still makes use of inadequate ideas throughout his work.  In this paper, I suggest that the key to understanding the use of the imagination in the realm of reason is the notion of a “being of reason” (ens rationis), a term borrowed from the scholastic tradition and discussed extensively in the early works.  I want to illustrate three ways in which “beings of reason” play an important role throughout Spinoza’s system:  as a measure, a model, and a narrative.  The importance of what may be in a broad sense described as fictions in his philosophy—things that are not real but nonetheless help us make sense of what is real—points to the limits of his rationalism.

• Conference paper: "Measures, Models, and Narratives: 'Beings of Reason' and the Limits of Spinoza's Rationalism"

Biography: 

Michael A. Rosenthal is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of Washington.  He is the co-editor of Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise:  A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2010), and the author of numerous essays, including most recently, “Spinoza’s Political Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza, “Politics and Ethics in Spinoza:  The Problem of Normativity,” in Essays on Spinoza's Ethical Theory, and “The Siren Song of Revolution:  Spinoza on the Art of Political Change,” in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal.

Samantha Matherne: “Useful Fictions in Kant’s Account of the Sublime”

Abstract:

In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant offers a phenomenological account of our experience of the sublime.  He claims that unlike our purely pleasurable experience of beautiful objects, sublime objects, i.e., extremely large or powerful objects in nature, initially make us feel displeasure because they expose our inadequacy and limits as sensible creatures.  It is only once we recognize that the reason within us is something that is elevated above all sensible constraint that we can subsequently feel pleasure in the sublime.  On Kant’s analysis, this twofold experience of the sublime is the result of the interaction between two mental capacities, imagination and reason, and prima facie it seems as if he identifies the imagination as the capacity responsible for our displeasure, while reason alone is the source of our pleasure.  In this paper, however, I argue that the imagination, in fact, plays a positive role in the pleasure we experience in the sublime.  More specifically, I maintain that the imagination contributes to this pleasure by producing what I call ‘useful fictions’, which turn on our imaginative ability to see nature as a symbol of what is sublime in a literal sense, i.e., reason and morality. Far from these being empty fictions, I suggest that on Kant’s view, they help fulfill one of our most basic needs, viz., the need to believe that we as free, moral agents can make a difference in the sensible world.  I claim that this is what ultimately gives rise to the pleasure we feel in the sublime; in which case, this pleasure could not be had were it not for the useful fictions of the imagination.

• Conference paper: "Useful Fictions in Kant's Account of the Sublime"

Biography:

Samantha Matherne is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her work focuses on issues relating perception and aesthetics in Kant and post-Kantian traditions in the 20^th century, especially Phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism.  She has published articles on Kant’s theory of the imagination, Kant’s aesthetics, and the Kantian influence on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception.  She is currently writing Cassirer, a book on the Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, which will appear in the Routeldge Philosophers Series. 

Colin Marshall: “Kant on the Role of Intuitions in Fictions and Dreams”

Abstract:

In the Critique of Pure Reason and the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant appears to commit himself to the view that fictions and dreams involve empirical intuitions. This commitment is puzzling, since Kant seems to regard intuitions as representations of actual objects. My aims in this paper are (a) to make sense of why Kant was attracted to this puzzling view and (b) to show how one approach to understanding Kant’s idealism can make sense of this puzzle. On (a): I argue that Kant is drawn to this view because he held that the mind was deeply dependent on external objects for all of its representational activity. On (b): I argue that in dreams and fictions, genuine objects appear to us, but those appearances do not amount to actual properties because they do not cohere with the conditions of experience. In effect, this means that Kant understands fictions and dreams on the model of distorted perceptions.

• Conference paper: "Kant on the Role of Intuitions in Fictions and Dreams"

Biography:

Colin Marshall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on Kant, early modern philosophy, and metaethics. His recent publications concern Kant's transcendental idealism, Kant's methodology, Spinoza's theory of reason, and Hume's views on the epistemology of causation. He is currently working on metaethical issues in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza, as well as a book project on empathy.

Ellwood Wiggins: “A Sacrifice for the Human Intellect”: The Role of Fiction in Mendelssohn’s Philosophy

Abstract: 

It is by now widely accepted that Plato’s philosophy cannot be fairly assessed without taking the dramatic structure of his dialogues into account. The historical reputations of the characters, the narrative framing of the texts, and the ironical layerings of mediality all bear upon the questions, ideas, and myths to which interlocutors in the dialogues give voice.  Such respect for the fictional characteristics of the dialogue form has received much less attention for latter day examples of the genre. Scholarly commentaries on Early Modern philosophical dialogues, from Galileo to Shaftesbury and beyond, tend to assume that one of the speakers is a direct mouthpiece for the author, much as most scholars of Plato prior to 1970 tended to do. 

In contrast, this paper attends carefully to the interplay of narrative framing, character construction, and genre convention in two philosophical works by Moses Mendelssohn. ThePhilosophical Dialogues and Letters on the Sentiments (both anonymously published in 1755), I argue, give much more than lip service to the genres in which they are written, dialogue and epistolary novel, respectively.  In fact, the fictional elements work in tandem with the thematic issues represented in the texts to both illustrate and—more interestingly—challenge the arguments made by authoritative characters. This paper makes two major claims that emerge out of observations about the generic performances of the two texts.  First, the Letters emphatically devolve from epistolary fiction into the narrative of a dialogue without any satisfactory closure.   The pointedly incomplete framing of the Letters plays with generic expectations of epistolary fiction with the surprising effect of undermining the arguments made by Palemon (later Theokles). Instead of beginning in medias res, theLetters end there: they come to an abrupt and unframed close with a speech about the theatrical presentation of ill fortune. Unlike many of Plato’s dialogues that conclude with a myth, Mendelssohn’s letters end with an unfinished discussion of tragedy.

Second, the narrative frame of the Dialogues is conspicuously hard to descry. A move toward fictionalization instead is displaced to characters’ arguments, whereby debates over the attribution of ideas culminate in accounts of philosophers’ lives. Especially the first two dialogues’ depiction of Spinoza is cast as a tragedy of admiration that will find its generic defense in the later Correspondence on Tragedy (with Lessing and Nicolai, 1756-7). Hence the fictions of both the epistles and the dialogues are displaced to the tragic. This essay will conclude with a reflection on how this generic shift—from dialogue/letter to tragedy—comments on the ostensible projects not only of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics (Letters), which one might expect, but also of his metaphysics (Dialogues).

• Conference paper: "A Sacrifice for the Human Intellect": The Role of Fiction in Mendelssohn's Philosophy

Willi Goetschel: “Reason’s Fiction: Spinoza in Heine”

Abstract:

Heine’s prose, fiction, and poetry cannot be imagined without its polemical stance with regard to philosophy. The most literary and fictionally most sublime moments, however, are those where Heine critically engages with the claims of philosophy. Much of his writing is conceived as a challenge to, and always as provocation, and occasional refutation of philosophy. Most recently, Heine even could be said to have become a bonafide certified philosopher if we take the publication of his philosophically most explicit work, his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series as an indication of the recognition posthumously bestowed on him.

But as we know, recognition, and recognition as philosopher in particular, comes with a price. And in this case it cost Heine rather dearly, for his entry ticket to the philosopher’s guild was to be admitted under the name of a Young Hegelian. Nothing could be farther removed from Heine than the notion to be a follower of Hegel whose key concept of the idea Heine made the target of one of his most unrelenting criticisms.

 In my paper, I want to discuss how Heine stages his critique of philosophy by way of fiction but also address the question of how his poetry, prose and fiction give voice to a vision that engages with philosophy in a sustained manner. Of particular interest is Heine’s staging of Spinoza – “mein Unglaubensgenosse” as he once called him –as a philosopher whose quasi-mythical characterization deserves critical attention. A particular feature of Heine’s critical procedure is that he never loses sight of the theological-political aspects of philosophy and therefore gives voice to the concern that philosophy as a problematic discipline of thinking remains informed by a theological undercurrent that begs examination in the first place – quite unsurprising if we remember that this insight bears Spinoza’s trademark.

Heine’s writing, I argue, reflects an original and intriguing approach to Spinoza that brings Spinoza’s approach to central themes of his thought – epistemology, the relationship between mind and body, the theory of the affects, the nature of reason, theological-political nexus of politics and the theory of hermeneutics, religion, and tradition, and an anti-teleological stance – into play to challenge and re-imagine philosophy and critique. Heine’s appropriation of Spinoza offers a literary enactment of his thought that – in true recognition of Spinoza’s thought – does not imitate but recreate his thought in original variations.

If we look at the way Heine introduces Spinoza in his intellectual history’s chapter on philosophy, it becomes clear that the narrative serves as critical renegotiation of Spinoza’s place in the history of philosophy, a narrative that programmatically spells out what philosophy means for Heine. Spinoza serves Heine as the corrective to the Saint Simonism he originally so enthusiastically embraced but was soon to find a rather disappointingly parochial ideology. Throughout Heine’s poetry and narrative fiction we find traces of what I would like to call instantiations of Spinozist negotiations, i.e. strong theoretical engagements whose core is distinctly non or post Kantian and Hegelian and and whose critical drive derives its force from the critical impulse that iterates its affinity with Spinoza.

• Conference paper: "Reason's Fiction: Spinoza in Heine"