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    Ferraris on Strawson and a Heidegger on Kant

    Nice NDPR review here by Riccardo Pozzo of Maurizio Ferraris' Goodbye Kant!: What Still Stands of the Critique of Pure Reason. According to Pozzo, the book is actually a best-seller in Italy, which is pretty cool. There's also this very funny passage (have to read it through to the end):

    For Ferraris, given that "ontology includes everything that is in heaven and earth, the realm of objects that are available to experience," which makes up the first main topic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and given that "metaphysics deals with what goes beyond or transcends [experience]," which makes up the second main topic of the book, it does indeed make sense to speak of Kant's metaphysics and ontology (p. 20). In fact, "the reader of the Analytic has before him Kant's ontology, a work of construction and not of destruction" (p. 21). Ferraris follows suit with the two otherwise opposed readings of Kant by Strawson and Heidegger, with Strawson calling for a metaphysics of experience and Heidegger for an analysis of finite human being, "which amounts" — Ferraris succinctly notes — "to the same thing, said with more passion" (p. 21). 

    Ferraris himself is rapidly becoming one of the key figures in the movement in continental philosophy sometimes called "the new realism" or "back to metaphysics." His English language wikipedia page is pretty informative as far as these things go. In light of the recent reappraisal of Derrida by people such as Paul Livingston, Martin Hagglund, Graham Priest, and Debbie Goldgaber (following earlier work by people such as Sam Wheeler, and to some extent contraposed by Lee Braver's important interpretation of Derrida) it's interesting that Ferraris's early work is influenced by, and often about, Derrida. The wikipedia page (take with a grain of salt) says that his new realism comes in part by systematizing Vattimo and Derrida. A bunch of his stuff is coming out in English over the next few years. It will be fun to follow it.

     

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    4 responses to “Ferraris on Strawson and a Heidegger on Kant”

    1. David Liakos Avatar
      David Liakos

      I’ve been really looking forward to the English translation of his Manifesto of New Realism from SUNY, which comes out in December! (http://www.amazon.com/Manifesto-Realism-Contemporary-Italian-Philosophy/dp/1438453779) His strain of realism is of interest to me because of its rootedness in (and from what I can gather, rejection of) the hermeneutic tradition, as well as his attempts to make common cause with Anglo-American forms of realism. I also look forward to seeing his thought become more prominent in English-language philosophy.

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    2. Ed Hackett Avatar
      Ed Hackett

      Jon,
      Do any of the new realisms encompass value-talk? I find realism about experience in phenomenology and pragmatism, and probably would argue for a realist interpretation of effective history in Gadamer.
      Maybe the next question should be what is the best introduction to speculative realism for those of us steeped within Continental philosophy, but not a lot of time on our hands to read everything.
      Best,
      Ed

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    3. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      There’s a forthcoming issue of the Monist (one of the editors is Ferraris) where I think most of the papers are going to be in just this issue.
      The new realism coming out of Speculative Realism hasn’t had much to say about ethics thus far. I think this is in part because of the tradition in which they were reacting. So much philosophy in the phenomenological tradition is a mirror image of logical positivism. Consider Rorty’s appropriation. He accepts the Heideggerian claim that we can only make sense of a descriptive or factual realm with respet to a rich background of possibilities and (normative) permissibilities. Which is fine. But then he uses this to try to denigrate the objectivity of a factual realm (when philosophers in the phenomenological tradition say that something is “really just political” the same move is often being made).* But why on earth would the factual realms’ parasitic relationship to the normative impugn the objectivity of the factual realm? The enthymeme only fills if you already accept an epistemic downgrading of the normative! But why do this? Only if you were something like a verificationist. This is logical positivisms great revenge on whole schools of thought. And in fact, as Mark Okrent has shown, in this respect Heidegger and Carnap had far more in common than their differences (both had complicated relationships with the back to Kant movement which used neo-Kantian verificationism to bludgeon Hegelianism).
      There is new research on Cavailles (insert accent grave over the e) that is highly relevant. He actually got some of the connections between positivism and phenomenology and was working them out in the last book he was writing when he was captured and killed by the Nazis. This was influential among some French philosophers that became big over here, but we haven’t traditionally read them in terms of that influence. I hope to do a post about this in a few days, as I just saw a couple of remarkable papers on Cavailles yesterday.
      Anyhow, the speculative realist fight has been largely a fight against a kind of verificationism that stems from readings of Berkeley, Kant, and Fichte. But if this is successful it still leaves open what to do say about the Heideggerian claim about the priority (or at very least equiprimordiality) of the modal and normative. Harman has a nice paper where he takes Alphonso Lingis’ book “The Imperative” very seriously and considers objects in themselves as having a normative force. And he’s about to publish a second book on Bruno Latour on the political which will hopefully develop thoughts about normativity in this framework. Harman can do this because part of what he does is explore what happens if you read Heidegger as a metaphysician, as opposed to reading him as a transcendental epistemologist (I think there’s a tension in Heidegger’s writing and both are textually fine consistifications).
      Some of the new metaphysicians (early Brassier on a certain reading) keep to the positivist’s fact/value divide. So metaphysics is on the table again, but that doesn’t really concern the normative.
      Meillassoux and Tristan Garcia are so interesting in part because they are very carefully rehabilitating certain Sartrean themes against phenomenology, and non-trivial normative claims come out of this rehabilitation.
      I don’t think that the metaphysical commitments of Deleuzians have any specific political or ethical weight, though I might be wrong with respect to the political at least (there has been a decent amount of writing on this). And there’s a whole raft of neo-Spinozists I haven’t read yet that probably have the most interesting things to contribute. Cavailles himself linked his Spinozism with his work in the French Resistance. He was insanely brave, blowing up a railroad station at one point, and ultimately died for his activity.
      I might be leaving stuff out. I think that Speculative Realism, post-phenomenological Deleuziana, and new Spinozaists cover most of the stuff peopel are talking about by “the new metaphysics.” But that might only be fair if I lump people together as Speculative Realists who would rather not be so called (for that matter, I’m putting Whitehead under the new Deleuziana).
      Anyhow, I’m really looking forward to the Ferraris anthology. My own inclination would be to go with the early Harman work on Heidegger and take that as a starting point for realist theories of alethic and deontic modalities. But that’s just one possibility with respect to the work. As far as what’s out there, the neo-existentialist writings of Meillassoux and Garcia are probably the most developed insofar as non-trivial normative claims are shown to follow from the metaphysical framework. But I’d be really happy if anyone reading this has some other citations.
      [*I hope that people prone to this trope will correct me here or, if you are a newapps poster, in another trope.]

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Oops. Above, I should have mentioned the materialist tradition in contintal philosophy (especially Althusser’s students and their students). Not only have meta-ethical questions always been part of the picture, but with people like Adrian Johnston this is being put into conversation with the other strands in the new metaphysics that I mentioned above. And there’s great stuff being done on Badiou (Althusser’s student and Meillassoux’s teacher) and the political by people like Paul Livingston and Bruno Bosteels. It’s pretty extraordinary stuff (I’m writing this from Pittsburgh where I get to attend lectures by both of these guys and Tom Eyers for a week).

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