Stephan Zimmermann

Im Schwerpunkt dieses Heftes werfen Dieter Teichert, Gisela Schlüter, Gerhard Schreiber und Martin Laube einige Schlaglichter auf die noch ungeschriebene Begriffsgeschichte von Trost. Was sie bei ... mehr

At the end of the Critique of Judgement, Kant returns to his discussion of the doctrine of the postulates of pure practical reason. He there describes the justification for these judgements of faith as ›moral arguments‹. In the course of this, he resolves a hitherto unanswered question, namely what exactly the ›increment‹, as it is already mentioned in the Critique of Practical Reason, consistsi n, when the immortality of the human soul, the freedom of our will and the existence of God are postulated. The paper shows that the underlying ideas of pure theoretical reason shed their subjectivity in the postulates and extend to a certain objectivity. And it explains how this objectivity has to be understood in opposition to that of judgements of experience. mehr

As the »key to the critique of taste« in §9 of his Critique of Judgement Kant offers the well-known doctrine of a »free play of the cognitive faculties«. What exactly this play consists in is still much discussed in the literature. Kant describes it as a state of harmony between imagination and understanding, for which the reflecting judgement, which mediates between the two, is responsible. This paper turns against the popular interpretation that considers »free play« as an exceptional state of the mind in which the said faculties are relieved from their actual cognitive activity. This view, however, creates a number of inconsistencies. Above all, Kant explicitly speaks against it. The paper therefore argues for an alternative reading that is able to take these objections into account. mehr

In his lectures, talks and writings on hermeneutics, Schleiermacher discusses the various aspects and methods of an artful, i. e., scientifically pursued, practice of understanding. He repeatedly expresses the goal of such understanding with a handy formula which takes up a remark in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: to «understand the utterance at first just as well and then better than its author.” This formula, which demands an understanding superior to that of the author of an utterance, is programmatic for Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. However, he subjects Kant’s remark to a decisive reinterpretation. This paper examines the means and outcome of this reinterpretation. mehr