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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy
Cognition Without Construction: Kant, Maimon, And The Transcendental Philosophy Of Mathematics, Nicholas A. J. Birmingham
Cognition Without Construction: Kant, Maimon, And The Transcendental Philosophy Of Mathematics, Nicholas A. J. Birmingham
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant takes the ostensive constructions characteristic of Euclidean-style demonstrations to be the paradigm of both mathematical proofs and synthetic a priori cognition in general. However, the development of calculus included a number of techniques for representing infinite series of sums or differences, which could not be represented with the direct geometrical demonstrations of the past. Salomon Maimon’s Essay on Transcendental Philosophy addresses precisely this disparity. Maimon, owing much to G. W. Leibniz, proposes that differentials of sensation achieve what Kantian constructions could not. More importantly, Maimon develops a kind of symbolic cognition that …
The Entelechial Thinker In Space: ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ In Durrell, Flaubert, And Carroll, Sheena M. Jary
The Entelechial Thinker In Space: ‘Worlds Within Worlds’ In Durrell, Flaubert, And Carroll, Sheena M. Jary
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This thesis argues that the interior space of each individual mind has infinite potentiality to do or create x new reality in one’s life via possible worlds. I use Lawrence Durrell’s short story “Zero” (1939), Gustave Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” (1877), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) as literary representations of how readers outside of the literary text share an unbreakable bond with universal space. I discuss the infinite potentiality of the finite being, and the experiential data in the process of entelechy, or epistemological maturation of the mind. I bring Leibniz’s theory of the continuum of infinitesimals …