Description

FCT Project FCT/PTDC/FIL/71833/2006

At the same time that the Anglo-Saxon philosophy begins to revalue the apparently classic dichotomy dividing the analytical and the continental tradition, it is important for the old continent to be able to reconsider its own contribution to an ideal history of reason. This project means to start from the confrontation between the two main European philosophical traditions which took place in Davos in 1929, between the representatives of the phenomenology and the neokantianism, M. Heidegger and E. Cassirer. The debate which represents the definitive split between the two rational methods in front of the young Carnap represents an unequalled mark whose content, unavailable until now in Portuguese language, traces the lines of the structures of the continental tradition, without nevertheless being explained what the two methodical orientations owe to each other, whereas they work on the same problematic. If neokantianism and phenomenology could have been accused at the beginning to reduce the philosophical reflection to a theory of knowledge of science, the two schools will rapidly follow a parallel evolution and confront themselves with the same problems. As a method, both start from a rationalism incarnated in the Faktum of science, but that also aims to broaden the field of objectivation of rational determination. The goal of this research is to compare in a critical way the multiple strategies of re-foundation of the method inspired by the two schools which encompass most of the XXth century philosophy. It is particularly interesting to confront the new theory of the concept that both neokantianism and phenomenology developed when it is necessary to go beyond the restricted field of scientific activities, and attempt to broaden the rational domain. On one hand, when it is time to think what goes beyond what is traditionally placed outside the field of rational determination and represents a challenge to any kind of rational determination, what neokantianism think for example the basic phenomenon of expression, and what phenomenology will determine as ante-predicative until develop a phenomenology of the invisible. On the other hand, the challenge to inject some dynamism into the categorical a priori conceiving it as an alternative to a hidden Platonism of this “idealism”; this attempt assume the Hegelian lesson which read into the complexity of the world of culture a phenomenology of the spirit, understood in a Kantian perspective as an infinite function of the reason which establishes theories of different cultural legalities.

On the basis of the agreement of acknowledge that the critical dimension of reason does not root into a fact (like science), but into a fieiri, this research pretend to study the confrontation of two rationalist traditions from a definition of apparently antagonistic positions in Davos, until its fruitful encounter in one of the philosophical thought of broaden range of the actuality, the work of Hans Blumenberg.

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