The equivocality in Kant and the critical power to broaden the way of thinking

• Grant number: 18/05452-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: July 01, 2018
• End date: June 30, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Maurício Cardoso Keinert
• Grantee: Paulo Borges de Santana Júnior
• Supervisor: Kervegan Jean-Francois
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/07914-9 - The crossing of the delimitation to enlargement: one more meaning of critique in Kant, BP.DR

Abstract

Linked to research on the meaning of critique as broadening the thinking, this project intends to dialogue with important francophone interpretations of Kant's aesthetics and critique. In these interpretations, in addition to the reflective character of the notion of critique, the authors also highlight that Kant's aesthetics possess the particularity of acquiring a multiplicity of meanings with regard to each field of his research. Far from designating conceptual flaws, this equivocality illustrates the richness of aesthetics both for Kant and for eighteenth-century philosophy, also reverberating in literary artistic production. Under the influence of this valuation of Kant's equivocality, we aim to understand the relations between its meanings and the contexts that force the passages to a new meaning. Since these passages do not entirely reject the previous meanings, they may be called broadening of concept. Kant's equivocality is not negligence, but the result of a precise and detailed exposition which, by delimiting a new meaning for the concept, provides him with a broadening. For this reason, our hypothesis on critique as broadening finds, in the case of aesthetics, a very important example, insofar as this equivocality is brought to the transcendental point of view. In this way we propose to describe the seemingly mutual relation between the equivocality of terms and the critical exercise of broaden the thinking. (AU)