After a year of hibernation, PS pokes its head out again. In our slumber, many a morphed image of the transcendental sneaked into our dreams. With a glance back to previous PS events, that insisted upon the Stubbornness of the Empirical, we consider these dream-images to be symptomatic: while the empirical remains stubborn, the transcendental, as the underpinnings of aesthetics or of the sciences, equally remains in question.

We propose to address this head on, in a return to a historical moment that slips out of obscurity mostly by function of its place as an object of critique in the best known philosophical streams of thought of the XX century. Instead of a ‘return to Kant’, we will immerse ourselves in the work of some of those who, in the late XIX century, called for such a return: the Neo-Kantians.

Remote enough to constitute an open field of exploration for our endeavours, Neo-kantianism represents the face of philosophy in German academia in the last quarter of the XIX century, as expressed in the standards of the Marburg and the Southwest (Freiburg and Heidelberg) schools. With Herman Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer as the most prominent scholars on one side and Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrick Rickert on the other, a perhaps brutal simplification gathers all of them under the project of rethinking transcendental philosophy in opposition to a prevalent penchant for Hegelian speculation.

We suspect that thinking through some of the Neo-kantian debates will help us both continue the previous PS discussions and begin new ones, with those of you who want to join in for the first time.

The articulation of transcendentals as the conditions of possible experience (whether as categories, forms of intuitions or principles of perception) will inevitably also bring to the fore experience as such. Is it scientific or lived and how is reason configured between these poles? Especially in Cohen’s Neo-Kantianism, the re-reading of Kant’s Critiques focused on the idea of a transcendental method (‘transcendental analysis’), to be applied in virtually any philosophical inquiry: setting off from the ‘factum’ of science, this method would trace its way back to a dynamic and ever evolving system of categories, the justificatory background to scientific claims.

Even this basic input raises a plethora of questions and curiosities, the matters of which extend from the nature of the ‘factum’ of science, to the relation between philosophy and the sciences. What position does philosophy assume vis-a-vis science and is there any implicit necessity to locate this position? Perhaps most pressingly, what happens to philosophy when the accent is on method? With further insistence, we will also have to consider what becomes of the transcendental, in a philosophy centered on ‘transcendental analysis’. And as this term is of two facets, it equally poses questions regarding ‘analysis’: what does it denote here, exactly? Then down in the specifics, but also grounding some of these questions in the historical moment we want to study, how are we to read, for instance, both Cohen’s metaphysics and epistemology?

To consciously or unconsciously side with more familiar, XX century orientations that found in Neo-kantianism a target or an ally may be tempting, but, before we do that, we want to ask: what were the hopes and what the promises held in this return to the beginning of transcendental philosophy?

For the occasion, we have invited Howard Caygill and Marco Giovanelli to each present on parts of their research. Surely one of the most curious Kantians of today, Howard Caygill has continually worked on questions of experience, philosophies and histories of culture as well as most recently on resistance and defiance. Among much else, Marco Giovanelli has written brilliantly on Neo-Kantian philosophers and especially on the promising debate over the possibility of measuring in science and on Cohen’s publishing quasi-failure of the Principle of the Infinitesimal Method and Its History.

Thursday’s dinner will mark the beginning of the event, the two lectures by our invited speakers will take place on Friday and Saturday afternoon, with Sunday devoted entirely to a general discussion before the farewell breakfast on Monday. Our imaginary for this weekend is largely made up of morning reading groups to establish a common pace and the preliminaries for a shared language, afternoon lectures to sharpen and frame our thoughts and continually branched discussions. Alongside conceptual concerns, the gambit is once again that the effort to think together and to remain attentive to the mode of discussions might help us not to reproduce the patterns that instantiate the worst of academia. In this spirit, arguments will be recomposed and stripped of shorthands to leave them open to perusing. As always, you are welcome to spontaneously add readings, presentations and whatever else to the programme.

Practicalities:
Thursday (March 8th) will be the arrival day, departure on Monday (March 12th) morning. Staying up to 4 nights costs €20 per night, €18 per night, if you stay longer. There is a mandatory membership fee for PAF itself which is €12 and lasts for one year.
Food-wise, we will collectively organize on site, and from past experience it has come to around €10 per day, which means approximately €40 for the whole event. Email PAF (contactpaf@gmail.com) with the dates you’d like to attend. Anyone who would like to stay longer is, of course, welcome to do so.

This PS event is prepared by Marie Louise Krogh, Mikkel Ibsen and Silvia Mollicchi.

Image by Jenny Holzer

‘That is said to express a thing in which there are relations which correspond to the relations of the thing expressed… Hence it is clearly not necessary for that which expresses to be similar to the thing expressed, if only a certain analogy is maintained between the relations.’ – Leibniz, ‘What is an Idea?’

‘The great proximity between the ‘scientifc’ metaphor and the ‘philosophical’ metaphor gives rise to the thought that each of the fields expresses two different, yet capable of being articulated, modes of intervention of allusive stratagems’ – Châtelet, ‘Interlacing
the singularity, the diagram and the metaphor’

Year two. Where are we? Given that the empirical is still stubborn, it might be time to employ an allusive stratagem to dodge such truculence, and so we encounter the idea of surrogat(iv)e autonomy. Warning: this is a provisional chimera. The frst notion is that of ‘surrogate’ or ‘surrogative’ reasoning (the confation is already telling). In the literature (Barwise & Shimojima, Swoyer), this refers to the use of external supports in reasoning, or, generally, letting one thing stand (however partially) for another. This encompasses many phenomena, from the use of scale models, to projective geometry, to the fact that we use pens to write things (yes, that’s a genuine example). The notion has older roots, in Leibniz’s conception of ‘expression’: “the model of a machine expresses the machine itself, the projective delineation on a plane expresses a solid, speech expresses thoughts
and truth”, and on.

One could ask whether such diverse cases can be subsumed under a structural concept. To point to one obvious (potential) division, is the process whereby one, say, uses a model of an airplane to model a real case of fight strictly analogous to the one whereby we use numbers to reason about measurements? Beyond, that is, the fact that both are, in the loosest of senses, processes of analogy? We touch then upon the problem of modelization, wherein we have to reason not only about the, so to speak, ‘problem at hand’, but recursively about the nature of the very tools we use to approach that problem. Such conceptual acrobatics can be both stymying and productive: it is no accident that surrogate reasoning is sometimes called ‘constraint projection’, and we hope to tackle both the positive and negative valences of the latter formulation. So there’s some thoughts on this broad sense of ‘surrogacy’, we’ll see where that goes.

The second head of our chimera turns to face us: that of ‘autonomy’ as such, particularly with regards to the formal. Insofar as the impasses of formalization concern the dialectic of suffciency and inadequacy with regards to the material formalized, we could say that the problem of ‘the autonomy of forms’ is the necessary double of the previous year’s considerations on ‘the stubbornness of the empirical’. But our question is not simply limited to the formal taken as an index of the mathematical, logical or symbolic. Rather, we wish to open up consideration of the purchase of a critical concept of autonomy with regards to forms and practices in an expanded sense: aesthetic, political, artistic, philosophical.

So, as a frst point of purchase, beyond looking at the tension between formalization and the content formalized, we seek means of addressing how the ‘life’ of the concept, or the behaviour of the abstract, points to the non-intentional activity of the formal. As a second, we are asking whether autonomy is even possible, in what senses it might be, and, indeed – another question lurking in the background – autonomy from what? Might these two investigations have something to say to each other? And could ‘surrogacy’ be a useful notion in making this bridge?

With regards to our plan for this stew, the weekend will be, as before, a combination of talks, readings and discussion. Moving into the second year of doing this, we would like to focus on PS as a research platform, inviting active collaboration from all participants, new or returning. As such, this time we will experiment with providing some more – non-mandatory – readings in advance to focus the discussion. Alongside these will be two invited speakers, Elie Ayache & Anne-Françoise Schmid, who will feed into all of this. For Ayache, the very notion of writing, particularly understood as the writing of price, is an imperfect capture of the contingent behaviour of the market, a market divorced from the structure of possibility. For Schmid, a generic epistemology that cuts across felds as diverse as design, philosophy, and science, accounts for the generation of an object of inquiry that has no one-to-one correspondence in the world, but is the manifestation of a research program. Both then articulate complex epistemologies and ontologies which open onto the contingent and the generic, and in doing so place an emphasis on models, be they as self-generating structures or tools of partial bridging and construction.

Practicalities:
Thursday (the 3rd) will be the arrival day, departure on Tuesday (the 8th) morning.
Staying up to 4 nights: €20 per night; staying more than 4 nights: €18 per night. €12 for membership. Food we will collectively organize on site, and from past experience has come to around €10 per day.

Email PAF (contactpaf@gmail.com) with the dates you’d like to attend. Anyone who would like to stay longer is, of course, welcome to do so.

We invite all to come and participate in whatever this triggered for you. See you in November. Amazing.

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