Kristeller-Popkin
Travel Fellowships
The Board of
Directors is pleased to announce the
recipients of the 2008 Kristeller-Popkin
Travel
Fellowships:
Shannon
Dea (University
of Waterloo)
Professor
Dea
will
use her fellowship to examine the more than 1300
volumes from Charles Sanders Peirce’s personal
library, among them a number of volumes
concerning Spinoza and early modern philosophy.
She plans to examine these texts for
annotations, page-cuts, and other features as
part of a larger project of engaging Peirce’s
well-known but seldom discussed references to
Spinoza as a distinctively Peircean variety of
pragmatist. This project will offer a novel
account of Spinozism. It also will shed light on
the character of Peirce’s own distinctive
doctrine and some of its differences from the
pragmatism of James, Schiller, and Dewey.
Jennifer
Mensch (Pennsylvania State
University)
Professor
Mensch
will use the fellowship to visit the Bayerische
Akademie der Wissenschaften, which houses the
Schelling archive. She is interested in the
early reception of Schelling’s Letters on
Dogmatism and Criticism [1794-96] as well as his
System of Transcendental Idealism [1800] and, in
particular, the comparisons made between
Schelling’s and Kant’s account of intellectual
intuition. This discussion of the role
assigned to intellectual intuition in Descartes
and Kant will be part one of the monograph's
larger effort to describe a historical
transformation at work in the account of
knowledge. Descartes' is a bifurcated vision,
spanning, as it does, the tail-end of the
Renaissance and the inception of the New
Science. His appeal to intellectual intuition is
in fact at odds with the mechanical philosophy
for which he is more generally identified. But
while Kant's rejection of intellectual intuition
is in keeping with what will come to be the
prevailing attitudes of Enlightenment "science,"
he too marks a transitional moment in history
and his work reflects this. Most of the German
Idealists--Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin,
Goethe--understood themselves at one point or
another to be working both against and with Kant
and to be engaged, albeit in very different
ways, in projects shaped in part by the role of
intellectual intuition. Her discussion
concentrates on Schelling, who was initially
convinced that the proper understanding of
intellectual intuition could end the false sense
of division existing between "the real" and "the
ideal," that intellectual intuition, in other
words, could grasp a truth no longer dominated
by the Kantian antinomies of nature and freedom.
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