This week, Samuel Honsbeek and Johan Heemskerk will be discussing Samuel's paper "The Intellect is a Mere Tool: Nietzsche, Kant and Is a Critical Philosophy Possible at All?"

 Abstract:

As is well known, Kant’s first Critique seeks to identify the limits of all possible knowledge by way of the conditions of possibility of cognition. In this paper I reconstruct a Nietzschean argument against this project. It can hardly be disputed that Nietzsche’s assessment of the Critique of Pure Reason is absolutely scathing. It is less clear, however, why he felt compelled to this assessment in the first place. In this paper I aim to show that his reaction to the critical project is in fact a considered one. I argue that Nietzsche’s dispute with Kant over the possibility of a critical philosophy is motivated by a disagreement over the proper way of grounding intellectual norms: Kant thinks that these can be grounded in the uninhibited activity of the human mind, whereas Nietzsche denies that, given Kant’s critical ambitions, there is an adequate way of grounding them at all. I conclude by showing that Nietzsche has a compelling argument for this view.