Gertrudis Van Vijver
Gertrudis Van de Vijver received both her undergraduate and graduate training in Ghent University, apart from a brief study stay in Paris, under (a.o.) Francisco Varela, René Thom, Henri Atlan and Jean Petitot. After receiving her PhD in philosophy in 1988, with a dissertation titled “Doelgerichtheid in cybernetica, connectionisme en cognitivisme. Tussen twee epistemologische opties: naturalisme en constructivisme”, she was post-doctoral researcher and research director at Ghent University until she became a professor at that institution in 2000 (Gewoon Hoogleraar since 2014, and Academic Secretary to the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy since 2015). She has been on expert panels for both FWO and FNRS, is a member of several scientific associations concerned with philosophy, psychology and the life sciences, and is currently the director of the Centre for History of Philosophy and Continental Philosophy (HICO) at Ghent University. Between 2005 and 2010, she led an interdisciplinary research project that involved philosophers, biologists, bio-engineers and communication scientists, and currently runs, with Emiliano Acosta, the research platform Re-thinking Europe, devoted to the philosophical study of political and legal issues surrounding Europe and the European Union. Her research is mainly concerned with issues of complexity, self-organization and teleology in the life sciences, psychology and the study of cognition, for which she developed a transcendental epistemology, centring on the idea of co-constitution She recently became involved in debates on legal and political issues concerning mental health care.
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Papers by Gertrudis Van Vijver
This article discusses the affinity between Kant’s notion of objectivity and Wittgenstein’s view on the limitations of language by addressing both philosophers’ relation to the constitutive space at work in a transcendental logic. For both, the system and conceptual room hosting the activity of subjective conditionality is dynamically connected to what can be seen as an object in response to the heterogeneity between concepts and sensibility. In his work On the Genealogy of Universals. The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (2018) Fraser MacBride makes a plea for the importance of Kant in the history of the origin of analytical philosophy, more specifically, the philosophies of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. He nevertheless does so in an inadequate way, because he understands Kant from a realist perspective striving to see ‘objects’ as an awaiting reality ‘out there’ to be made our own. Contrary to that, we make the case that a transcendental dynamics of a ‘lost’ primordial captivity is at work in the process of the constitution of objects. We look into Wittgenstein’s notion of substance and the problematic subreptitious exchange between the notions of substance and attribute on the one hand and the relation between the particular and the universal according to MacBride on the other. We propose that both Kant and Wittgenstein sharpen the awareness for the transcendental anticipatory activity of a presupposition, to be seen as a crucial moment within pure formalization and logical strictness, built on a minimal ontology of openness to what is determinable within the action of determination, opposite to a realism of what is simply determined as ‘what is the case’ without taking into account the constituting subject-pole.
This article discusses the affinity between Kant’s notion of objectivity and Wittgenstein’s view on the limitations of language by addressing both philosophers’ relation to the constitutive space at work in a transcendental logic. For both, the system and conceptual room hosting the activity of subjective conditionality is dynamically connected to what can be seen as an object in response to the heterogeneity between concepts and sensibility. In his work On the Genealogy of Universals. The Metaphysical Origins of Analytic Philosophy (2018) Fraser MacBride makes a plea for the importance of Kant in the history of the origin of analytical philosophy, more specifically, the philosophies of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein. He nevertheless does so in an inadequate way, because he understands Kant from a realist perspective striving to see ‘objects’ as an awaiting reality ‘out there’ to be made our own. Contrary to that, we make the case that a transcendental dynamics of a ‘lost’ primordial captivity is at work in the process of the constitution of objects. We look into Wittgenstein’s notion of substance and the problematic subreptitious exchange between the notions of substance and attribute on the one hand and the relation between the particular and the universal according to MacBride on the other. We propose that both Kant and Wittgenstein sharpen the awareness for the transcendental anticipatory activity of a presupposition, to be seen as a crucial moment within pure formalization and logical strictness, built on a minimal ontology of openness to what is determinable within the action of determination, opposite to a realism of what is simply determined as ‘what is the case’ without taking into account the constituting subject-pole.