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The Impossible Possibility of Palmquist’s Kant and Mysticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

Chris L. Firestone*
Affiliation:
Trinity International University

Abstract

Stephen R. Palmquist’s Kant and Mysticism revisits his earlier work on Kant and Swedenborg, arguing that, contrary to standard interpretations, the arguments of Dreams of a Spirit-Seer expand into ‘Critical mysticism’ throughout the Critical philosophy and into the Opus Postumum. Although the beginning portions of Palmquist’s book successfully disturb the standard portrait of Kant as the all-destroyer of metaphysics and religious experience, his argument for critical mysticism is inconclusive. It is impossible to know if his interpretation of the Opus Postumum is more right than its competitors. The conflict of interpretations shows Palmquist’s interpretation to be a hermeneutic impossible possibility.

Type
Author Meets Critic
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Kantian Review

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References

Firestone, Chris L. (2009) Kant and Theology at the Boundaries of Reason. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Palmquist, Stephen R. (1993) Kant’s System of Perspectives: An Architectonic Interpretation of the Critical Philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Palmquist, Stephen R. (2000) Kant’s Critical Religion: Volume Two of Kant’s System of Perspectives. Aldershot: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Palmquist, Stephen R. (2019) Kant and Mysticism: Critique as the Experience of Baring All in Reason’s Light. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar