Dreams of a Ghost-Seer
May 2024 · Minerva Heritage Press
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114
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About this ebook
A new translation of Immanuel Kant's "Dreams of a Ghost-Seer Explained by Dreams of Metaphysics" from the original German manuscript first published in 1766. The original German title is "Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik". This new edition contains an afterword by the translator, a timeline of Kant's life and works, and a helpful index of Kant's key concepts and intellectual rivals. This translation is designed for readability, rendering Kant's enigmatic German into the simplest equivalent possible, and removing the academic footnotes to make this critically important historical text as accessible as possible to the modern reader. Kant’s 1766 “Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik” is directed to the charlatan metaphysicians of his day, using Swedenborg's claims of spirit-visions as a central example. It is a cynical, scathing, and mocking criticism of Swedenborgian metaphysics, while simultaneously undermining the faulty Epistemology of Leibniz. Kant addresses “Mr. Schwedenberg” directly analyzes his works methodically. Carl Jung's philosophy is heavily influenced by German Transcendentalism, specifically this work as well, and continued Kant’s work of making the spiritual acceptable within a materialistic metaphysics. Kant and Hegel both articulate that the human psyche does not operate off of Presuppositional Rationalism, but Symbolism. Kant speaks of Archetypes guiding the pneumatic world. He is sketching out a response to the Aristotelian metaphysics of Hume while upholding the Scientific advances of the Enlightenment. He uses Occam’s Razor against Swedenborg, using reason to deconstruct his claims. But at the same time, he pushes back against a pure Newtonian mechanical, deterministic worldview: “For in the relations of cause and effect, of substance and action, philosophy serves at first to resolve the intricate phenomena and to bring such to simpler conceptions.” Schopenhauer wrote a much longer work modeled after this essay titled "Attempt on Spirit-Seeing and what is connected with it".
About the author
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a German philosopher whose work in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics shaped the course of Western philosophy. In his landmark work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed "transcendental idealism," asserting that human knowledge is limited by the mind's structures, which mediate our understanding of reality. This "Copernican revolution" in philosophy argued that we can only know phenomena (appearances) and not noumena (things-in-themselves). In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant introduced the "categorical imperative," a foundational principle in ethics that calls for actions to be universally applicable. Kant's focus on autonomy, moral duty, and rationality laid the groundwork for modern ethical and political thought, and his ideas continue to influence fields such as philosophy, law, and cognitive science, positioning him as a central figure in the Enlightenment.
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