You say:
“…Immanuel Kant, whose discovery of the synthetic a priori threatens the validity of Hume’s position on the purely experiential arrival at any rule of causality. It seems to me that Hume’s aesthetics cannot get off the ground without the validity of his epistemological division between relations of ideas and matters of fact.”

There are a couple of things going on here that I’m not quite following.

First, Kant doesn’t really seem to disagree with Hume about reason’s inability to discover any causal relations in reality? Kant would certainly say there isn’t any, and Hume, I think, would agree with this. Causality, for Hume, is simply a psychological habit cultivated through experience, aiding in ‘conjoining’ different events. No ‘connection,’ however, is ever discovered. How, then, does Kant’s formulation of synthetic a priori propositions threaten Hume? The necessity for determining how such propositions are possible indicates how Hume set the stage upon which Kant was to perform his own song and dance.

Second, are you saying that Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact stands in need of further demonstration? It seems that Hume has come across a rather sure way of doing just that insofar as he appeals to the principle of non-contradiction as establishing relations ideas (what Kant would later describe as ‘analytic’). Matters of fact, on the other hand, must be confirmed by experience. Kant himself is in agreement with Hume in this regard as can be seen with what the former says about determining the truth of analytic and synthetic a posteriori propositions; the problem arises, however, as you noted, with synthetic a priori propositions which, because they are synthetic, cannot be determined through non-contradiction. But because they are a priori cannot be determined through experience. Again, it seems that Kant fundamentally agrees with Hume if only to emmend the Scott; or, as Kant says in the Prolegomena, to provide a rudder with which to steer Hume’s ship rather than allow it to run aground.

But perhaps I’m missing something–cheers.

Have the masses degraded humanity by their mediocrity? Is Democracy a better answer for governance than aristocracy? ortega Y gasset would have answered a Yes for the first one and a No fro the second one. In his book the revolt of the masses he talks about how the culture of elitism had declined in all spheres of society and it was being trumpeted as a great social change for the better when the truth was that the elite are the greatest protectors of culture and civilisation in a society. Reading him feels like listening to one voice of dissent in this world , a voice which refused to see any virtues in democratic form of government and strove to make people aware of the vices it was composed of and the ills that it had the power to bring to the society in the name of liberty and freedom. One may dismiss him as an aristicratic iconoclast today but his ideas give one a pause in today’s unquestioned supremacy and truth of the adage enshrined in teh American Constitution, All men are born equal. Not only is Ortega saying that All men are not born equal, he is also suggesting that it is good and necessary that there remains a degree of inequality in the society in the absence of which he says all that is good and valuable will be lost as the proletarian will never be able to understand the value of the true and the sublime no matter how much they say about it.

Couple all that with the eclipsing genius of the rising star Martin Heidegger in Germany and I don’t think it’s all that difficult to understand why–right or wrong–Scheler was left behind.

Nice blog by the way, Poli.; I hope it brings you your success!

Sartre may also have stolen some of his ideas from Gabriel Marcel.

Scheler’s relative obscurity is more difficult to explain, I think. Any ideas?