Hegel had taken the Kantian categories of thought to be merely formal, without content, since, he argued, Kant abstracted the conditions of thought from the world. The Kantian categories can, as such, only be understood subjectively and so are unable to secure a content for themselves. Hegel, following Fichte, tried to provide a content for the logical categories. In order to reinstate an objective status for logic and conceptuality he tries to affirm the unity of thought and being. The idea (...) that this unity is established by reinstating a pre-Kantian metaphysics has in most of the recent Hegel literature been discredited. In the wake of this non-metaphysical Hegel there is a concern that the architectonic of concepts which is taken as the organizing principle of consciousness offers an account of experience which is too schematic. While Hegel disputes the intuition/concept distinction as it is played out in Kant and Fichte, he does nevertheless retain some residue of a notion of intuition in his theory of the Concept. This is central to understanding his notion of experience as it can't simply be equated with rule governed conceptuality. Satisfying the demands of reason for Hegel requires more than conceiving our experience solely as judgments. (shrink)

Hegel's empty formalism charge is taken, virtually without exception, as a serious objection to Kant's categorical imperative and a powerful refutation of his formalist ethics. The dominant interpretation is represented by Bradley, Paton, Mill, Korsgaard, Guyer, Wood, Schneewind, Sedgwick, more recently, Freyenhagen, and others. So far, the dominant interpretation has remained powerfully influential and virtually unchallenged.However, the dominant interpretation tends to take Hegel's empty formalism in isolation from other texts in the corpus, his holistic system, and dialectical method in general. (...) What makes this non-contextualised approach problematic is that it ignores his remarks on formalism in other texts where his use of dialectical and sceptical method is more in evidence. Hegel's emptiness remarks span his entire career, from their appearance in Jena right up to the end of his career in Berlin. In Jena, his views on formal thinking in a logical sense developed alongside his views on formalism in ethics. Prima facie, the arguments bring together two subject matters that seem to have nothing to do with one another. This may explain why no one has given an interpretation that brings the two domains together. But it is worth noting that Kant himself brings logical considerations to bear on his conception of the moral principle. His distinction between the form of a moral principle and its empirical content recalls his characterisation of logical laws in the firstCritique. (shrink)

This thesis undertakes a systematic, tripartite analysis of the interactions between the fiction and essays of Thomas Pynchon and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in a solid set of original reference-material for those undertaking work on Pynchon and philosophy, or more generally on philosophico-literary intersections. Premised upon the notion that Pynchon's literature harbours a fundamental hostility to much systematizing philosophical thought, this work avoids a dominating imposition of philosophy, or an application of philosophical (...) thought as a validating Other, by examining those aspects of Pynchon's work that seem ill at ease with, or aggressive towards, aspects of each philosopher's thought. This is explored through the concept of an intra-textual polyvocality and relational situation of philosophical intersection; when Wittgenstein is cited, for instance, who is speaking and what are the connotations of that placement? I do not propose, therefore, a Wittgensteinian / Foucauldian / Adornian Pynchon, but rather explicitly highlight excluded aspects of thought to instead develop a complementary reading; a form of intersubjective triangulation. This polyvocality is examined from a univocal perspective. The specific conclusions of this work re-situate Pynchon, in many cases against forty years of critical consensus, as a quasi-materialist or at least anti-idealist, a regulative utopist and a practitioner of an anti-synthetic style akin to Adorno's model of negative dialectics. In a broader sense, it answers the questions regarding hostility towards philosophical thought in Pynchon's work by demonstrating that no single philosophical standpoint has yet to totally resonate with even one of his novels. Simultaneously, it also shows that a profitable approach can be found in the spaces of philosophical overlap and divergence. (shrink)

There is today much debate about the contents of perceptual experience relative to our capacity to make them figure in judgments. There is considerably less interest, however, in how we subsume perceptual contents in judgments, that is, what judging about a perception is like for us. For Kant and Husserl, this second question is as important as the first. Whereas Kant tries to answer it in the schematism section of the first Critique, Husserl addresses it at length in Experience and (...) Judgment. This paper draws new attention to this ‘forgotten’ transcendental problem by comparing both accounts of it. I will first discuss Kantian conceptualism in section two and schematization in section three. In section four I then turn to the Husserlian notion of type, which is today often juxtaposed to Kant’s schema. After rejecting one commonly held view that they are functionally identical, I turn to Husserl’s work on active synthesis, where I distinguish three different acts of judgment and their respective contents. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)