The article offers a close reading of chapter 6 of Dewey's 'Experience and Nature'. It explains how Dewey reformulates the classical notion of the subject in pragmatist terms, emphasizing in particular Dewey's idea that 'experience' is not a priori subjective, but rather has to be appropriated by the acting individual in order to become one's own experience in an emphatic sense.

There has been a tendency in some of the most influential recent interpretations of Hegel to downplay the theological characterizations that Hegel gives to the subject-matter of logic, and to emphasize, instead, certain continuities taken to exist between Hegel’s conception of logic and that of Kant. In the work of Robert Pippin and others, this has led to an ‘apperception’-oriented interpretation of Hegel’s logic, according to which Hegel follows Kant in taking logic to be primarily concerned with the nature of (...) human self-conscious subjectivity. Here I put pressure on this interpretation—first, by foregrounding textual and systematic evidence for taking the theological characterizations to accurately convey Hegel’s considered position on logic, as the science of the ‘absolute idea’, and then, secondly, by showing how Hegel’s arguments for the absolute formality and universality of logic point instead to a more fully-fledged rejection of Kant’s conception as too specifically psychological. (shrink)

I offer a new reconstruction of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s idealism. Kant held that we impose categorial form on experience, while sensation provides its matter. Hegel argues that the matter we receive cannot guide our imposition of form on it. Contra recent interpretations, Hegel’s argument does not depend on a conceptualist account of perception or a view of the categories as empirically conditioned. His objection is that given Kant’s dualistic metaphysics, the categories cannot have material conditions for correct application. This (...) leads to subjectivism in the content of experience: the subject is given an implausibly strong role in determining what is the case. Hegel’s own absolute idealism solves this problem. (shrink)

In the context of a dialogue between Kant and Hegel, this paper aims at presenting some aspects of the reception that Hegel made in the Logic of Being on the so-called notion of Inbegriff aller Realität. It is a notion that Hegel retrieves and examines dialectically and speculatively, not just in a way of an exposition. The paper seeks to identify and explain the main connections of the moments in which Hegel, in the field of the development of a pure (...) logic, first turns the reality into negation and then into contradiction. (shrink)

A Review of Paweł Sikora’s Pojęciowa treść percepcji w filozofii nowożytnej, Wyd. UMCS, Lublin 2016.

This essay discusses how, for Hegel, freedom can be realized in nature in a rudimentary fashion in solar systems. This solves a problem in Kant’s account of freedom, namely, the problem that Kant only gives a negative argument for why freedom is not impossible but does not give a positive account of how freedom is real. I give a novel account of Kant’s negative argument. Then, I show how, according to Hegel, solar systems can be considered as exhibiting freedom in (...) a rudimentary fashion. Finally, I lay out how Hegel systematically develops this point about the freedom of solar systems in the ‘Mechanism’-chapter of the Science of Logic. In doing so, he uses Kant’s negative argument in a ‘purified’ form to arrive at an account of an ‘intimate token-type relation’ between the planets in a solar system and the law that governs their motion. The essay as a whole provides a concrete example of how Hegel is an inheritor and radicalizer of Kant, both with respect to freedom’s reality and with respect to philosophical method. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant Yearbook Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 1 Seiten: 39-62.

In this essay I argue that Hegel criticizes Kant for failing to carry out a thorough critique of the categories of thought. In Hegel's view, Kant merely limits the validity of the categories to objects of possible experience, but he does not challenge the way in which the ‘understanding’ conceives of those categories and other concepts. Indeed, for Hegel, Kant's limitation of the validity of the categories itself presupposes the sharp distinctions, drawn by understanding, between concepts such as ‘form’ and (...) ‘matter’ or ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. I note that Hegel does not do complete justice to Kant's concept of the ‘thing in itself’ or to his conception of ‘critique’, but I argue that his criticism of Kant is none the less correct. (shrink)

According to a common interpretation, most explicitly defended by Onora O’Neill and Patricia Kitcher, Kant held that epistemic obligations normatively depend on moral obligations. That is, were a rational agent not bound by any moral obligation, then she would not be bound by any epistemic obligation either. By contrast, in this paper, I argue that, according to Kant, some epistemic obligations are normatively independent from moral obligations, and are indeed normatively absolute. This view, which I call epistemicism, has two parts. (...) First, it claims that in the absence of other kinds of obligations, rational agents would still be bound by these epistemic obligations, i.e., that the latter are normatively independent. Second, it claims that, no matter what other obligations are at stake, rational agents are bound by these epistemic obligations, i.e., the normativity of these epistemic obligations is absolute in that it cannot be undercut by any moral or other sort of obligation. The argument turns on an exploratory reading of Kant’s remarks in “What Is Orientation in Thinking?” (1786) about the maxim of “thinking for oneself” as the “supreme touchstone of truth.” In contrast to O’Neill and Kitcher, I argue that if we interpret this maxim as stating the unifying principle of theoretical and practical reason, then we must interpret it as stating an epistemic, and not merely practical imperative. This result, I argue, vindicates epistemicism and illuminates interesting lessons about Kant’s conception of the category of “epistemic” norms. Further, it helps us make headway with Kant’s enigmatic remarks about the unity of practical and theoretical reason in the Groundwork, first and the second Critiques, and the Lectures on Logic. On my proposal, principles of the practical and theoretical uses of rea-son are unified through a formal epistemic principle. (shrink)

Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do “hang together.” Hegel’s unity is idealist; Sellars’ is physicalist; the differences are substantial, but (...) so are the resonances. (shrink)

Chenyang Li’s new book, The Philosophy of Confucian Harmony, has been heralded as the first book-length exposition of the concept of harmony in the approximately 3,000 year old Confucian tradition. It provides a systematic analysis of Confucian harmony and defence of its relevance for contemporary moral and political thought. In this philosophical discussion of Li’s book, I expound its central claims, contextualize them relative to other salient work in English-speaking Confucian thought, and critically reflect on them in light of a (...) conception of harmony that is salient in the sub-Saharan African tradition. Hence, this article aims to continue the nascent dialogue between indigenous Chinese and African philosophical traditions that has only just begun. Li responds to this critical notice in the same issue of the journal. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I seek to explain G.W.F. Hegel’s view that human accessible conceptual content can provide knowledge about the nature or essence of things. I call this view “Conceptual Transparency.” It finds its historical antecedent in the views of eighteenth century German rationalists, which were strongly criticized by Immanuel Kant. I argue that Hegel explains Conceptual Transparency in such a way that preserves many implications of German rationalism, but in a form that is largely compatible with Kant’s criticisms of (...) the original rationalist version. After providing background on Hegel’s relationship to the traditional rationalist theory of concepts and Kant’s challenge to it, I claim that Hegel’s central task is to provide a theory of conceptual content that allows a relationship to the objective world without being dependent on the specifically sensory aspect of the world, which Kant’s theory of concepts required. Since many interpreters deny that Hegel’s use of the term “concept” is comparable to other historical philosophers (or our own), I first show that Hegel’s critique of standard conceptions of concepts presupposes an agreement of subject matter. I then show how Hegel’s account of the “formal concept” provides the skeleton for a view of conceptual content that relies on negative relations between terms, rather than a relation to sensibility, to provide content. Hegel’s account of conceptual content is completed when he shows how a universal term is further specified so that it can determine singular objects. This occurs in its adequate form in a teleological process. I argue that Hegel’s account of teleology in the Science of Logic is an attempt to explain how and where Conceptual Transparency obtains. A teleological process is one in which a concept constitutes an object, and this means that a concept is perfectly adequate to express that thing’s nature and not merely to represent it. However, in the final chapter, I show that Hegel’s concept of teleology is meant paradigmatically to illuminate how human purposive processes have constituted a social world that is conceptually accessible to us. In this way, the primary “province” of Hegel’s rationalism is the human constructed world. (shrink)

The following contribution aims at presenting a reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as a kind of idealism within the Kantian and post-Kantian traditions. The goal is to argue that Wittgenstein’s position shares substantial theoretical and methodological grounds with Hegel’s idealism. The main concepts pertaining to the later Wittgenstein’s position are analyzed and understood as a form of idealism. After defending the reading against anti-idealist interpretations we argue that the kind of idealism presented clashes with central tenets of the Kantian position. (...) These points of departure are then shown to cover in a substantial manner the same kind of criticism Hegel raised against Kant. In the last section, an interpretation of central concepts of the Hegelian position is offered in order to dissolve any fundamental incompatibility with Wittgenstein’s idealism. (shrink)

I argue that the idea of the good is best understood in terms of a rather unorthodox thesis concerning actuality, namely that what is actual -as opposed to what just is, either spatio-temporally or abstractly- is properly identified as actual if it embodies a value, the value of maximal determinateness.

In this chapter, I expound Hegel’s critique of Kant, which he first and most elaborately presented in his early essay Faith and Knowledge (1802), by focusing on the criticism that Hegel levelled against Kant’s (supposedly) arbitrary subjectivism about the categories. This relates to the restriction thesis of Kant’s transcendental idealism: categorially governed empirical knowledge only applies to appearances, not to things in themselves, and so does not reach objective reality, according to Hegel. Hegel claims that this restriction of knowledge to (...) appearances is unwarranted merely on the basis of Kant’s own principle of transcendental apperception, and just stems from Kant’s empiricist bias. He argues that Kant’s principle of apperception as the foundational principle of knowledge is in fact incompatible with his empiricism. Hegel rightly appraises the centrality of transcendental apperception for the constitution of objectivity. But he is wrong about its incompatibility with Kant’s empirical realism. By virtue of a misapprehension of the formal distinction between the accompanying ‘I think’, i.e. the analytical principle of apperception, and what Hegel calls “the true ‘I’” of the original-synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel unjustifiably prises apart the productive imagination, which is supposedly this “true ‘I’”, and the understanding, which is supposedly just a derivative, subjective form of the productive imagination; the latter, according to Hegel, is Reason or Being itself, and is the truly objective. This deflationary reading of the understanding, which hypostatises the imagination as the supreme principle, rests on a distortion of key elements of Kant’s theory of apperception. In this chapter, I show that Hegel’s charge of inconsistency against Kant, namely, Hegel’s claim that the principle of apperception as the highest principle of cognition does not comport with Kant’s restriction thesis, is the direct consequence of a psychological misreading of Kant’s subjectivism. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es el de indagar la estructura de la totalidad presente la noción de «universal sintético» del §77 de la KU, con el intento de mostrar que en estos pasajes textuales Kant parece querer pensar un modelo de unidad que se distingue de las otras unidades colectivas delineadas en su filosofía, en la medida en que aquí se intenta acceder a una totalidad capaz de dar cuenta de las partes/distinciones, que se constituirían – en este sentido (...) – no como simples determinaciones o limitaciones de la totalidad en virtud de la cual adquieren sentido y significado, sino que estructurarían ellas mismas, a partir de sí mismas, su función respecto de las otras partes/distinciones y respecto del todo, el cual, a su vez, adquiere sentido y significado a partir de las partes que lo constituyen. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to provide a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s project in the late twenties and of its breakdown and transformation around the turn of the decade. I argue that Heidegger develops a unified project in the late Marburg period that is constructed around the question of the unity of the concept of being in light of its regional multiplicity. Furthermore, I argue that Heidegger’s conception of the framework of this project is highly influenced by his reception of Kant in (...) this same period. Specifically, I identify the elements of the Kantian framework that Heidegger retains and appropriates for his project, as well as those elements that he rejects. In the former case, Heidegger takes up primarily Kant’s framework of a priori transcendental conditions that are to make empirical experience possible, which Heidegger reformulates in terms of the pre-understanding of being that makes possible the apprehension of entities. In the latter case, I isolate two primary criticisms that will serve as desiderata for the execution of Heidegger’s project, namely: that the categories have an excessively subjectivistic status, and that they are based solely on logical functions of judgement. The former constitutes a problem because the location of the categories on the subject side make s difficult their applicability to the objective realm, and lead Heidegger to reject both the quid juris form of posing the question as well as the results of the transcendental deduction in general. The latter, though closely connected, points to a different set of problems, and targets not the applicability claim but the exhaustiveness claim of the metaphysical deduction. In articulating a theory of categories based on logical functions of judgments, Kant’s resulting theory of possible objects of experience is limited merely to objects of explicit judgement, roughly the objects of the natural sciences, at the expense of other kinds of objects. Paradigmatic of these ‘other kinds of objects’, for Heidegger, are ready-to-hand entities, which are neither spatio-temporally individuated, nor fit into the Kantian conditions for what it would be to count as an object of possible experience. I argue that Heidegger develops his late Marburg project as a development of the Kantian-inspired framework of pre-understanding of being in a manner that responds to the two above problems. Specifically, Heidegger seeks to ground the understanding of being in temporal schemata rather than in logical functions of judgement, which is intended to provide both a wider range of possible objects and to provide a unified backdrop against which the subject can apprehend objects. I end with an assessment of Heidegger’s project, arguing that while it is ultimately unsuccessful in its aims, it nonetheless represents a philosophically interesting and innovative post-Kantian project that sheds exegetical light both on Heidegger’s middle period as well as on his later works. (shrink)

Nineteenth century Christian thought about self and relationality was stamped by the reception of Kant’s groundbreaking revision to the Cartesian cogito. For René Descartes (1596-1650), the self is a thinking thing (res cogitans), a simple substance retaining its unity and identity over time. For Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), on the other hand, consciousness is not a substance but an ongoing activity having a double constitution, or two moments: first, the original activity of consciousness, what Kant would call original apperception, and second, (...) the reflected self, the “I think” as object of reflection. Both are essential to the possibility of an awareness of a unified experience. Such an awareness is achieved only insofar as the self is capable of reflecting on its activity of thinking. As such, the possibility of self-consciousness, or the capacity to reflect on one’s own acts of thought is essential to the constitution of the self. This new model of the mind became the starting point to the thought of central 19th century figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). This chapter will explore their reception of Kant’s model of self-consciousness, the controversies surrounding its development and exposition, and the advantages of this model for theological reflection. The idea of mind as essentially capable of reflection provided an account of how the self can stand in an ontologically immediate relation to God constitutive of the self, while at the same time allowing that the self’s consciousness of itself is distinct from this original moment, so that a limited or false consciousness of self is possible. As such the task of the self is to recognize (that is, to realize in and through self-consciousness) who it most truly is, both in relation to God, and in relation to self and other. (shrink)

El paper analiza la lectura hegeliana del concepto de entendimiento intuitivo en Fe y saber. Como intentaremos mostrar, tal concepto constituye un modelo cognoscitivo privilegiado para Hegel en virtud de su carácter de “universal sintético”, es decir, en virtud del hecho de que aquí el todo se constituye como lo que contiene el fundamento de la posibilidad de las formas de las partes y de la conexión de las mismas entre ellas y con la totalidad. El universal que Kant atribuye (...) al entendimiento intuitivo en el § 77 de la KU se presenta, para Hegel, como totalidad que contiene la ratio de la identidad de las partes, y, al mismo tiempo, la ratio de su diversidad. (shrink)