How do rational minds make contact with the world? The empiricist tradition sees a gap between mind and world, and takes sensory experience, fallible as it is, to provide our only bridge across that gap. In its crudest form, for example, the traditional idea is that our minds consult an inner realm of sensory experience, which provides us with evidence about the nature of external reality. Notoriously, however, it turns out to be far from clear that there is any viable (...) conception of experience which allows it to do the job. The original problem is to show that thought is rationally constrained by external reality. If sensory experience is to provide the solution--in particular, if it is to provide the answer to sceptical challenges--it must therefore meet two criteria. First, it must itself be `receptive'--i.e., appropriately constrained by external reality. Second, it must be the kind of thing that can enter into a logical or rational relationship with belief--it must already be `conceptual,' in other words. In arguing against the idea that anything could serve both roles, Wilfred Sellars termed this conception of experience "the Myth of the Given.". (shrink)

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

In the conceptual preliminaries of his philosophical Encyclopedia Hegel discusses three approaches to epistemology under the headings of three ‘Attitudes of Thought Toward Objectivity’. The third of these is Jacobi’s doctrine of ‘immediate’ or intuitive knowledge. Hegel’s discussion presumes great familiarity with Jacobi’s highly polemical and now seldom read texts. In this essay I disambiguate and reconstruct Hegel’s discussion of Jacobi, in close consideration of Jacobi’s texts, showing why Hegel finds him important and what Hegel’s objections to his doctrines are. (...) Jacobi’s importance for Hegel lies in three points. First, Hegel agrees with Jacobi’s claim, against Kant, that God and the world are themselves knowable. Second, Hegel must answer Jacobi’s charge that discursive thinking ineluctably leads to determinism and ultimately to nihilism. Third, Hegel’s analysis of Jacobi’s doctrine of ‘immediate knowledge’ reveals some points that are important to Hegel’s metaphysics. Hegel mounts five objections to Jacobi’s doctrine. First, Jacobi’s key term ‘immediacy’ illicitly equivocates among the rejection of three different kinds of ‘mediation’: syllogistic inference, the application of concepts, and representational accounts of perception. Second, Jacobi’s doctrine of a-conceptual knowledge is untenable because one must apply concepts to objects in order identify objects and thus to know what kinds of things known objects are. Third, if a fundamental point of Hegel’s holistic ontology (explained in the essay) is correct, then the identity conditions of things are interdependent, and this interdependence would render ‘immediate’ knowledge impossible. Fourth, Jacobi’s doctrine is self-referentially inconsistent: it is possible on his doctrine to prove that his doctrine is false. Finally, Jacobi’s doctrine licenses question-begging and is in principle unable to address or to settle disagreements among divergent intuitions. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Untersuchung verfolgt zwei Ziele: erstens die systematische Rekonstruktion der Grundstruktur von Hegels Erkenntnistheorie und Philosophy of Mind auf der Grundlage der Schriften des 'reifen' Systems, insbesondere der Wissenschaft der Logik und der Enzyklopadie. Zweitens die Eroffnung eines wechselseitig fruchtbaren Dialogs zwischen Hegel und der gegenwartigen analytischen Philosophie in den Debatten um Realismus / Antirealismus, Wahrheitstheorie, Externalismus / Internalismus und um die Struktur kognitiver Systeme. Inhaltlich wird der Nachweis gefuhrt, dass im Zentrum von Hegels Philosophy of Mind eine holistische, (...) anti-modulare Theorie des Geistes, im Zentrum seiner Erkenntnistheorie ein anti-skeptischer, anti-reprasentationalistischer, direkter Realismus steht. (shrink)

A 5,000-word conspectus of Hegel’s moral philosophy which considers the theoretical context of his moral philosophy (§1), his accounts of legal, personal, moral and social freedom (§2), the structure of Hegel’s analysis in his Philosophy of Justice (or »Rechtsphilosophie«) (§3), his account of role obligations as a central component of social freedom (§4), and his integrated account of individual autonomy and social reconciliation (§5).