Abstract

Bondeli starts his book with the following remark: “Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s philosophical viewpoint, with which he went public in 1800 in Jena, at the beginning of his academic teaching, is everything but presupposition-less. It is the result of a step by step appropriation, critique, and overcoming of Kant’s philosophy dating back ten years”. The goal of Bondeli’s book is to provide a new and comprehensive discussion of Hegel as a critical reader of Kant from 1790 to 1800. As is well known, Hegel scholars are divided on this issue, particularly because we have no definite proof that Hegel ever read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason before writing extensively about it in Faith and Knowledge, which appeared in 1802. Moreover, Bondeli reminds us that today it is still fairly common to characterize the foundation and methodology of new philosophical standpoints by referring to either Kant or Hegel. Also, many issues concerning the foundation of knowledge or of ethics can be identified as confrontations between Kantian or Hegelian positions. Bondeli shows, however, that there is a considerable deficit in Hegel’s arguments against Kant as we know them from Faith and Reason, the Encyclopedia, and the Lectures on History of Philosophy. In these texts Hegel deals with Kant from the rather hermetic standpoint of the system of absolute identity, while giving no proper charge to Kant but that of having remained within the realm of reflection. Bondeli tries to challenge this argumentative deficit of Hegel’s appropriation and critique of Kant by reconstructing its motives as well as the actual or the possible series of arguments.