in a late note, dated 1797, Kant refers to the schematism of the pure understanding as one of the most difficult as well as one of the most important issues treated in the Critique of Pure Reason.1 His treatment of this theme is indeed notorious for its obscurity.2 As I see it, part of the problem is caused by the fact that Kant frames his discussion in terms that he could expect his readers to be familiar with, while he gradually (...) develops ideas that breach any traditional account of cognition. This holds for his references to the power of judgment and the related view that cognition is a matter of subsuming intuitions under concepts3 as well as for the suggestion that there is an initial gap between categories... (shrink)
ABSTRACTWhile we endorse Heidegger’s effort to reclaim Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a work concerned with the possibility of metaphysics, we hold, first, that his reading is less original than is often assumed and, second, that it unduly marginalizes the critical impetus of Kant’s philosophy. This article seeks to shed new light on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and related texts by relating Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant to, on the one hand, the epistemological approach represented by Cohen’s Kant’s (...) Theory of Experience and, on the other, the metaphysical readings put forward by Heimsoeth, Wundt and others in the 1920s. On this basis, we argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant remains indebted to the methodological distinction between ground and grounded that informed Cohen’s reading and was transferred to the problem of metaphysics by Wundt. Even if Heidegger resists a ‘foundationalist’ mode of this distinction, we argue that his focus on the notions of ground and grounding does not... (shrink)
Hegel's Philosophy is notorious for its alleged claim that all things are contradictory. Whereas Marxists took this claim to support their view that the social-political world exhibits "real" contradictions, non-Hegelian philosophers of various breeds have used it to argue that Hegelian dialectic annihilates the very principle of scientific reasoning.1 Yet, even if it is granted that Hegel did not intend to violate the law of non-contradiction, the stakes of Hegel's account of contradiction in the Science of Logic are far from (...) clear. According to Robert Pippin, Hegel's claim that all things are contradictory is "one of the most important, even if most obscure things said in the Logic."2 In what follows, I hope to .. (shrink)
Hegel is most famous for his view that conflicts between contrary positions are necessarily resolved. Whereas this optimism, inherent in modernity as such, has been challenged from Kierkegaard onward, many critics have misconstrued Hegel's own intentions. Focusing on the Science of Logic, this transformative reading of Hegel on the one hand exposes the immense force of Hegel's conception of tragedy, logic, nature, history, time, language, spirit, politics, and philosophy itself. Drawing out the implications of Hegel's insight into tragic conflicts, on (...) the other hand, De Boer brings into play a form of negativity that allows us to understand why the entanglement of complementary positions always tends to turn into their conflict, but not necessarily into its resolution. (shrink)
Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the Critique (...) of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light. (shrink)
In this article I aim to clarify the nature of Kant’s transformation of rationalist metaphysics into a science by focusing on his conception of transcendental reflection. The aim of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it is argued, consists primarily in liberating the productive strand of former general metaphysics – its reflection on the a priori elements of all knowledge – from the uncritical application of these elements to all things (within general metaphysics itself) and to things that can only be (...) thought (in special metaphysics). After considering Kant’s conception of metaphysics and his various uses of the term ‘transcendental’ I closely examine his account of logical and transcendental reflection in the section entitled ‘On the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’. Whereas commentators generally attribute the activity called transcendental reflection to Kant alone, I contend, first, that Kant regarded philosophy as such to rely on a mode of transcendental reflection and, second, that the critical mode of transcendental reflection enacted in the Critique itself yields insight into the reason why our a priori knowledge is limited to the realm of possible objects. This is illustrated by outlining the difference between Kant’s and Leibniz’ employment of the concepts of reflection. (shrink)
Abstract: This article contends that the relation of early logical empiricism to Kant was more complex than is often assumed. It argues that Reichenbach's early work on Kant and Einstein, entitled The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge (1920) aimed to transform rather than to oppose Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. One the one hand, I argue that Reichenbach's conception of coordinating principles, derived from Kant's conception of synthetic a priori principles, offers a valuable way of accounting for the (...) historicity of scientific paradigms. On the other hand, I show that even Reichenbach, in line with Neo-Kantianism, associated Kant's view of synthetic a priori principles too closely with Newtonian physics and, consequently, overestimated the difference between Kant's philosophy and his own. This is even more so, I point out, in the retrospective account logical empiricism presented of its own history. Whereas contemporary reconstructions of this history, including Michael Friedman's, tend to endorse this account, I offer an interpretation of Kant's conception of a priori principles that contrasts with the one put forward by both Neo-Kantianism and logical empiricism. On this basis, I re-examine the early Reichenbach's effort to accommodate these principles to the paradigm forged by Einstein. (shrink)
Does philosophical critique have a future? What are its possibilities, limits, and presuppositions? Bringing together outstanding scholars from various traditions, this collection of essays is the first to examine the forms of critique that have shaped modern and contemporary continental thought. Through critical analyses of key texts by, among others, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, and Rancière, it traces the way critique has time and again geared itself towards new cultural, social, and political problems, shedding those of its (...) assumptions no longer deemed tenable. It is our hope that the many voices of critique that arise from the present volume will produce effects – new doubts, new insights, new challenges, or new resources – that none could have achieved on their own. (shrink)
While Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason maintains that things in themselves cannot be known, he also seems to assert that they affect our senses and produce representations. Following Jacobi, many commentators have considered these claims to be contradictory. Instead of adding another artificial solution to the existing literature on this subject, I maintain that Kant’s use of terms such as thing-in-itself, noumenon, and transcendental object becomes perfectly consistent if we take them to acquire a different meaning in the (...) various parts of the work. Challenging the opposed interpretations of Allison and Langton, I argue that Kant’s account of things in themselves is primarily relevant to the second-order reflection on the possibility and limits of a scientific metaphysics that the Critique undertakes. (shrink)
This article challenges Honneth's reading of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in The Pathologies of Individual Freedom: Hegel's Social Theory (2001/2010). Focusing on Hegel's method, I argue that this text hardly offers support for the theory of mutual recognition that Honneth purports to derive from it. After critically considering Honneth's interpretation of Hegel's account of the family and civil society, I argue that Hegel's text does not warrant Honneth's tacit identification of mutual recognition with symmetrical instances of mutual recognition, let alone (...) his subsequent projection of symmetrical forms of mutual recognition onto the various spheres of the Philosophy of Right as a whole. I conclude by indicating an alternative way in which Hegel's text might be used to understand contemporary society. (shrink)
Since the 1970s, debates about Hegel’s Science of Logic have largely turned around the metaphysical or non-metaphysical nature of this work. This debate has certainly issued many important contributions to Hegel scholarship. Yet it presupposes, in my view, a set of oppositions that thwart an adequate assessment of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant. I hope to show in this paper that Hegel is deeply indebted to Kant, but not to the Kant who is commonly brought into play to argue for the (...) non-metaphysical nature of the Science of Logic. If Kant ’s own Critique of Pure Reason defies oppositions such as that between epistemology and metaphysics, then they cannot be employed to determine the extent to which Hegel’s Logic moves beyond Kant. By focusing instead on the system of pure reason that Kant intended to elaborate, I hope to bring out the ontological thrust of both Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Science of Logic. My paper thus intends to highlight the deep continuity between Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s Logic, yet without reducing the latter to the kind of epistemology commonly attributed to Kant. (shrink)
Shedding new light on Kant’s use of the term ‘transcendental’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, this article aims to determine the elements that Kant’s transcendental philosophy has in common with Wolffian ontology as well as the respects in which Kant turns against Wolff. On this basis I argue that Wolff’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of metaphysics – qua first philosophy – have a deeper affinity than is commonly assumed. Bracketing the issue of Kant’s alleged subjectivism, I challenge the opposition (...) between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings of Hegel’s Science of Logic. One the one hand, I argue that Hegel was more deeply indebted to Kant than he generally admits. On the other hand, I hold that this debt concerns Kant’s conception of metaphysics rather than his alleged subjectivism. (shrink)
Focusing on Greece, this essay aims to contribute to a philosophical understanding of Europe’s current financial crisis and, more generally, of the aporetic implications of the modern determination of freedom as such. One the one hand, I draw on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in order to argue that modernity entails a potential conflict between a market economy and a state that is supposed to further the interests of the society as a whole. On the other hand, I draw on Sophocles’ (...) Oedipus the King as well as on Hegel’s account of tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit to reinterpret the conflict between the spheres of civil society and the state as a tragic conflict. Modernity threatens to undermine itself from within, I maintain, because the simultaneous development of capitalism and democracy makes it very hard to prevent the sphere of particular interests from encroaching upon the sphere of politics. (shrink)
"Recent years have seen a growing interest among scholars of 18th-century German philosophy in the period between Wolff and Kant. This book challenges traditional interpretations of this period that focus largely on post-Leibnizian rationalism and, accordingly, on a depreciation of the contribution of the senses to knowledge about the world and the self. It addresses the divergent ways in which eighteenth-century German philosophers reconceived the notion and role of experience in their efforts to identify, defend, and contest the contribution of (...) foundational a priori principles and empirical data to the various branches of metaphysics, the natural sciences, and emerging disciplines such as psychology and aesthetics. The chapters are organized according to the four major schools that defined the various phases of German Enlightenment philosophy: Wolff and Wolffianism, Eclecticism and Populärphilosophie, the Berlin Academy, and Kant. Each chapter is devoted to one or more philosophers, several of whom are seriously under investigated or even unknown outside small circles of specialists. By framing the period in terms of the notion of experience, this book presents a more nuanced understanding of the German reception of British and French ideas and theories, dismisses the prevailing view that German philosophy was largely isolated from European debates, introduces a number of relatively unknown, but highly relevant philosophers and developments to non-specialized scholars, and contributes to a better understanding of the richness and complexity of the German Enlightenment"--. (shrink)
Focusing on the section ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this article argues that the method Hegel employs in this work does not capture the full significance of the French Revolution. I claim that Hegel’s method is reformist rather than revolutionary: Hegel deliberately restricts his analyses to transformations that occur within the element of thought and presents the changes that occur within this element as logically ensuing from one another. This approach, I argue, is at odds with (...) the very concept of a revolution. Seen in this way, efforts to frame Hegel’s philosophy as revolutionary are misguided. (shrink)
This essay re-examines Hegel's account of Greek culture in the section of the _Phenomenology of Spirit_ devoted to “ethical action”. The thrust of this section cannot be adequately grasped, it is argued, by focusing on Hegel's references to either Sophocles' _Antigone_ or Greek tragedy as a whole. Taking into account Hegel's complex use of literary sources, the essay shows in particular that Hegel draws on Aristophanes' comedies to comprehend the collapse of Greek culture, a collapse he considered to result from (...) the tragic conflict constitutive of Greek culture as a whole. The essay thus aims to shed light on Hegel's abstruse remarks on womanhood and, more generally, to demonstrate that Hegel's peculiar employment of literary sources constitutes an essential element of the method he employs throughout the _Phenomenology of Spirit_. (shrink)
The current crisis makes it clear that the financial sector has an ever greater impact on national and international politics. This development poses a challenge not only to Europe, but also to our philosophical understanding of the relationship between politics and the market. In order to use Hegel’s Philosophy of Right for the purpose of reflecting on this relationship, I begin by arguing that recent commentators, including Honneth and Pippin, unduly play down Hegel’s critique of the liberalist conception of freedom (...) as well as the conception of the state that follows from this critique. Turning to Hegel’s analysis of the relationship between civil society and the state, I submit that we can learn from Hegel that it is crucial for modern societies to let citizens pursue their own interests, but that a one-sided focus on this element threatens to undermine the society as a whole. This is the case if the political domain, which ought to be devoted to the long-term interests of the society as a whole, fails to sufficiently distinguish itself from the struggle between contending particular interests that characterizes civil society. (shrink)
In his early Jena System Drafts, Hegel elaborates a conception of time which is no longer thematized in later works such as the Encychpaedia. Hegel's early philosophy of nature bears not only on time insofar as it constitutes — together with space — the basic framework of the sciences, but also on the interiorization of time which occurs in the animal. This interiorization marks a decisive moment in the transition from nature to human consciousness, for it is here, in Hegel's (...) view, that time begins to enact itself as pure form of intuition. In this article I reconstruct Hegel's conception of this transition by sketching out the movement in which the pure concept unfolds itself in the element of exteriority and, within the limits imposed by that element, increasingly overcomes its self-externalization. According to Hegel's Jena texts, the concept initially determines itself as ether, space and time, reaches its turning point in the interiorization of time that occurs in the animal, and culminates in the distinction between the pure I and time which allows human consciousness to increasingly overcome its dependence on impressions caused by outward objects. I argue that this construction of the genesis of human consciousness sheds new light on Hegel's understanding of the relation between the pure concept and time, and hence on his philosophy as such. (shrink)
From the time of his very first courses, Heidegger seeks to thematize the radically finite dynamic for human life. As he considers traditional metaphysics to be incapable of facing this finitude, he engages in a critical examination of its most fundamental presuppositions. This article attempts to elucidate Heidegger's critique by means of twodifferent detours. First I show that the idea of self-realization, which Aristotle understood to be the most perfect movement, is unable to account for the tragic, unstable and internally (...) divided structure of human life. Whereas the idea of self-realization determined the ensuing history of metaphysics — including Hegel — to a considerable extent, I understand Heidegger to develop against the background of this tradition a dynamic principle which allows us to conceive of every human striving as essentially threatene by the very principle that makes it possible. I then turn to Greek tragedy, especially to Oedipus Rex, to clarify this radically finite principle in terms of the essential structure of the tragic as such. The tendency of both human life and philosophy to turn away from this essentially tragic movement can be understood as the 'fall' which is inherent in all efforts of the human being to raise itself above itself. Heidegger's own thinking, on the other hand, can be characterized as a finite attempt to withstand this predominant tendency of western philosophy. (shrink)
OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be considered as (...) having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. (shrink)
The financial crisis that currently besets Europe not only disturbs the life of many citizens, but also affects our economic, political and philosophical theories. Clearly, many of the contributing causes, such as the wide availability of cheap credit after the introduction of the euro, are contingent. Analyses that aim to move beyond such contingent factors tend to highlight the disruptive effects of the neoliberal conception of the market that has become increasingly dominant over the last few decades. Yet while the (...) financial sector has received most of the blame, and rightly so, few commentators seem willing to take into account the role played by representative democracy in its current form. Even if it is granted that actual democratic policies fall short of what they ought to achieve, contemporary representative democracy itself is seldom regarded as part of the tangle it was supposed to resolve. David Merill touches upon this issue when he notes, in the preceding issue of thisBulletin, that ‘the economic dilemmas faced today may be ultimately the consequences of state failure’. The state that has failed to regulate the markets is described as ‘weak’ and ‘subject to external blows, blind to its ends, merely one actor among many in the events of the day’. Yet Merill does not seem to consider this weakness to be an inherent feature of the constellation of which contemporary democracy is a part.There are, of course, excellent reasons not to take this path. First, representative democracy has in many cases proved to be the best way of preventing small elites from acquiring political power, and many of the impressive social and political achievements of the twentieth century are the result of democratic processes. (shrink)
Heidegger often stressed that the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time should be understood as a mere preliminary investigation. That this analysis indeed prepares the investigation into the relationship between time, the understanding of Being and ontology,can only become clear when some light is thrown on the never published third section ofBeing and Time. In this section Heidegger would have explicated in what sense time can be understood as condition of possibility for every kind of ontology. As ontology is (...) a specific possibility of human beings, this possibility must be based on the same basic structures as Dasein as such. In Heidegger's analysis of Dasein, the distinction between a proper and an improper mode of existence is understood as based on a different temporalisation of temporality. Improperness results from a temporal movement in which presentness takes the upper hand and determines the way Dasein understands beings, other people and itself. In the proper mode of existence on the other hand, not only presence, but the three ecstasies of time as a whole would constitute the openness of Dasein. Heidegger would have demonstrated in the third section that this same temporal difference also forms the condition of possibility for the improper and proper mode of ontology: the so-called metaphysics of presence and Heideggers own temporal ontology respectively.From the rather formal perspective of our interpretation, the different moments of the analysis of Dasein are read in view of their significance for the investigation into the essence of metaphysics. By doing so, the third section appears to be the aim of Heidegger's questioning and the 'missing link' between the analysis oí Dasein and the destruction of traditional metaphysics. When Being and Time is read with such a focus on the third section, the often used distinction between the early and the later Heidegger looses much of its sharpness, if not its relevance: it is already in Being and Time itselfthat Heidegger tries to decenter the human being in behalf of a temporality that constitutes meaningful openness as such. (shrink)
This essay draws on Hegelrsquo;s conception of tragedy in the emPhenomenology/em to reinterpret the intercultural conflicts that confront us today. It is argued that the prevailing self-conception of modern states, relying on the opposition between universality and particularity, effaces the irresolvable entanglement of contrary values such as progress and tradition or reason and faith. The essay seeks to employ Hegelrsquo;s insight into the dynamic of tragic conflicts to conceptualize precisely this entanglement. This requires, however, that the tragic strand of this (...) insight be extricated from the predominant optimism of Hegelrsquo;s dialectics as a whole. By turning this tragic strand into a conceptual perspective of its own, this essay seeks to account for the inherent tendency of contending cultural paradigms to oppose their counterpart instead of recognizing themselves in the other.nbsp; br /. (shrink)
