Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-16 of 16 documents


1. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3
James R. Mensch

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
How do we relate animate to inanimate temporality? Animate temporality is teleological. Our present actions are determined by the future that we want to accomplish. The determining factor for inanimate objects, however, is what happened in the past. In the material world, the past determines what happens in the present. The paradox, then, is that of time supporting two different directions. How is this possible? The claim of my paper is that this paradox arises from trying to think of time apart from space. Space, I argue, provides the common framework that unifies the temporality of the animate and inanimate.

2. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3
Joseph Arel

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The achievement of self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology hinges on establishing a relationship with another self-conscious being. How this is accomplished, and even that it is accomplished in Hegel’s text, are topics of dispute and misunderstanding in the literature. I show how Hegel’s Phenomenology argues for this, first, by comparing Hegel’s analysis of lord and bondsman to Sartre’s analysis of intimacy. Second, I focus on two interpretive challenges. First, I argue that the staking of life comes from an other-oriented epistemological relation, and not simply from an immediate concern with dominating the other. Second, contrary to many interpretations which see the bondsman’s development arising out of an isolated activity merely between himself and the products of his labor, I argue that the slave’s ability to gain knowledge of himself as a self is only possible by establishing a relationship with the lord. This point is essential because, if readings of the bondsman’s development as isolated from the lord are correct, then Hegel has in fact not succeeded in showing that self-consciousness only develops out of intersubjective recognition.

3. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3
Michael Rohlf

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper argues that Kant agrees with the substance of Hume’s critique of induction but without following Hume in characterizing induction as non-rational. I begin in part one by situating the problem of induction within the context of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, and by comparing Hume’s view that inductive inferences are based on custom or habit with Kant’s view that they are based on reason’s assumption that nature is systematic. Part two examines Kant’s view of the mental process by which reason leads us to assume that nature is systematic—a process that involves, I argue, reflecting on conditions of experience and then extending this reflection to an unconditioned idea. Part three then turns to addressing why and in what sense Kant thinks that we are justified in assuming that nature is systematic. Finally, in part four I flesh out my interpretation by arguing that it makes sense of Kant’s description of reason’s principle of the systematicity of nature as both transcendental and regulative.

4. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3
Kate Padgett Walsh

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper approaches Humean accounts of desire from a perspective relatively unexplored in contemporary moral theory, namely Hegel’s ethical thought. I contend that Hegel’s treatment of desire is, ultimately, somewhat more Humean than Hegel himself recognized. But Hegel also goes further than contemporary Humeans in recognizing the sociality of the normative domain, and this difference has important implications for the Humean thesis of desire-based reasons (DBR). I develop a Hegelian critique of DBR and conclude by outlining a distinctively Hegelian approach to understanding the normative import of desire.

5. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3
Mark E. Jonas

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In the first introduction of The Science of Knowledge, Fichte claims that there are two legitimate philosophical systems: dogmatism and idealism. He then asserts that only idealism allows individuals to retain their concept of personal freedom, whereas dogmatism requires that individuals give up that concept. I argue that on his own grounds Fichte is incorrect on this point. After a close examination of his theory, I attempt to demonstrate the possibility of a non-idealistic libertarian using Fichte’s explanation of self-positing as the foundation for her libertarianism. I hope to show that Fichte’s defense for the necessarily free act of self-positing is legitimate not only for his idealist system, but also for at least one non-idealistic system as well. The act of self-positing is indeed the only legitimate foundation for freedom, but that does not entail that freedom can only found in idealism.

6. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3
Ezequiel L. Posesorski

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In 1796, the lack of historicity in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre was one of the issues that provoked Friedrich Schlegel’s criticism of the Grundsatz tradition and paved the way for his early-romantic approach to philosophy. Schlegel argues that the critical development of Fichte’s approach demands its transcendental historization, i.e., a philosophical explanation of the temporal, evolutionary process whereby reason has reached Fichte’s self-conscious standpoint. The full understanding of this aspect of Schlegel’s break with Fichte demands a systematic discussion of a major, though still partially reconstructed, aspect of his thought during those years that preceded the new standpoint of the Vorlesungen über die Transzendentalphilosophie of 1800–1801: Schlegel’s critically historicized approach to philosophy. This paper reconstructs this path of Schlegel to early romanticism, and points to one of his virtually neglected sources: the early logical-historical thought of August Hülsen, between 1799 and 1800 a collaborator of Schlegel in the early-romantic journal Athenäum.

7. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 3

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

8. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Gary Overvold

view |  rights & permissions | cited by

9. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Nicholas Rescher

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
From the pragmatic point of view, cognition is an instrument for the cultivation of our interests, among which, interestingly enough, knowledge itself also figures. The cultivation of objective knowledge involves a complex trade-off between generality and security, between definiteness and reliability. Perfection with respect to these desiderata is in general unrealizable, and a compromise between achievability and ideal aspiration is as unavoidable here in cognition as it is elsewhere.

10. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Laura Papish

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Kant’s account of moral feeling is continually disputed in the secondary literature. My goal is to focus on the Religion and make sense of moral feeling as it appears in this context. I argue that we can best understand moral feeling if we note its place in Kant’s concerns about the possibility of moral conversion. As Kant notes, if the new, morally upright man is of a different character than the man he used to be, then it remains unclear how the new man can properly bear the debts of his old self. To address this issue, we need the presupposition that a person is both continually conscious of her empirical, bodily identity and capable of experiencing a felt recognition of the moral law; without this presupposition, I argue that fair punishment and the just payment of evil debts is impossible.

11. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Geoffrey Gorham

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
When McTaggart puts Spinoza on his short list of philosophers who considered time unreal, he is falling in line with a reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of time advanced by contemporaneous British Idealists and by Hegel. The idealists understood that there is much at stake concerning the ontological status of Spinozistic time. If time is essential to motion then temporal idealism entails that nearly everything—apart from God conceived sub specie aeternitatis—is imaginary. I argue that although time is indeed ‘imaginary’—in a sense ‘no one doubts’ as Spinoza says—there is no good reason to infer that bodies, the infinite modes, and conatus are imaginary in the same sense. To avoid this conflation, we need to follow Spinoza (who follows Descartes) in carefully distinguishing between tempus and duratio. Duration is not only real; it has all the structure needed to ground Spinozistic motion, bodies and conatus.

12. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Nicholas Mowad

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Aristotle differentiates not just soul from body, but proximate from remote matter. Yet Aristotle can be easily misunderstood as holding that the body of the human being is essentially biological in nature, and that the human differs from the beast only in having an immaterial intellect. On the contrary, I show that for Aristotle even the form of embodiment in humans is different from the form of bestial embodiment, and that human embodiment cannot be adequately understood in the biological way appropriate for understanding bestial bodies. Rather, the form of embodiment proper to humans is habit.

13. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Inge-Bert Täljedal

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Berkeley’s ‘esse is percipi’ has been criticized for implying epistemological solipsism, the main argument being that different minds cannot harbor numerically one and the same idea. Similarly, C. J. Boström, the dominating Swedish philosopher in the nineteenth century, was early scorned because his principle of esse est percipi allegedly contradicts the simultaneous claim that two spirits (God and a human, or two humans) can perceive the same thing under qualitatively different appearances. Whereas the criticism against Berkeley is here regarded as valid, it is argued that Boström successfully defended himself by employing a dual concept of meaning, resembling Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung some thirty years later, and by postulating an ontology that permits human minds to share in the divine ideas that constitute reality.

14. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
G. Anthony Bruno

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this from the “Letters,” which reject Fichte’s claim that the Wissenschaftslehre is an unrivalled system. I read Schelling as charging Fichte with misrepresenting a system’s livability or commensurability with our finitude. My historical aim is to provide a framework for understanding Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, which argues that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness or limitation by our finitude. On my reading, Schelling is early and continually committed to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude.

15. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Julia Peters

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
According to a widespread view, Hegel holds that beauty cannot be found in the creatures and objects of the natural world, but is strictly limited to works of art. I argue in this paper that Hegel’s restriction of beauty to works of art is not as straightforward as it is often taken to be, by showing that the phenomenon of beauty has anthropological roots in Hegel. Juxtaposing the Lectures on Aesthetics with sections from Hegel’s Anthropology in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, I demonstrate that the living human individual has considerable aesthetic potential in Hegel’s view. According to the interpretation developed in the paper, Hegel holds that artistic beauty—at least in its classical form—is inspired by the beauty of the living human individual. This interpretation makes emerge a strong, ambitious conception of artistic beauty according to which beautiful art not only stands in continuity with human nature, but also makes normative claims pertaining to the living human individual.

16. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 43 > Issue: 1/2
Jacob Blumenfeld

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In the history of interpretations of Hegel, how one reads the chapter on “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology of Spirit determines one’s whole perspective. In fact, Marx’s only comments on the Phenomenology concern this final chapter, taking it as the very “secret” of Hegel’s philosophy. But what is the secret hidden within the thicket of this impenetrable prose? My suggestion is that it turns on a very specific meaning of the “abolition of time” that Hegel describes in the very last paragraphs. But the meaning of this idea is not what Marx criticized in his last Manuscript of 1844, that is, it is not simply a form of idealism which abolishes the finitude of man. Rather this relationship to time accepts such finitude, making it the central axis upon which the possibility of freedom turns. In this paper, I will present a reading of “Absolute Knowing” that focuses on the meaning of overcoming time, and connect it to some thoughts on “disposable time” that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse.