Idealistic Studies

Kant’s theory of taste supports his political theory by providing the judgment of beauty as a symbol of the good and example of teleological experience, allowing us to imagine the otherwise obscure movement of nature and history toward the ideal human community. If interpreters are correct in believing that Kant should make room for pure judgments of ugliness in his theory of taste, we will have to consider the implications of such judgments for Kant’s political theory. It is here proposed that pure, formal ugliness symbolizes regressive, counter-teleological trends in nature and history. Kant’s paradoxical stance on the right to rebellion, both condemning and supporting the French Revolution, is interpreted as failing to take into account negative social forces signified by ugliness, and therefore neglecting the role of moral agency in social change.

This paper argues that Schelling’s understanding of love more readily captures his notion of unground as a contradictory-producing a priori. Love is a more appropriate term for unground insofar as it conveys the juxtaposition of feelings which motivate the eternal beginning. Self-expression, for Schelling, is born from the tension between God’s longing to be and his freedom. While this antithesis entails that God’s decision to be is only subjectively intelligible, it also implies the element of risk in the decision insofar as it suggests the groundlessness—and, thus, ambiguity—of God’s wanting to be. Indeed, for Schelling, God must decide whether to relinquish his perfection for the sake of an uncertain future. This essay offers a fresh interpretation God’s decision insofar as it introduces love as a means of understanding the attractiveness of God’s risk-taking, while also affirming his freedom to decide if the risk is worthwhile.

In Glauben und Wissen, Hegel criticizes Kant for drawing a deep division between sensibility and understanding. Hegel suggests that Kant’s faculty of productive imagination is a step toward uniting intuition and concept in an original unity out of which the two arise, but this requires him to treat the productive imagination in ways Kant would not approve. I argue that Kant’s doctrine of the schematism offers an advance on the productive imagination when it comes to solving the intuition/concept dualism Hegel critiques, although there remain serious problems with which Hegel would take issue. Although the schematism might answer some of the criticisms Hegel aims at the intuition/concept dualism, it does not solve the related problem Hegel finds in Kant, namely the dualism of cognition and thing-in-itself.

Like previous theorists of natural law, Kant believes in the possibility (and necessity) of a rational theory of ius, but also claims that the very concept of ius naturae and the method of investigation of its principles must be thoroughly reformulated. I will maintain that Kant solves the methodological problem of natural law theories by stating that a rational doctrine of Right concerns pure rational knowledge. Right must be conceived as a metaphysical doctrine in which its principles and laws are determined a priori. By conceiving the idea of a “metaphysics of morals” and linking Right with it, he finds a way both to conserve the notion of ius naturae (i.e., rational and “immutable principles for any giving of positive law” (RL, AA 06: 229)) and to purify it from any empirical or anthropological element.

Kant characterizes Critique of Pure Reason as “a treatise on the method” (KrV B xxii). But he does not clearly work out the Doctrine of Method of the Critique. Most interpreters of the Critique do not work out the Doctrine of Method either. This paper outlines the systematic place and significance of the Doctrine of Method within the structure of the Critique. It suggests that the Doctrine of Method supplies the methodological conditions, or systematic laws, of possible cognitions of reason. In other words, the Doctrine of Method is the primary locus of critique or reason’s self-cognition, i.e., reason’s cognition of the laws that make its possible cognitions systematic.

I provide a phenomenological response to Quentin Meillassoux’s “realist” criticism of phenomenology and I explore the resources and limits of phenomenology in its own attempt to grapple with the paradox Meillassoux believes sinks it: subjectivity has priority over the physical reality it constitutes despite the anteriority and posteriority of that physical reality to subjectivity. I first offer a corrective to Meillassoux’s interpretation of Husserl. Then, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on the philosophy of nature, where he addresses the paradox by interpreting Husserl in the light of Schelling. I argue throughout that the correct understanding of Husserl’s concept of constitution, and particularly, passive constitution, defangs this realist criticism of phenomenology and suggests phenomenology to be capable of a Naturphilosophie intimating pre-reflective being. The prime instance of this pre-reflective being is subjectivity’s entanglement with a reality that encompasses it.

In this paper, I begin by showing that for Spinoza, it is unclear how the human mind can have a true idea of God. I first provide an explanation of Spinoza’s theory of parallelism of the mind and the body, followed by showing how this doctrine seems to undermine the mind’s ability to have an adequate idea of God. From there, I show that the idea of God presents a problem for Spinoza’s theory of the parallelism of the attributes in general. To resolve the tension, I argue that Spinoza’s theory of parallelism does not entail a one-to-one correspondence between the modes of different attributes. From here, I show that the human mind can have an adequate idea of God, because the mind can have an idea of its own formal essences and the idea of a formal essence is itself an idea of God.

Through a key passage (Xici 2.2) from the Book of Changes, this paper shows that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms shares similarities with the canonical account of symbolic formation in the Chinese tradition: the genesis of xiang (象), often translated as image or symbol. xiang became identified with the origins of culture/civilisation itself. In both cases, the world is understood as primordially (phenomenologically) meaningful; the expressiveness of the world requires a human subject to consummate it in a symbol, whilst the symbol in turn gives us access to higher orders of meaning. It is the self-conscious creation of the symbol that then allows for the higher forms of culture. For both the Xici and Cassirer, symbols and the symbolic consciousness that comes with it is the pre-condition for the freedom, ethics and the cultivation of agency. As for both the Xici and Cassirer, it is human agency that creates these symbols, it will be argued that the Xici is making a Cassirerian argument about the (ethical) relationship between human agency, symbols and ethics/freedom.

Most interpretations of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason focus on its Doctrine of Elements, and ignore that the Doctrine of Elements needs to be grounded systematically in the Doctrine of Method. As a step toward remedying such neglect, this paper outlines the relation between the Doctrine of Elements and the Doctrine of Method within the Critique. It lays out the three systematic needs implied in the Doctrine of Elements, and shows that, in Kant’s account, these needs can be satisfied only in the Doctrine of Method. In doing so, the paper reveals the systematic dependence of the elements of cognitions on the method of cognition from pure reason.

Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is often interpreted in light of its initial reception. Conventionally, this reception is examined in the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who found in Kant’s third Critique a new task for philosophy: the construction of an absolute, self-grounding system. This paper identifies an alternative line of reception in the work of physiologists and medical practitioners during the 1790s and early 1800s, including Kielmeyer, Reil, Girtanner and Oken. It argues that these naturalists called on Kant’s third Critique to solidify an experimental natural history that classifies organic form within a system of laws. Kant held both kinds of system in tension, which is why the third Critique remains a singular and provocative text.

In “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” Kant defines the public use of reason as “that use which someone makes of it as a scholar before the entire public of the world of readers.” Commentators rarely note Kant’s reference to “scholarship” in this passage and, when they do, they often disagree about its meaning and significance. This paper addresses those disagreements by exploring discussions of scholarship in Kant’s logic lectures as well as in later works like The Conflict of the Faculties. These sources suggest that Kant defends a rigorous conception of scholarship, which may not be consistent with liberal and egalitarian interpretations of the public use of reason. The paper concludes that Kant’s account of the public use of reason provides only a limited defense of freedoms of speech and of the press, which is neither as liberal nor as egalitarian as other commentators have suggested.

Schelling’s later philosophy (1820 onwards) was historically received as a disappointment: the once brazen Romantic and pantheist becomes a pious Christian in his old age. Indeed, Schelling’s Berlin lectures on revelation and mythology culminate in a suspicious level of Christian orthodoxy. In the last few years, a number of scholars have offered a different reading of Schelling’s Spätphilosophie, particularly by pointing out his rethinking of nature, revelation, and Christianity. In this paper, I offer a systematic reading of Schelling’s later philosophy so as to show that his views of a philosophical religion fit within the trajectory of his thought. Nevertheless, Schelling does recourse overtly hasty in (Christian) religion.