Hegel indicates toward the end of his Phenomenology of Spirit that there would be a parallelism in the categories of his later system to the various configurations of consciousness in the Phenomenology. Some general correspondences have been indicated by Otto Pöggeler and suggested by Robert Grant McRae, but I argue in this paper that there are at least four important and more specific parallels, bringing out simultaneously a similarity of content and a difference of approach and methodology in the two works: 1) in the philosophical construal of “categories”; 2) in the conceptualization of a “phenomenology”; 3) in the analysis of the dialectical relationship of religion and art; and 4) in the relationship of the history of philosophy to the Absolute.

Studies of Reinhold have not paid sufficient attention to the systematic connection of the early Elementarphilosophie with the history of philosophy. Reinhold understands his own system as the last historical step of a purposive philosophizing activity of reason that ends the history of philosophy and enables the accomplishment of the true Copernican revolution. Reinhold discusses different aspects of this self-understanding in the writings of 1789–1791. Reinhold develops the core of this approach in a neglected and not republished essay from 1791: “Ueber den Begrif der Geschichte der Philosophie: Eine akademische Vorlesung.” The complete picture of Reinhold’s approach emerges only after the respective arguments of the Versuchschrift, Beiträge vol. 1, Ueber das Fundament, and “Ueber den Begrif ” are methodically integrated. In addition, “Ueber den Begrif ” fulfils another unnoticed function; it reveals the role that Reinhold’s theory of representation plays in the systematic construction of the rational history of philosophy.

G. W. F. Hegel is stuck between a rock and a hard place in the history of moral philosophy. On one hand, he is frequently regarded as an infamous critic of Kantian moral individualism. From the standpoint of Kierkegaard’s Socratic revival, Hegel is seen as ignoring or even suppressing the individual in favor of a ‘systematic’ form of philosophy. This paper addresses both criticisms by reconstructing Hegel’s unique contribution to the history of moral philosophy. Refusing to reduce Hegel to a foil for either Kant or Kierkegaard reveals his own inheritance of a Socratic ethic. I argue that Hegel revives a long-suppressed form of moral and practical philosophy: the Bildung of one’s self-understanding that involves both self-knowledge and self-transformation. Understanding the way in which Hegel resurrects and reinterprets this conception of moral philosophy requires that one pay attention to the close connection between his systematic method and his unique version of skepticism.

Commentators on the Phenomenology of Spirit have offered careful but conflicting accounts of Hegel’s chapter on sense-certainty, either defending his starting point and analysis or challenging it on its own terms for presupposing too much. Much of the disagreement regarding both the subject matter and success of Hegel’s chapter on sense-certainty can be traced to misunderstandings regarding the nature and role of certainty itself in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Specifically, such confusions can be traced to a failure to appreciate the connection between sense-certainty as a particular way of approaching and knowing the world, and the assumptions regarding the nature of the world it comes to know that Hegel attributes to sense-certainty. The “certainty” of sense-certainty is not so much an explicit attitude or conception it adopts but is rather something implicit in its practice of knowing through immediate or direct sensation.

In this paper I argue that there are two distinct senses of contingency operative within Hegel’s philosophy, and that the failure to sufficiently distinguish between them can lead to a misrepresentation of Hegel’s idealism. The first sense of contingency is the categorical one explicated in the Science of Logic, in which contingency carries the meaning of dependence and conditionality, while the second sense of contingency, predominantly found within the Philosophy of Nature, means irrationality and chance. Not only does Hegel acknowledge a systematic place for the necessity of contingency within his ontological logic, but he also admits the existence of real chance and multiplicity in nature. However, I claim that these two acknowledgements should not be collapsed since they involve different senses of contingency.

Kant’s elevation of practical reason to a position of primacy in relation to theoretical reason is certainly well known. With this, though, comes also a new articulation of what the task of philosophy is. This paper addresses how Kant thinks that philosophy must actively promote and work to bring about the essential ends of human life, namely, moral goodness and a just society. This means that philosophers must direct the use of their reason to the public sphere. In this, the primary occupations of philosophy for Kant can be seen to be moral education, which aims at the moral goodness of individuals, and political critique, which seeks to bring about a society in accord with universal law.

This paper examines how Nietzsche’s view of the mind and its relationship to nature informs his account of human agency. In particular, it focuses on his approach to the causal efficacy of conscious mental states. By examining the Leibnizean and Kantian background to this approach, I contend that Nietzsche proposes a naturalist but non-eliminativist account of mind, central to which is his anti-Cartesian denial that consciousness is intrinsic to the mental. However, Nietzsche ultimately oscillates between two accounts: the first, which I call the ‘enchantment thesis,’ sacrifices the extrinsicality of consciousness but secures the causal efficacy of conscious mental states, whilst the second avoids enchanting nature, securing the extrinsicality of consciousness but sacrificing its causal efficacy. I argue that it is possible to reconstruct his arguments to combine elements of the conflicting accounts and to successfully hold together his anti-Cartesian account of mind with the possibility of autonomous human action.

Aaron Ridley has concluded that “Collingwood’s global Idealism is really only a distraction from the much more important and interesting ideas that constitute his aesthetics.” My paper takes issue with this conclusion. Collingwood’s idealism is an integral part of his aesthetics, and it simply cannot be shucked off, leaving his aesthetics untouched and intact. A careful reading of Collingwood’s oeuvre in aesthetics reveals that it is his long-standing antipathy to realism that grounds both his critique of pseudo-art and his own theory of art, particularly his idealist theory of the imagination. If Collingwood’s aesthetics are interesting and important, so is the idealism that grounds them.

In an analysis of Fichte’s theoretical reflections read in the light of decisive biographical events, the present paper examines the following question: to what extent are we to assent to Fichte’s own assertion that his system is from the very outset a system of freedom? Kant’s philosophy provided the catalyst for the young Fichte because it promised a way out of the impasse of determinism. I will argue that the ultimate goal of Fichte’s lifelong struggle was to furnish a foundation for genuine freedom. In reaction to both Jacobi and Schelling, Fichte’s philosophical and political investigations pursue at once the problem of grounding the “Absolute” and the relationship between individual freedom and reason as a whole.—These tensions are especially visible in Fichte’s path from the Addresses To the German Nation to the virtually unknown “Philosophical Diaries” of the final days of his life.

In this article I show how Schelling elaborates the fundamental topic of the ontological proof, from the first phase of his philosophy on. I make clear how he keenly penetrates the formulation of Descartes, establishing that it is insuf­ficient in order to demonstrate the existence of God. The fact is, Descartes says that it would be contradictory with the nature of the perfect being that he existed only accidentally; so that it can exist only necessarily. But it is different to say that God can exist only necessarily, and to say that He in fact exists necessarily. From the first sentence, descends only that He exists necessarily if He exists, but this does not imply that He exists in fact. To arrive to the existence, the only possible way is through experience: the reason gives the concept, the experience gives the existence. On this difference is based the hendiadys between negative and positive philosophy, the nature of which I cleared up in the last part of the article.

A reading of Kant’s viewpoint on objectivity is suggested that finds inspiration in the second part of the third Critique, on living systems. It develops the idea that the need to articulate the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity only emerges to the extent that something resists the anticipative procedures of a living, actively engaged being. The possibility of objective knowledge, so it is argued, rests on the possibility of developing an adequate orientation in a phenomenal world, i.e., the possibility of actively distinguishing an “outside” from an “inside”—this not on the basis of an a priori principle, but by taking into account the punctual resistances and disappointments that appear within contingent encounters leading to pleasure and displeasure. We consider negation as a constitutive factor in the emergence of this very basic distinction, as well as in more elaborate and complex differentiations between objectivity and subjectivity.

This paper uses Maurice Blanchot’s image of the corpse as a trope by which to offer a unique quasi-material reading of the German Idealist notion of speculative suicide. And its method of interpretative retrieval, like these idealists, works to think the relevance of idealism today by affirming the spirit against the letter. The paradox of suicide—that we aspire to be witness to our own death—presents itself as a double, as interpreted in works of Fichte and Schelling. This double, the very core of speculative aspiration, is essentially a temporal other whose prosthetic character suggests that the speculative power of spirit is simultaneously technological, and that the limit-condition of suicide be found not in an ethereal speculative unity but rather in the intractable materiality of our own corporeal remains.

Jan Patočka appears as a paradoxical figure. A champion of human rights, he often presents his philosophy in quite traditional terms. He speaks of the “soul,” its “care,” and of “living in truth.” Yet, in his proposal for an “asubjective” phenomenology, he undermines the traditional notion of the self that has such rights. The question that thus confronts a reader of Patočka is how to reconcile the Patočka who was a spokesman of the Charter 77 movement with the proponent of asubjective phenomenology. What, in fact, is the conception of selfhood that allows him both to affirm human rights and to deny what has been traditionally conceived as the subject of such rights? This conception, I argue, is that of the self as a specific “motion of existence.” By focusing on how, through motion, we actualize our humanity, he avoids both the naturalistic and the idealistic (subjective) conceptions of the self.

This paper aims to analyze R. G. Collingwood’s maiden work in philosophy, Religion and Philosophy, in the light of the realism/idealism dispute in early twentieth-century British philosophy. Due to scholars’ narrow scopes of interests, this book has suffered divided and unsettled understandings in literature that find only either realist or idealist character in it. By contrast, I comprehensively examine various aspects of the work on which both readings rest in turn—his conception of history and metaphysics. Consequently, I find out that Collingwood implicitly elaborates a series of negative doctrines attempting to overcome dualismspervading at both poles of the dispute, namely abstract/concrete, subject/object, and theory/action. Since this framework is to be more explicitly present in his subsequent philosophizing, I demonstrate that Religion and Philosophy was, against its underestimated status in literature, not mere juvenilia, but a substantialstarting-point for Collingwood’s philosophy constructively grounded in the contemporary debate.

Logic, as a thinking of thinking, in which method and subject matter are indistinguishable, cannot begin with any determinate form or content without question begging. The essay examines how logic can proceed from such an indeterminate starting point and achieve closure as a valid thinking of valid thinking. Drawing upon the final chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic, the essay examines the nature of the end of logic and the significance this termination has for both philosophical method, the difference between truth and correctness, and the possibility of thinking what is other than thought.

Paul Ricoeur sharply distinguishes his hermeneutics from Heidegger’s ‘ontological’ hermeneutics. An ontological hermeneutics, Ricoeur claims, is bound to be insufficiently critical. Yet this cannot be the whole story, since Ricoeur himself engages in ontological hermeneutics. What really distinguishes Heidegger’s hermeneutics from Ricoeur’s? I seek an answer to this question in the two thinkers’ appropriations of Kant. More specifically, I examine their appropriations of Kant’s view of the productive imagination, as conveyed in the Transcendental Schematism. Heidegger sees the productive imagination as a ‘third basic faculty’ prior to sensibility and understanding. Conceived in this way, the imagination is so primordial that it must be characterized in a highly abstract way. Ricoeur sees this move as dangerous, and tries to avoid it by reinterpreting the imagination as a faculty that requires the mediation of concrete symbols. In doing so, he hopes to preserve Kant’s insights while leaving room for critique.

The paper argues that the idea that immediate (i.e., self-contained, supposedly cognitively unmediated) experience of itself suffices to provide for “evident” knowledge is an illusion. The step from experiential subjectivity to objective fact always presupposes some suppositionally “taken” (rather than experientially given) linkage of an objectively trans-experiential nature. The deployment of idealistically mind-postulated resources is always needed to underwrite the step from personal experience to putatively objective knowledge.

A lexical unit of meaning, or the concept, involves not just two moments, the rule and the following of the rule, but two reciprocally dependent moments. I argue that this links meaning to value. As a reciprocal relation, truth as normative is constituted by what Hegel calls ethical substance, which exists only between more than one consciousness, or, as Hegel would say, moments of consciousness. I read these two moments as the two shapes of consciousness that Hegel calls the master and slave in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Hegel’s account of international relations in the closing sections of the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1820) has been the source of considerable philosophical confusion and anxiety. This is primarily due to the fact that Hegel leaves international law at the stage of abstract right and thus, argues that an international moral order is impossible. In his essay ‘Hegel Contra Hegel in his Philosophy of Right’ (1994) and again in his systematic commentary on the Grundlinien Modern Freedom (2001) Adriaan Peperzack puts forward an innovative solution to this problem. He argues that Hegel failed to see that his own account of the transition from Abstract Right to Morality contains the solution (i.e., the appearance of the judge). In this paper I question this solution by closely examining the transition from Abstract Right to Morality. On the basis of this examination I argue that the attempt to apply this transition to Hegel’s account of international relations runs aground on the problem of punishment.