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21. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 2
Patrick Fleming Kant and Strawson on the Objectivity Thesis
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In the Transcendental Deductions, Kant attempts to establish the necessary applicability of the categories to what is encountered in experience. As I see it, the argument is intended to deduce two distinct, but, in Kant’s eyes, interrelated, claims. The first is that it is a necessity that experience be of an objective world. Call this rough idea the objectivity thesis. The second thesis is that the categoriesapply only to mere appearances, that is, the world insofar as we structure it. Call this the idealist thesis. P. F. Strawson attempted to split the two claims in order to save the objectivity thesis from what he saw as its unnecessary idealist trappings. My thesis is that the objectivity thesis depends upon the idealist thesis and cannot survive on its own.
22. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 3
Nicholas Rescher The Revolt Against Absolutes In Twentieth-Century American Philosophy
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An antipathy to absolutes has been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century philosophy: universality, necessity, objectivity and the like have figured prominently on its index of prohibitions. Ironically, this anti-absolutism itself represents an absolutism of sorts. And it is actually injurious to the interests of philosophizing where adequacy sometimes demands absoluteness. Certain philosophicallysignificant facts root in the non-negotiable necessities of things—the wickedness of inflicting needless pain, for one.
23. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 3
S. M. Amadae Nietzsche’s Thirst For India: Schopenhauerian, Brahmanist, and Buddhist Accents In Reflections on Truth, the Ascetic Ideal, and the Eternal Return
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This essay represents a novel contribution to Nietzschean studies by combining an assessment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenging uses of “truth” and the “eternal return” with his insights drawn from Indian philosophies. Specifically, drawing on Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of a static philosophy of being underpinning conceptual truth is best understood in line with the Theravada Buddhist critique of “self ” and “ego” as transitory. In conclusion, I find that Nietzsche’s “eternal return” can be understood as a direct inversion of “nirvana”: Nietzsche celebrates profound attachment to each and every moment, independent from its pleasurable or distasteful registry.
24. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 3
Farhang Erfani Sartre and Kierkegaard on the Aesthetics of Boredom
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This paper analyzes two inauthentic approaches to the problem of boredom from Sartre’s and Kierkegaard’s perpectives. I maintain that their narratives—Nausea and “The “Seducer’s Diary”—fit this problem perfectly, as it is through narratives that we appreciate and learn to avoid boredom. I also submit that their solutions are doomed to failure because they attempt to be the sole authors of their own stories, without making room for alterity.
25. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 3
Andrew Fiala Emerson and the Limits of Language
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This article focuses on Emerson’s emphasis on the limits of language. This emphasis is important because for Emerson self-expression in language is an essential part of the process of becoming self-reliant. Emerson thus shows us the way in which language often prevents us from becoming self-reliant. Emerson performatively shows the limits of language in an effort to inspire his audience to develop self-reliance in speaking for themselves. The article locates Emerson’s emphasis on the limits of language within the context of nineteenth-century thought. His approach is contrasted with German Idealists such as Fichte and Hegel and Romantic poets such as Wordsworth. Moreover, the article emphasizes similarities between Emerson and Europeans such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
26. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 3
Philip J. Kain Nietzsche, the Kantian Self, and Eternal Recurrence
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Nietzsche’s concept of the self grows out of Kant—and then attempts to subvert Kant. Nietzsche agrees that a unified subject is a necessary presupposition for ordered experience to be possible. But instead of a Kantian unified self, Nietzsche develops a conception of the self of the sort that we have come to call postmodern. He posits a composite bundle of drives that become unified only through organization. This subject is unified, it is just that its unity is forged, constructed, brought about by domination. But if the self is a bundle of struggling and shifting drives, how could it remain unified over time? Nietzsche’s concept of the self requires his doctrine of eternal recurrence, which promises that I will remain the same, exactly and precisely the same, without the slightest change, not merely throughout this life, but for an eternity of lives.
27. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 34 > Issue: 3
Douglas McDermid Keeping the World In Mind: Schopenhauer’s Misunderstood Reductio of Realism
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In this essay, I focus exclusively on an ill-understood Schopenhauerian objection to realism, which I call the Inconceivability Argument (since its conclusion is that realism is inconceivable or unintelligible). The received scholarly view of Schopenhauer’s supposedly conclusive disproof of realism is that it is nothing but a simple and familiar fallacy. I disagree; and in this paper I develop three ways of understanding the Inconceivability Argument, according to which Schopenhauer’s reductio is not an insubstantial and worthless sophism but a solid construction in which some valuable philosophical insights are embedded.
28. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
Timothy J. Nulty Fictional Structures and the Human Psyche
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This paper offers a deconstructive analysis of the work of Mitra Gholamain and Keith Oatley. The authors’ treatment of fiction as a simulation of psychic reality can be inverted; psychic reality is already constituted by non-literal narrative elements. I offer empirical considerations drawn from current psychological literature. The relationship between readers’ psychology and works of narrativefiction is a constitutive structural similarity, rather than simply a psychological process of simulation.
29. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
John Tietz Heidegger on Science, Realism, and the Transcendence of the World: Being and Time, Section 69
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Discussion of recent analyses of Being and Time, concentrating on that of Hubert Dreyfus, in which Heidegger’s philosophy of science is claimed to be a form of realism. Surveying other views, those of William Blattner, Barry Allen, Charles Guignon, and Richard Rorty, I argue that Heidegger should not be anachronistically classified because, similar to Subject/Object, he considers the Realism/Idealism debate to belong to another era.
30. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
Ha Poong Kim On Kant’s Hedonism
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Kant’s ethical writings contain a hedonistic view of human motivation. This has been pointed out by several commentators. Less noticed, however, is his hedonic life perspective, present in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and Critique of Judgment. This life outlook covers the full range of experience, so that Kant speaks not only of pleasures of the senses and the aestheticimagination but also of pleasures felt through concepts (Begriffe) and ideas (Ideen). In the first part of the paper, I discuss how Kant’s hedonistic view of human motivation is integral to his metaphysics of morals, by examining his four theorems and supporting arguments presented in the Critique of Practical Reason. The second part explores Kant’s hedonic life outlook contained in his Anthropology and Critique of Judgment. I claim that his hedonic perspective is indeed presupposed by his hedonistic view of all human choices outside morality.
31. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
Sara Beardsworth Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Adorno: Modes of Historical Reflection and the Problem of Authoritative Statements
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The paper considers what united and divided Benjamin and Horkheimer-Adorno in terms of their respective confrontations with the question of what it is to articulate the past historically. It presents their shared self-consciousness of the difficult task of responding critically to a problem conceived of as the entanglement of the concept of history with domination. For the problem imbues conceptualization itself and therefore threatens the value of the authoritative statements made in their own critical reflection on it. I show that these thinkers necessarily respond to the problem in confrontation with specific historical contexts: fascism, Soviet communism, German social democracy, and liberal democracy. The challenge they face is how to metabolize thinking in the midst of tendencies that disable it. I compare Benjamin’s solution, the dialectical image, with Horkheimer and Adorno’s solution, the recovery of critical reflection through the fragmentary writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
32. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
Raymun Festin At the Crossroads of Historiography and Metaphysics of History: Gadamer’s Critique of Collingwood
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Gadamer profoundly appreciates Collingwood’s Logic of Question and Answer (LQA). But while he grants its innovative serviceability, he contends that it has not been fully developed, and that its function in historical re-enactment is an exercise in historicism. Attempts have been made to defend Collingwood from Gadamer’s charge of historicism. But they have not documented the source ofGadamer’s alleged misunderstanding of Collingwood. This article will do the task. I will argue that Gadamer came up with a wrong conclusion about Collingwood’s doctrine of re-enactment because he overlooked the context of a passage in The Idea of History where he examined Collingwood’s discussion of Plato’s argument in Theaetetus. I will argue that Gadamer’s lack of perspective of the overall context of Collingwood’s discussion caused him to focus on a wrong aspect of the argument. This is quite unfortunate. Because of this, Gadamer is unable to appreciate more Collingwood’s LQA and its special role in hermeneutics.
33. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
Tom Rockmore A New Look at Croce’s Historicism
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The aim of this informal paper is to direct (or redirect) attention to the importance of Croce’s historicism. Though he is sometimes described as the best known Italian intellectual since Galileo, and though his influence remains strong in Italy, his impact outside Italy is not as important as it should be. Other than through Collingwood, his only well known English-language disciple, Croce has had very little influence on those writing in English. His theories, including his historicism, on which I will be focusing here, are only infrequently discussed in English, especially by philosophers.Historicism is a doctrine which receives almost no attention in English-speaking lands but looms very large in Italian thought.For purposes of this paper, I will treat Croce’s historicism as arising out of his readings of three very different thinkers, different from himself and from each other, who are committed to varying forms of epistemological historicism, and who are important for the development of his own position, Vico, Hegel and Marx. Croce studies these thinkers early in his very long career in inverse chronological order, beginning with Marx (1900), turning next to Hegel (1907), and then concerning himself later with Vico (1911). In considering Croce’s interpretation of three other historicists, it will be useful to keep in mind that, as an original thinker, he is never only an interpreter of other theories, always in the process of thinking for himself with and against whatever ideas he is interpreting. In each case, he made important contributions to our understanding of these thinkers while continuing to work out his own view.
34. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 1
Robert Piercey Gadamer on the Relation Between Philosophy and Its History
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This article asks what Gadamerian hermeneutics can contribute to recent debates about how philosophy is related to its history. First, I explain how Gadamer understands this relation, paying particular attention to his debts to Heidegger and to the role of tradition in the human sciences. Next, I argue that Gadamer’s view raises serious difficulties—difficulties connected with what he calls historicalconsciousness. Finally, I try to respond to these difficulties by distinguishing two different ways of understanding what historians of philosophy do. While my response is in some tension with what Gadamer explicitly says about the history of philosophy, it is, I argue, consistent with the spirit of his work.
35. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 2/3
Nicholas Rescher The Absolute: A Concise History
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In one form or another the concept of the Absolute has played a prominent role in Western philosophy from Plato to Hegel and beyond. The present paper addresses in particular the idea of the Absolute as the completion or perfection of the cognitive project of inquiry into the nature of the real. The discussion first traces the historical development of this conception, and then addresses the question of what sort of constructive role such a concept of cognitive absoluteness can continue to play in philosophical deliberation, arguing that it does indeed afford an instrumentality able to accomplish useful work.
36. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 2/3
Joshua Rayman Hegel’s Critique of Representation
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Recently, philosophy of language has swept through the community of Hegel scholarship. Since the early 1980s, Hegel scholars, such as John McCumber, Willem De Vries, Rodney Coltman, John Russon, Frank Schalow, Irene Harvey, and Henry Sussman, have imputed to Hegel the notion that the problems of philosophy are problems of language. What these readings ignore is that theessential systematic obstacle in Hegel is representation, not language as such. Hence, any Hegelian resolution of philosophical problems involves the speculative overcoming of representation, rather than the reformation of language, as is clear in the transition from “Revealed Religion” to “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology. By tracing seriously the implications of the fact that the completion of revealed religion is “absolute knowing” and that the limiting form of revealed religion is representation, I will show that representation is the dominant problem throughout the Phenomenology.
37. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 2/3
Nathan Andersen Orcid-ID Conscience, Recognition, and the Irreducibility of Difference In Hegel’s Conception of Spirit
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Hegel’s conception of Spirit does not subordinate difference to sameness, in a way that would make it unusable for a genuinely intersubjective idealism directed to a comprehensive account of the contemporary world. A close analysis of the logic of recognition and the dialectic of conscience in the Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates that the unity of Spirit emerges in and through conflict, and is forged in the process whereby particular encounters between differently situated individuals reveal and establish the emerging character and significance of the stances they uniquely occupy.
38. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 2/3
Ido Geiger Orcid-ID Is Art a Thing of the Past?: The Political Work of Art Between Hegel and Schiller
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The claim that art has no role to play in what is of highest significance for modernity is often attributed to Hegel. Against this interpretation, the paper makes the following claims: First, Hegel does not claim that art is simply superseded in modernity by rational reflection. Artistic expression remains an essential human need in modernity. Second, Hegel’s ideal of modern ethical life in which values shape human nature has an essentially aesthetic shape. Third, Hegel describes the foundation of a new shared form of life—in particular, the ideal ethical life of the future—not as a rational act of legislation, but as the politically creative work of art. This idea appears in Hegel’s early thinking and shapes his mature thought of the figure of the world-historical individual. Finally, Hegel turns to art to give life to the tragedy of the foundation of the state in his discussions of Sophocles’ Antigone and Schiller’s Wallenstein.
39. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 2/3
Rolf Ahlers Reinhold and Hegel on the Principle and Systematicity of Philosophy
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In the United States the relationship between Hegel and Schelling divides into two camps: The first sees Hegel’s critical remarks in the Phenomenology not directed against Schelling himself but against Schelling’s adherents. I provide here detailed arguments for the minority view: Although Hegel did collaborate with Schelling in the early Jena years even opposing Reinhold, he nonetheless worked with Reinhold’s arguments on the origins and systematicity of philosophy differently than did Schelling: The rift between the two giants really goes back to the very early Jena period.
40. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 35 > Issue: 2/3
Don Morse William James’s Neglected Critique of Hegel
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Although most scholars have ignored it, William James’s critique of Hegel, as developed in his book A Pluralistic Universe, poses a significant challenge to Hegelian thought. While not every argument James levels against Hegel is valid, and some are bogus, at least two of his arguments are highly persuasive—the charge of “vicious intellectualism” and the charge of “false unity.” As a result of leveling these charges, James escapes Hegel’s logic and is able to establish pragmatism as an original position in the history of ideas. He also offers an entirely new and serious critique that modern day defenders of Hegel must contend with—a critique that, unless it is addressed, makes pragmatism seem to be a more reasonable philosophy to adopt than Hegel’s.