journal of the h istory of phi lo so phy 52 :2 apr i l 2014 After explicating virtue as freedom of the self over time in chapter 2, the objective of chapter 3, "Freedom of the Self and the Moral World: The Highest Good," is to show how the demands of reason extend to necessitate our adoption of the highest good as a general, communal end that resolves a teleological dialectic as follows. Reason and nature present heterogeneous ends, namely virtue and happiness, as inherently good. The universal standpoint of reason enables and requires us to causally synthesize happiness with the unconditional goodness of virtue; thus in our realization of a good world through freedom we recognize happiness as inherently but conditionally good. The evident "consanguinity" of the duty to enact communal ends and the formulas of the moral law in reference to a world then highlights the "originary unity" of Kant's deontological and teleological commitments: the three formulas "prescribe . . . virtue, happiness, and the union of these in a world" (125, 140). According to Sweet, the universal exercise of reason through a community of wills is thus an individual duty that can only be jointly executed. The consequent tension between what I ought to do and what I can do is "one of the most productive tensions in Kant's practical thought" (142) because from it arise the individual duty to jointly found and explicitly promote a civil condition (chapter 4), the duty to join an ethical community, that is, church, to enact the moral world (chapter 5), and the necessity of progress through culture and history (chapter 6). In these shorter chapters Sweet argues that whereas the culture of discipline and religious practices together transform the dialectic through their constitution of the inner freedom of practical life, history and civil practices (e.g. practices rightfully securing property, promoting peace, etc.) progressively constitute our individual and communal exercise of outer freedom. Though it is elegantly systematic, clear in overall form of argument, and maintains close contact with both primary texts and practical life, Kant on Practical Life is densely argued and presumes significant familiarity with Kant's work. Kant scholars, both sympathetic and otherwise, should find it to be a rich resource. S u s a n V . H . C a s t r o Wichita State University Ezequiel L. Posesorski. Between Reinhold and Fichte: August Ludwig Hülsen's Contribution to the Emergence of German Idealism. Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing, 2012. Pp. x + 209. Paper, $67.00. The history of philosophy, like any history, has its own winners and losers. We do not penalize the losers; we simply leave them for oblivion. The fortunate among the damned are subject, occasionally, to heroic resurrection attempts by noble historians. Such an attempt has recently been made by Ezequiel Posesorski, in his important book on the philosophy of the German Idealist and early Romantic thinker, August Ludwig Hülsen (1765–1809), whose work is barely known even among scholars of classical German philosophy. Posesorski convincingly documents how highly the major figures of both German Idealism and early Romanticism esteemed Hülsen. Thus, we learn that Fichte ardently recommended Hülsen's only book as an introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, Friedrich Schlegel described him as "only second to Fichte in dialectical virtuosity" and called him a more important philosopher than Schelling (who, incidentally, edited and published Hülsen's Nachlass), and Novalis included Hülsen among the five members of "the philosophical directorate" of Germany (2). Hülsen, the son of a village preacher, enrolled in 1785 at the University of Halle, where he pursued studies in critical philology. In 1794 he went to the University of Kiel to study the new philosophy of Kant with Reinhold. Not being satisfied with Reinhold's philosophy, he moved to Jena in the spring of 1795 in order to hear Fichte lecture on the 383bo o k rev i ews Wissenschaftslehre. During this stay in Jena, Hülsen contributed to Fichte's Philosophisches Journal, and published his sole book, Was hat die Metaphysik seit Leibniz und Wolff für Progressen gemacht? (in 1796; the manuscript of the book had been submitted a year earlier to the 1795 Berlin Akademie contest). In 1798, upon Fichte's recommendation, Hülsen was offered a chair at Jena. Hülsen turned down the offer, wishing to keep his freedom as an independent thinker. Instead he opened a Socratic school for boys in a village near Berlin, an experimental initiative that soon failed. In the last decade of his rather short life, Hülsen collaborated closely with the brothers Schlegel, with Schleiermacher, and with several Scandinavian philosophers (201). According to Posesorski, Hülsen's crucial contribution to the emergence of German Idealism was his "historical enlargement of the Wissenschaftslehre as an attempt to fill the empty spaces left by Fichte's incomplete rearticulation of Reinhold's early Elementarphilosophie" (7). In his Preisschrift Hülsen developed a systematic view of the history of philosophy and its epochs. The telos and vocation [Bestimmung] of human history is the gradual explication and achievement of self-determination and self-consciousness. Such history unfolds through reason's self-contradictory activity (106). Hülsen follows the steps of the dialectical structure of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, though next to the unfolding of pure reason (Hülsen's equivalent of Fichte's unconditional I), he also charts the parallel progress of empirical reason through the historical stages of philosophy. Hülsen's intimate assimilation of speculative logic and the history of philosophy is likely to remind the reader of Hegel's thought. Yet Posesorski avoids such comparisons, and instead attempts to trace punctually the development of Hülsen's thought against the background of his predecessors, Reinhold and Fichte. He thus refuses to make his hero a stepping-stone to others. Overall, Posesorski's book is lucidly written, meticulously documented, and well structured. In addition to a thorough exploration and exposition of Hülsen's philosophy of history, the book contains valuable discussions of core issues in the systems of Reinhold and Fichte, as well as Hülsen's ideas on the philosophy of education. Let me conclude this review by reminding the readers of a modest truism: there is no a priori reason to assume the justice of history. Those who are enchanted by the prospect of expanding their philosophical horizons through the discovery of a neglected thinker will find Posesorski's book a stimulating and most valuable work. Y i t z h a k Y . M e l a m e d Johns Hopkins University Allen W. Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn, eds. The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790–1870). Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 992. Cloth, $183.95. Dividing history into century-size chunks is an arbitrary convention, and its artificiality tends to spawn a shadow sense of terms like "nineteenth century," whose extension never exactly coincides with the chronological period. The parenthesis in the title of this admirable volume-the latest in a growing series of (large) collections of expert scholarly essays on the history of philosophy published by Cambridge University Press-signals this drift by staking out a span of eighty years that includes Kant's Critique of Judgment at one end, but excludes Frege, Nietzsche, and Peirce at the other. This is no doubt at least in part because the next book in the series, published a few months earlier and titled simply The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1870–1945, begins where this one leaves off, and so covers those figures as well as the neo-Kantians and the British Hegelians. But while it serves as a convenient organizing principle no worse than any other, the stipulated terminal date also expresses an interpretive and editorial point of view. At the