Sally Sedgwick presents a fresh account of Hegel's critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy. She argues that Hegel offers a compelling critique of and alternative to the conception of cognition that Kant defended in his 'Critical' period, and explores Hegel's claim to derive from Kantian doctrines clues to a superior form of idealism.

Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit examines a conspicuous feature of Hegel's major works: that they are progressive narratives. They advance from less to more perfect, abstract to concrete, indeterminate or empty to determinate. This is true, argues the author, of his lectures on aesthetics and on the history of philosophy, and it is also true of his most abstract work, the Science of Logic. In answer to the question of why is it so important for Hegel to (...) structure his various philosophical works as developmental narratives, this book defends the thesis that Hegel's motivation is in part metaphysical, intending his developmental accounts to reveal something significant about who we are as thinking, willing natures. He undertakes his study of past in order to demonstrate that there have been advances in the nature of human thought or reason itself and in our resulting freedom and his concern with our reason's development conveys his interest in how human reason is anchored in and shaped by its past. Ultimately, this book specifies the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 5.

Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785 is one of the most profound and important works in the history of practical philosophy. In this introduction to the Groundwork, Sally Sedgwick provides a guide to Kant's text that follows the course of his discussion virtually paragraph by paragraph. Her aim is to convey Kant's ideas and arguments as clearly and simply as possible, without getting lost in scholarly controversies. Her introductory chapter offers a useful overview of (...) Kant's general approach to practical philosophy, and she also explores and clarifies some of the main assumptions which Kant relies on in his Groundwork but defends in his Critique of Pure Reason. The book will be a valuable guide for all who are interested in Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

A common reaction to Hegel’s suggestion that we collapse Kant’s distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as Kant (...) conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel’s critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel’s idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant’s dichotomy between form and content or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect—does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre-Critical metaphysics. This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more seriously. (shrink)

Der Band 14 des Internationalen Jahrbuchs des Deutschen Idealismus ist dem Thema der Auseinandersetzung von Kant und den Vertretern des Deutschen Idealismus mit den Rationalisten gewidmet. Beleuchtet werden in den Beiträgen die Beziehungen von Kant zu Wolff und Leibniz; von Fichte zu Spinoza und Leibniz, von Hegel zu Descartes und Spinoza, von Schelling zu Spinoza sowie von Novalis zu Spinoza. Die Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Bezügen bietet die Möglichkeit, Transformation und Kontinuität konkreter metaphysischer Themen der Frühen Neuzeit zu diskutieren. In vielen (...) Beiträgen wird darüber hinaus auch zum Thema gemacht, inwiefern und in welchem Sinne Kant und die deutschen Idealisten selbst eine 'rationalistische' Philosophie vertreten. Autori*innen des Bandes sind: Brady Bowman, Daniel Breazeale, Karin de Boer, Willem de Vries, Johannes Haag, Dietmar Heidemann, Thomas Hilgers, Marco Ivaldo, Anja Jauernig, Franz Knappik, Jane Kneller, Brandon C. Look, John McCumber, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Oliver Sensen, Paul Ziche. Der Band bietet Einzelstudien herausragender Wissenschaftler*innen zum Verhältnis zweier wichtiger Traditionen in der Geschichte der Philosophie. (shrink)

Der Band 15 des Internationalen Jahrbuchs des Deutschen Idealismus ist dem Thema Psychologie gewidmet.

In her book Kant and the Capacity to Judge, Be ´atrice Longuenesse makes two apparently incompatible claims about the status of the categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. On the one hand, the categories, in her words,?result from [the] activity of generating and combining concepts according to logical forms of judgment? and are thus?in no way prior to the act of judging?. On the other, they guide the unity which must be produced in the sensible manifold before any combination (...) of concepts into judgments can occur. Longuenesse?s strategy for rendering these two claims compatible is to draw our attention to the various roles the categories play as conditions of empirical judgment. This paper suggests that her arguments do not support the thesis that the categories themselves are generated out of acts of judging. Her insistence upon the priority of the capacity to judge may therefore claim more than is warranted. (shrink)

The period from Kant to Hegel is one of the most intense and rigorous in modern philosophy. The central problem at the heart of it was the development of a new standard of theoretical reflection and of the principle of rationality itself. The essays in this volume, published in 2000, consider both the development of Kant's system of transcendental idealism in the three Critiques, the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and the Opus Postumum, as well as the reception and transformation (...) of that idealism in the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. (shrink)

The author of this article challenges a central thesis of Robert Pippin's book, "Hegel's Idealism": namely, that Hegel's idealism is a "completion" or "extension" of an insight first discovered but inadequately developed and appreciated by Kant. It is argued that Pippin does not establish his claim that implicit in the very idea of the transcendental unity of a perception as it is presented in the Transcendental Deduction of the "Critique of Pure Reason" is the key to a form of idealism (...) which resolves the contradictions and dualisms of the Critical philosophy. (shrink)

From the various discussions of Kant’s theoretical philosophy throughout Hegel’s works, it is not difficult to come away with the impression that Hegel thinks that the Kantian categories are derived from experience, and that the method of a “transcendental” investigation of the forms of subjectivity is nothing other than that of generalization upon observation. As early as the 1802-03 essay, Faith and Knowledge, for example, he characterizes the critical philosophy as the “completion and idealization” of Lockean “empirical psychology.” In § (...) 41 of the Encyclopedia he tells us that Kant’s systematization of the “special forms of the a priori element … of thought … is solely based upon psychological and historical grounds.” Moreover, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he refers to Kant as going “psychologically,” i.e., “historically,” to work in his accounts of intuition, understanding, and reason in a manner that is “entirely empirical, and not developed out of the concept.”. (shrink)

In paragraph 135 of the Philosophy of Right Hegel formulates his well-known objection to the" empty formalism" of Kant's theory of morality:"[I] f the definition of duty is taken to be the absence of contradiction," he tells us,"... then no transition is possible to the specification ..

A common reaction to Hegel’s suggestion that we collapse Kant’s distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as Kant (...) conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel’s critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel’s idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant’s dichotomy between form and content or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect—does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre-Critical metaphysics. This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more seriously. (shrink)

Band 11 des Internationalen Jahrbuchs des Deutschen Idealismus widmet sich dem Thema Bewusstsein. Die Beiträge erörtern das Verständnis von Bewusstsein, Selbstbewusstsein und dem Verhältnis beider zueinander aus Sicht der Vertreter des Deutschen Idealismus und von deren Zeitgenossen. Während diese Themen schon lange mit dem Deutschen Idealismus verbunden sind, erfreuen sie sich in der Philosophie seit einigen Jahren insgesamt wieder eines großen Interesses. Der Band nimmt dies zum Anlass, um sich intensiv mit Fragen zur Möglichkeit, Bedeutung und Rolle von Bewusstsein und (...) Selbstbewusstsein auseinanderzusetzen. (shrink)

Der 13. Band des Internationalen Jahrbuchs für deutschen Idenalismus widmet sich dem Thema,Begehren‘. Von Alix Cohen und Paul Guyer wird in verschiedener Weise herausgearbeitet, dass Begehren bei Kant einen wichtigen Beitrag zur moralischen Handlung leistet. Federica Basaglia behandelt die Frage, welche Rolle das Begehrungsvermögen für Kants Thesen dazu spielt, was der moralische Status von Tieren ist. Andreas Schmidt und Allen Wood beschäftigen sich in ihren Beiträgen mit Begehren bei Fichte. Christoph Halbig widmet sich der Frage, auf welche Weise Hegel affektive (...) Dimensionen des menschlichen Lebens in seine Philosophie integriert. Ulrich Pothast behandelt das Thema bei Schopenhauer und Judith Norman untersucht den Charakter des Begehrens oder Sehnens in der deutschen Romantik. Neben diesen Einzelstudien zu Kant, Fichte, Hegel und den Frühromantikern diskutieren Thomas Khurana, Ludwig Siep und Sebastian Gardner verschiedene Philosophen der klassischen deutschen Philosophie vergleichend. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

Band 12 des Internationalen Jahrbuchs des Deutschen Idealismus widmet sich dem Thema Logik. Der Band beginnt mit Beiträgen zu Kant. Kant kennt verschiedene Arten von Logik und die Abgrenzung der transzendentalen Logik von anderen Logikauffassungen ist wichtig für sein philosophisches Programm. Diese verschiedenen Logikauffassungen sowie deren Änderungen im Laufe der kritischen Philosophie werden in den Beiträgen von E. Carson, T. Rosenkoetter, C. Tolley und G. Zöller untersucht. Auch mit Blick auf Hegels Philosophie ist das Verständnis und die Rolle der Logik (...) zentral und eine Auseinandersetzung über Ziel, Aufbau und Inhalt von Hegels Logik gehört zu den wichtigsten Interpretationsaufgaben. Dem gehen die Autoren S. Houlgate, L. Illetterati, R.B. Pippin und P. Redding in ihren Beiträgen nach. Bei Fichte und Schelling ist die Rolle der Logik weniger offensichtlich. Die Beiträge von C. Asmuth, A. Nuzzo und S. Schwenzfeuer widmen sich daher vor allem der Frage, welchen Platz die Logik in den jeweiligen Konzeptionen inne haben kann und soll. Das Thema Logik bietet sich auch für eine vergleichende Untersuchung innerhalb des Deutschen Idealismus an. Diese führen A.F. Koch und P. Schwab durch. (shrink)

In Moral Literacy, Barbara Herman informs us that she will defend an ‘enlarged version of Kantian moral theory’ . Her ‘enlarged version’, she says, will provide a much-needed alternative to the common but misguided characterization of Kant's practical philosophy as an empty formalism. I begin with a brief sketch of the main features of Herman's corrective account. I endorse her claim that the enlarged Kantianism she defends is true to Kant's intentions as well as successful in correcting the objections she (...) outlines. I then argue that there is another version of the empty formalism worry Herman does not address. Not only does she not address it, but her form of Kantianism provides fuel for its fire. (shrink)