: This paper explicates and defends the thesis that individual rational judgment, of the kind required for justification, whether in cognition or in morals, is fundamentally socially and historically conditioned. This puts paid to the traditional distinction, still influential today, between ‘rational’ and ‘historical’ knowledge. The present analysis highlights and defends key themes from Kant’s and Hegel’s accounts of rational judgment and justification, including four fundamental features of the ‘autonomy’ of rational judgment and one key point of Hegel’s account of (...) ‘mutual recognition’. These themes are linked to Kant’s and Hegel’s transformation of the modern natural law tradition. The results explain why Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy are indeed the origins of the properly pragmatic account of rationality, why the pragmatic account of rationality provides genuine rational justification and why this pragmatic account of rational justification is consistent with realism about the objects of empirical knowledge and with strict objectivity about moral norms. > Russian translation : Nelly Motroshilova, ed., К 200-летию выхода в свет «Феноменологии духа» Гегеля, 195–219. > Turkish translation : ‘Hegel’in Tinin Görüngübilimi’nde Karşihkh Onanma ve Ussal Gerekçelendirme’. MonoKL 4–5 :212–231. (shrink)

While almost all of Kant's contemporaries agreed that the Critique of Pure Reason effected a philosophically epochal change, there was far less consensus about what precisely Kant's new critical philosophy had brought about. In large part, this uncertainty was a result of a methodological crisis that Kant's work had sparked: the Critique had shown that traditional dogmatic metaphysics was suspect at best, but what new methods needed to be adopted in the wake of Kant's 'Copernican Revolution'? The Critique stood as (...) the lighting rod at the center of a complicated and especially lively set of debates and disputes that erupted in Germany in the late 1780s and early 1790s: empiricists and rationalists, threatened by the 'all-destroying Kant', leapt to challenge the new critical system; skeptics attacked Kant's claims to have secured a sure footing for empirical knowledge; a few ambitious thinkers sought to complete the critical system by revealing a foundational first principle on which Kant's system could rest. All of these elements conspired to make the early stages in post-Kantian thought one of the richest, most vibrant – and most fascinating – periods in the history of philosophy. The present essay looks at the various figures of the move from Kant to Fichte, and presents some of the excellent new research on the era that has appeared in the last decade or so. The sequel takes up the period from Fichte to Hegel, with an eye toward understanding how Kantian critical philosophy gave way to Hegelian Absolute Idealism. (shrink)

The paper examines the evolution of Marek Siemek’s “dialogical principle.” The early version of this principle, sketched in the essay “Dialogue and Its Myth”, meets several criteria of the phenomenology of dialogue and even hermeneutics. However, Siemek has continued to change his concept of dialogue over the decades. In his recent book, Freedom, Reason, Intersubjectivity, he explores transcendental preconditions of free and reasonable activism, i.e., the Fichtean “limitative synthesis” of I and Non-I and its applications in social interrelations. He no (...) longer considers the empirical, anthropological, and phenomenological aspects of dialogics and mutual recognition. He also replaces mutuality with reciprocity, asymmetry with symmetry, and phenomenology with transcendentalism. (shrink)

This article seeks to demonstrate the influence of J. G. Fichte's philosophy on Søren Kierkegaard's theory of the self as he develops it in The Sickness unto Death and to interpret his theory of the self as a religious critique of autonomy. Following Michelle Kosch, it argues that Kierkegaard's theory of the self was developed in part as a critique of idealist conceptions of agency. Moreover, Kierkegaard's view of agency provides a powerful way of understanding human freedom and finitude that (...) has implications for contemporary debates about autonomy, normativity, and agency. (shrink)

Law functions on the basis of some presuppositions of what a person is. The purposes and tasks that are projected on a legal system depend on an understanding of personhood. Also, courts continuously find themselves in situations where they have to define the person or the legal subject, at times with surprising consequences. However, legal theory lacks clear criteria for personhood. We do not know who or what a legal person is, nor do we know what kind of being we (...) want her to be. There is clearly a need for critical examination of the concept of legal personhood. This article takes its inspiration from a historical theory, which sheds light on the complex logics of subjectivity. Reflecting on the thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte we can contemplate fundamental aspects of personhood, especially in its politico-legal dimensions. It is claimed in this article that even though the legal subject has to be autonomous to some degree, acknowledging otherness inside the self is a compelling way of understanding legal personhood. (shrink)

Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre 1794 is one of the most fundamental books in classical German philosophy. The use of laws of thought to establish foundational principles of transcendental philosophy was groundbreaking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and is still crucial for many areas of theoretical philosophy and logic in general today. Nevertheless, contemporaries have already noted that Fichte’s derivation of foundational principles from the law of identity is problematic, since Fichte lacked the tools to correctly (...) present the formal parts of Foundations. In this paper, however, we argue that Fichte’s approach intuitively offers an important contribution to transcendental philosophy, and especially to philosophy of logic. We first point out the difficulties of Fichte’s logic in the Foundations and improve it in a second part on the basis of a formal system in which both propositional logic and syllogistic are combined. (shrink)

I argue that Fichte (rather than Kant or Hegel or some amalgam of the two) was the primary historical model for the ethical standpoint described in Kierkegaard's Either/Or II. I then explain how looking at Kierkegaard's texts with Fichte in mind helps in interpreting the criticism of the ethical standpoint in works like The Sickness unto Death and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, as well as the significance of the discussion of secular ethics in Fear and Trembling. I conclude with a brief (...) look at the relevance for contemporary Kantian ethics of Kierkegaard's characterization and his criticism. (shrink)

This paper examines Fichte's conception of the freedom of choice in Das System der Sittenlehre of 1798 as a solution to the dilemma posed by determinism and indeterminism. It show that Fichte does not simply affirm an indifferent power of voluntary choice, but demonstrates how such a power might co-exist with the measure of regularity and lawfulness we normally admit of human choices. Particular choices do not occur at random, but are based on general reasons. These reasons are in turn (...) based on the extent to which we have freely reflected on our original drive. Thus our choices can be comprehended and predicted from the point of reflection from which we choose. This does not lead to the denial of the freedom of choice, but only to rethinking it in terms of the freedom of reflection: Though we cannot choose other than what we choose from the point of reflection we occupy, we can choose other than what we choose by raising or lowering ourselves through reflection to a higher or lower point of reflection. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel's depiction of knowledge, as presented in the Encyclopaedia philosophy of subjective Spirit, is founded on what he deems to be the practical interests of self-consciousness. More specifically, it highlights the significance of the will in Hegel's understanding of the cognitive process. I begin with a survey of the relation between category-formation and the notion of self-determining freedom in the Logic , and therewith draw attention to the unity of thinking and willing in the Concept. I (...) then indicate how Hegel's philosophy of subjective Spirit should be read as the applied logic of the Concept, according to which the socially constituted self-conscious I seeks to realise its claims to freedom through its theoretical cognitions of objects. As part of what could be called Hegel's integrative theory of the faculties, I finally argue that the will underscores both the determinate character of our theoretical cognitions and the reflexivity of knowledge in general. On this score, I maintain that Hegel, whose relation to Kant and Fichte I also consider, is of the view that it is with reference to willing that we can account for the self-referential nature of reason in toto as the actualised unity of theoretical-practical subjectivity. (shrink)