Abstract

Daniel Breazeale - All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 665-667 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Daniel Breazeale University of Kentucky Paul W. Franks. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 440. Cloth, $49.95. Paul Franks' All or Nothing is in no sense an introduction to or history of German idealism, but an immensely sophisticated philosophical engagement with a specific complex of problems that occupied Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others—problems they believed themselves to have inherited from Kant's transcendental philosophy, as well as from its criticism by Jacobi, Maimon, Schulze, and others. According to Franks, these thinkers were involved in a common systematic project of "ultimate" or "absolute" grounding, while adopting various strategies to avoid "the Agrippan Trilemma," according to which any effort to justify an ultimate first principle must involve either the purely arbitrary assertion or stipulation of the principle in question, an infinite regress of explanatory principles, or a viciously circular justification of the principle in..