Abstract

This book is one in a series of studies by the recently deceased Israeli philosopher Nathan Rotenstreich dedicated to the comparison of the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Reason and Its Manifestations is an attempt to make the best case possible for Kant’s notion of reason in light of Hegel’s critiques of various Kantian dualisms. Rotenstreich argues that the Kantian dualisms later integrated in Hegel—freedom and nature, theoretical reason and practical reason, will and reason, empirical and intelligible character— are not as discontinuous as one might think. According to Rotenstreich, Kant meant “both to maintain dualities and to mitigate them”. Kant’s insistence on the conceptual dualities in his programmatic first and second Critiques is balanced by Rotenstreich’s examination of the third Critique and Kant’s writings on history, where one finds certain continuities between the very concepts Kant at one point distinguished quite sharply.