Kant’s Refutation targets what he calls the problematic idealist. This is understood by the mainstream of Kantian scholarship as the global skeptic that Descartes briefly adumbrated in his first Meditation. The widespread view in the literature is that the fate of the Refutation is tied to its success as an argument against this Cartesian global skepticism. This consensus is what I want to question in this paper. I argue that Kant’s opponent – the problematic idealist – is not the (...) Cartesian global skeptic, but rather what I prefer to call here the Cartesian problematic external-world idealist. According to Cartesian global skepticism we cannot know whether our commonsensical beliefs are true until we rule out the skeptical hypotheses are false. In contrast, the Cartesian external-world idealist sees as problematic the assumption that the underlying nature of outer things of which we have ideas is mind-independent rather than caused by our own thinking being. My aim here is to disentangle Cartesian global skepticism from Cartesian problematic external-word idealism and show that, if measured against global skepticism, Kant’s Refutation is doomed to fail; while against problematic idealism, it is at least a promising argument. (shrink)

Kant’s Refutation targets what he calls the problematic idealist. This is understood by the mainstream of Kantian scholarship as the global skeptic that Descartes briefly adumbrated in his first Meditation. The widespread view in the literature is that the fate of the Refutation is tied to its success as an argument against this Cartesian global skepticism. This consensus is what I want to question in this paper. I argue that Kant’s opponent – the problematic idealist – is not the (...) Cartesian global skeptic but rather what I prefer to call here the Cartesian problematic external-world idealist. According to Cartesian global skepticism, we cannot know whether our commonsensical beliefs are true until we rule out that the skeptical hypotheses are false. In contrast, the Cartesian external-world idealist sees as problematic the assumption that the underlying nature of outer things of which we have ideas is mind-independent rather than caused by our own thinking. My aim here is to disentangle Cartesian global skepticism from Cartesian problematic external-word idealism and show that, if measured against global skepticism, Kant’s Refutation is doomed to fail, while against problematic idealism, it is at least a promising argument. (shrink)

Hopkins' Idealism provides a thorough re-examination of the nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), whose early writings on philosophy have to date received little critical attention. It is the first full-length study of Hopkins' largely unpublished Oxford undergraduate essays and notes on philosophy and mechanics. The volume also offers radical new readings of some of Hopkins' best-known poems.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the function of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism within Adorno’s thought. In order to do so, I have chosen to focus on the issue of the social significance of the work of art and the role played by the concept of literary material. Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, can be read as a reinterpretation of the idealist aesthetic model based precisely on a non-idealist notion such as that of aesthetic material.If one (...) is to allow a seemingly brutal simplification, there are two ways to think about the social meaning of literature. One identifies somehow the subject of the text, assesses whether or not this challenges the society from which the literary work stems, and on this ground establishes its social character. According to this perspective, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl can be seen as socially engaged literature, while Proust’s Recherche cannot, or can only to a lesser extent. The other approach argues instead that any literary work, and in any of its instances, says something about the society in which it takes shape. In this contribution I would like to focus on this latter approach. In particular, I am interested in understanding how literature is connected to society, that is, through which identifiable elements literary works express certain aspects of society. The Hegelian idealistic idea according to which Greek tragedy expresses the constitutive features of Athenian society, and which is found again and again in the authors who in various ways have taken up Hegel’s legacy, is generally accepted as such and valued for the explanatory opportunities it offers. It is my opinion, however, that one notion in particular can be retrieved within the whole inherited baggage of that aesthetic tradition, which may be able to further clarify the relationship between literature and society. This concept is that of material and the author who has most thoroughly investigated it is Adorno. In this paper I will try to outline the main features of a counterintuitive notion such as that of “literary material” and thereby explain why it plays such an important role in Adorno’s rework of the aesthetic paradigm of German idealism. The concept of material, in fact, is key to the definition of another aesthetic category around which, according to Adorno, most of the problems connected to works of art gravitate, that is to say, the notion of form. From Adorno’s aesthetics, in fact, one of his most insightful readers, Peter Szondi, draws the main principle for his study of the historical form of modern drama, namely the idea that form is essentially a precipitation, a sedimentation of contents. The work of art, then, at least according to this definition, is essentially identified by its form. Or, better said, the artwork must be interpreted as the way in which a certain (historical) content sediments in a certain external form. That the form of the work of art is precipitated content means, in simple terms, that no effective disjunction can be assumed between form and content. This is how Adorno reinterprets the concept of “identity of form and content” stressed by classical aesthetics. The content is such only insofar as it is precipitated into a certain form. This amounts to saying that no objective distinction can be established between one and the other. Now, if one were to ask how the form is made, Adorno’s answer is quite straightforward: the form is made by means of organization and, precisely, by means of the organization of the material. As one reads in Aesthetic Theory, in fact, “the substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials,” and the particular form of an artwork is defined as the “organization” of its “materials” (Adorno 1970, transl. 1997: 201). The concept of material, therefore, is key to the definition of the very notion of work of art in its constituent components, namely the relationship between form and content. In this paper I will first of all clarify the notion of artistic material in general and subsequently I will turn to strictly literary material. Finally, and this is the main goal of this essay, I will show to what extent this definition of the material possibly contributes to a better understanding of a widely and variedly debated literary phenomenon of our time, namely the form of the so-called postmodern novel. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the Irish modernist writings of James Joyce and the Scottish empirical philosophy of David Hume? Here I discuss Joyce’s conception of Hume as a philosopher and explore the presence of Hume’s work in Joyce’s final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake. How then did Joyce conceive of Hume’s thought, and to what extent did he engage with it? Well, in his lecture “Realism and Idealism in English Literature,” given at Trieste in 1912, Joyce denounces the interest (...) in the sanity of artistic and philosophical geniuses, before offering the following comments. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBritish Idealism was the philosophical school which dominated during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Using the ideas of Bernard Bosanquet, John Caird and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison as an illustration, this paper looks at some of the ways in which the British Idealists sought to develop new and more subtle conceptions of the transcendent, able to resist the corrosive effects of late nineteenth-century critical and naturalistic thinking. The paper concludes by looking at three fields – philosophy, theology and (...) literature – in which it is possible to discern the ongoing influence into the first half of the twentieth century of their efforts. (shrink)

No aspect of Marx’s theory has received more attention in recent decades than the dialectical method. Yet, Western interpreters have mainly restricted the discussion to those early writings in which Marx explicitly confronts Hegel’s philosophy, while socialist commentators often hesitate to subject Marx’s mature writings to fundamental questioning. In the present contribution I propose to raise a number of questions concerning the dialectical method as used in Marx’s later works and as interpreted in those of his principal followers. I realize (...) that there may be a substantial difference between the two, yet since the latter, correctly or incorrectly, explicate a text which frequently demands further justification, they must be consulted. My purpose with this task is hermeneutical rather than critical. I feel that, despite the existing bulk of Marxist literature, we still have not read Marx attentively enough to be ready for a decisive critique of his work. My own critical remarks pretend to do no more than to allow the text to reveal its own meaning within its total context. They are part of that internal criticism without which there can be no true hermeneutic. (shrink)

This paper defends the idea that Cassirer's methodology is idealistic in regard to validity claims and the structuralist views he holds and at the same time empiric in regard to the facts and genealogy of culture. This perspective is best to be unfolded along Cassirer's model of representation. The author does so by showing that Cassirer's triad of symbolic articulation (expressive, presentational, significative) and the triad of symbolic development (mimetic, analogical, symbolic) form a coherent and exhaustive theory of symbolic formation. (...) In order to defend this view, two main objections from the secondary literature against the consistency of this essential theory piece of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms have to be rejected. (shrink)

In this paper I explore one issue in the history of German Idealism which has been widely neglected in the existing literature. I argue that Salomon Maimon was the first to suggest that Spinoza's pantheism was a radical religious (or 'acosmistic') view rather than atheism. Following a discussion of the historical context of Maimon's engagement with Spinoza, I point out the main Spinozistic element of Maimon 's philosophy: the view of God as the material cause of the world, (...) or as the subject in which all things inhere. I argue that this doctrine was the basis of Maimon's Law of Determinability. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer a general survey of the latest development of metaphysical idealism in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. It consists of five main parts. The first part is a short introduction, it states the position of idealism and its current status in the Anglophone world. The second part focuses on the negative programme of idealism, which challenges physicalism on the problem of matter (2.1) and the problem of consciousness (2.2). The third part illustrates (...) the positive programme of idealism, whose varieties can be grouped into two principal types: constitutive and elementary. Constitutive idealism (3.1) is subdivided into the theocentric (3.1.1), the anthropocentric (3.1.2), and the acentric (3.1.3). Elementary idealism (3.2), on the other hand, can be unity-based (3.2.1), language-based (3.2.2), or knowledge-based (3.2.3). The six categories form a general framework of metaphysical idealism, and various accounts in the existing literature are discussed under each category. The fourth part addresses the relation between idealism and panpsychism. The paper is concluded with some caveats and future prospects. (shrink)

Professor Orsini’s book enters the controversy that has marked the changing response to Coleridge’s work during the past forty years, stimulated recently by the accessibility of Coleridge manuscripts and by the publication of hitherto unpublished works. Professor Orsini himself contributes to our new knowl­edge by publishing here for the first time texts from the note­books. His book is of importance and interest because it examines problems which are rooted in world-wide intellectual developments of recent times. Counterposing his argument against the (...) theory that Col­eridge had anticipated Kant and Schelling, Professor Orsini marshalls impressive evidence that shows that Coleridge was familiar with the works of the German idealists and that they greatly influenced his thinking, to the extent that he was for a time an expounder of transcendental idealism, and should be credited with bringing it to England. Professor Orsini’s new findings will lead inevitably to reassessment of Coleridge’s status as a philosopher, though he insists that his report is an interim one, that a final estimate must wait until all Coleridge’s writings have been published and assessed. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, Hilda Diana Oakeley set out a new kind of British idealism. Oakeley is an idealist in the sense that she holds mind to actively contribute to the features of experience, but she also accepts that there is a world independent of mind. One of her central contributions to the idealist tradition is her thesis that minds construct our experiences using memory. This paper explores the theses underlying her idealism, and shows how they are (...) intricately connected to the wider debates of her period. I go on to explain how the parts of Oakeley's idealism are connected to further areas of her thought – specifically, her views on history and her growing block theory of time – to provide a sense of Oakeley's philosophy as a system. As there is no existing literature on Oakeley, this paper aims to open a path for further scholarship. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to the growing discussion about leadership in the contemporary Church of England with a particular interest in the complex interaction between social context and leadership practices. Implicit leadership theory is used to explore mutual expectations around distributed models of lay and ordained leadership as well as ‘ordinary’ members’ of congregation. Applying a qualitative research method, we conducted 32 semi-structured interviews in 6 Church of England parishes. Through the systematic analysis of relevant contextual factors at multiple (...) levels, we identify limited congruence between ideal leadership attributes and actual behavior. We contribute to the ILT literature by identifying ethical attributes, such as the ability to help others flourish, as particularly pertinent to the religious setting. We also identify the malleability of some leadership attributes. We further contribute to the literature on organizational studies in faith-based organizations by offering novel insights into the relationship between leadership, followership and contextual factors at local parish level which have significant practical implications for recruiting and training church leaders and followers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism by Anja JauernigPatricia KitcherAnja Jauernig. The World According to Kant: Appearances and Things in Themselves in Critical Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. Hardback, $105.00.After Peter Strawson's withering criticisms of the "Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism" in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), many Kant scholars devoted their labors to (...) explaining and expanding his project of transcendental epistemology. Recently, however, the tide has turned, and major Kant scholars have tried to fathom the intricacies of his metaphysical doctrines. With its new, systematic, and boldly idealistic interpretation of transcendental idealism, Anja Jauernig's The World According to Kant is an important contribution to this literature.Jauernig casts her reading of Kantian metaphysics in relation to two traditional accounts: the two-world interpretation that seemed obvious to Kant's first readers, and the two-aspect interpretation offered by Gerald Prauss (Kant und das Problem der Dinge an sich [Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1974]) and Henry Allison (Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983]). On the second reading, there are not two sets of objects, one phenomenal and one noumenal, but just one set that can be regarded in two different ways. Jauernig effectively demolishes the original two-aspect reading, noting that it has the consequence that contradictory properties (being F and not being F) are attributed to the same thing (164). The serious competitor to her interpretation is a more recent reading that makes an analogy with secondary qualities. Rae Langton introduces this strategy in Kantian Humility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and Lucy Allais offers a new version of it in Manifest Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). On Allais's version, the properties of empirical objects are real, but unusual. As the redness of a rose depends not just on the existence of the rose, but also on the existence of perceivers with retinal cones, the properties of empirical objects depend on cognitive subjects as well on as things in themselves. Jauernig takes Allais's secondary quality analogy and a closely [End Page 160] related view of Tobias Rosefeldt's as her principal foils and marshals many texts to support her new view. To my mind, however, some of the cited texts seem ambiguous, for example, "our sensible representation is in no way a representation of things in themselves, but merely of the manner in which they appear to us" (Ak. 4:287, cited on 256n22). The second part of the citation seems to imply that sensible representations are how things in themselves are "manifest" to us, as Allais would put it.Jauernig would focus on the first part of the citation: a sensible representation in no way represents the thing in itself. In her view, empirical objects or appearances are fully mind-dependent: each of their "ontological ingredients" (elements that make up an object) is mind-dependent. Since empirical objects are fully mind-dependent and things in themselves are mind-independent, they have no "ontological overlap" (32). Phenomena and noumena are therefore numerically distinct things (32). Appearances or empirical objects are "empirically real" (as opposed to illusory), not merely because they agree with the formal conditions of reality, but because cognition begins with the receipt of sensations through the affection of human sensibility by things in themselves. (Here Jauernig's appearances that are grounded in real things but have properties that are "fully" mind-dependent seem similar to Allais's appearances.) Because objects of empirical cognition involve sensations caused by things in themselves, they should be understood as existents, even though they are not part of "fundamental ontology," whose denizens are mind-independent. Appearances exist or perhaps "in-exist" only as "intentional objects" of representations (33). On Kant's theory, as on Leibniz's, there are different levels of reality (39–40).Jauernig energetically engages challenges confronting her strongly idealistic reading. If empirical objects are fully mind-dependent, how do they differ from illusions and fictions? Since Kant anchors empirical reality to empirical intuition, the question becomes, how are appearances or empirical objects the referents of empirical intuitions? Appearances are... (shrink)

German Idealism is arguably the most influential force in philosophy over the past two hundred years. This major four-volume work is the first comprehensive survey of its impact on science, religion, sociology and the humanities, and brings together fifty-two leading scholars from across Europe and North America. Each essay discusses an idea or theme from Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, or another key figure, shows how this influenced a thinker or field of study in the subsequent two centuries, and how (...) that influence is felt in contemporary thought. Crossing established scholarly divides, the volumes deal with fields as varied as feminism, architectural history, psychoanalysis, Christology and museum curation, and subjects as diverse as love, evolution, the public sphere, the art of Andy Warhol, the music of Palestrina, the philosophy of Husserl, the literature of Jane Austen, the political thought of fascism and the foundations of international law. (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno’s writings are often categorized as either political, aesthetic or critical. While all of these characteristics are legitimate, it is problematic to view Adorno from only one of these angles. In fact, many literary critics consider his thoughts about literature to be simple cultural criticism, i.e., something that leaves the realm of pure scholarship by defiling the argumentation with philosophy or politics. Political theorists and philosophers, on the other hand, often view his literary concerns as superfluous. It (...) is my thesis that Adorno’s way of thinking can only be adequately understood when these categories are not seen as mutually exclusive. In order to demonstrate this point, I will concentrate on his use of the term realism which can be seen as paradigmatic for this question. (shrink)

The rise of Canadian national identity in the 1960s contributed to a flourishing small press movement across the country. One of the most impressive, long-standing and influential presses of this era was Coach House Press, located near the University of Toronto. Book design, creative forms of editing, collaborative and community-oriented work all became a focus of idealism in the Coach House context, as its founders borrowed from earlier international models, but relied, too, on the Canadian moment to devise new (...) ways to disseminate and create literary culture. More recently, a similar idealistic model in publishing and press work has appeared in Nova Scotia at Kentville’s Gaspereau Press. Gaspereau’s founders, like those at Coach House, have searched for an alternative plan and method- through an in-house dedication to the craft of design and bookmaking- that is unlike that applied by mainstream publishers. One could argue that the two outfits represent a counter-tradition in Canadian cultural life, a dedication to artisanal work, as well as to forms of collaborative editing and design. With the publishing and bookselling industry under great pressure in Canada from shifts in technology and government support, counter-traditional models like Gaspereau Press present the possibility of unique forms of cultural output and marketing. Behind such efforts we recognize philosophies and notions of cultural community that run counter to major trends. This paper examines the history of both presses, specific publications, and the impact of such work on the broader Canadian literary scene. (shrink)

This is a study of the attributes problem in the metaphysics of Spinoza, using the recent literature ascribing an absolute idealism to Spinoza as a point of departure.

The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy. Preface: The. Literary. Absolute. I. "There are classifications that are bad enough as classifications, but that have nonetheless dominated entire ...

I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, one searched almost in vain for allies if one wanted to approach a literary text from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure, there were Franz Mehring’s articles which I read with interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings hardly went beyond the limits of (...) a socialist journalist who wrote in essentially the same style about literature as about political and the economy. George Lukács had not yet published his impressive series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and interpretation of literature. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his fine little book, The Theory of the Novel , which I practically learned by heart. Besides Levin Schücking’s small volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major influence I can recall was George Brandes’ monumental work on the literary currents of the nineteenth century.Nonetheless, I had the courage, not to say hubris, to plan an ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish, and German literature, the beginning of which was to be formed by the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on the writes and literary schools which the German literary establishment either punished by total silence or raised up into the clouds of idealistic babble or relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology .In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of literature; for reasons which I hold to be sociologically and artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth century. While I in no way feel ashamed of these documents of my youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand, and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation between substructure and superstructure, between social currents and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my contemporaries have often amazed me because some—frequently in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language—are so concerned with “mediation” that the connections between social being and social consciousness became almost obscured. Leo Lowenthal is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also professor emeritus at the University of Frankfurt in West Germany. His collected works have been published in five volumes in German and in a parallel English edition. Lowenthal’s autobiographical writings, edited by Martin jay, will appear in the fall of 1987 under the title An Unmastered Past. Lowenthal’s present studies deal with German postmodernism. Ted. R. Weeks is a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in imperial Russian history. (shrink)

Since the initial reception of theCritique of Pure Reasontranscendental idealism has been perceived and criticized as a form of subjective idealism regarding space, time, and the objects within them, despite Kant's protestations to the contrary. In recent years, some commentators have attempted to counter this interpretation by presenting transcendental idealism as a primarily epistemological doctrine rather than a metaphysical one. Others have insisted on the metaphysical character of transcendental idealism. Within these debates, Kant's rejection ofontology(of the (...) kind exemplified by Wolff and Baumgarten) has received comparatively little treatment, although it is often acknowledged. The present essay seeks to contribute to the secondary literature on Kant by offering an analysis of this claim and elaborating its consequences for transcendental idealism. This will take the form of a critical examination of transcendental idealism's supposedontological agnosticism—that is, its disavowal of any ontological claims. The overall conclusion is that Kant's rejection of ontology is deeply problematic, and to such an extent that it may be necessary to reconsider the possibilities of defending transcendental idealism as a purely epistemological, non-ontological doctrine. (shrink)

Past philosophical ideas about arts influence contemporary artistic practices. We still use traditional Idealist concepts, such as the autonomy of art or the subjective expression of the artist. At the same time, today_s art often attacks and abandons Idealist thinking. The author of this book analyses this relation between the Idealist conception of the arts including literature and present-day reality. The aim is to create a link between past and present artistic practices and theoretical, philosophical thinking. The author also (...) questions the Idealist notions of history and the relation between the theoretical, the aesthetic and the practical, and seeks new ways to deal with the relation between the past and the present. (shrink)

In his famous work on vagueness, Russell named “fallacy of verbalism” the fallacy that consists in mistaking the properties of words for the properties of things. In this paper, I examine two (clusters of) mainstream paraconsistent logical theories – the non-adjunctive and relevant approaches –, and show that, if they are given a strongly paraconsistent or dialetheic reading, the charge of committing the Russellian Fallacy can be raised against them in a sophisticated way, by appealing to the intuitive reading of (...) their underlying semantics. The meaning of “intuitive reading” is clarified by exploiting a well-established distinction between pure and applied semantics. If the proposed arguments go through, the dialetheist or strong paraconsistentist faces the following Dilemma: either she must withdraw her claim to have exhibited true contradictions in a metaphysically robust sense – therefore, inconsistent objects and/or states of affairs that make those contradictions true; or she has to give up realism on truth, and embrace some form of anti-realistic (idealistic, or broadly constructivist) metaphysics. Sticking to the second horn of the Dilemma, though, appears to be promising: it could lead to a collapse of the very distinction, commonly held in the literature, between a weak and a strong form of paraconsistency – and this could be a welcome result for a dialetheist. (shrink)

Romantic Organicism attempts to reassess the much maligned and misunderstood notion of organic unity. Following organicism from its crucial radicalisation in German Idealism, it shows how both Coleridge and Wordsworth developed some of their most profound ideas and poetry on its basis. Armstrong shows how the tenets and ideals of organicism - despite much criticism - remain an insistent, if ambivalent, backdrop for much of our current thought, including the work of Derrida amongst others.

This book aims at providing the answer to one question: what did Coleridge derive from Kant and the post-Kantians in his most productive intellectual period, i.e., from approximately the eighteen-twenties? The question has already been investigated by a number of scholars-Shawcross, Muirhead, Wellek, Winkelmann, Schrickx and Chinol, in chronological order. Upon their work my book is founded. -Book's Preface.

Many idealists have thought that realism raises epistemological problems. The worry is that, if it is possible for truths about ordinary objects to outstrip our experiences in the ways that realists typically suppose, we could never be justified in our beliefs about objects. Few contemporary theorists find this argument convincing; philosophers have offered a variety of responses to defend the epistemology of our object judgments under the assumption of realism. But in this paper, I offer a new type of epistemic (...) argument against realism which is immune to the standard responses in the literature. In addition to raising a challenge for realism, the epistemology of our object judgments has implications for how the idealist should develop her own positive metaphysical view. So in the second half of this paper, I discuss how the idealist should understand the dependence between objects and our experiences if she is to secure epistemic advantages over the realist. (shrink)

SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO I wrote a small book entitled Conceptual Idealism, which ultimately saw the light of print in 1973. In the wake of its appearance, a considerable number of reviews were published in the philosophical literature, and their perusal, as well as discussions with various colleagues, brought home to me how easy it is to misunderstand and misconstrue a position which, to its exponent, seems quite clear and straightforward. In due course, I have come to think (...) it useful to exploit the benefit of distant hindsight to try to restate the position more clearly and to try to safeguard it against various misunderstandings that have come to view. The present essay is the result of this endeavor. (shrink)

When interpreters orient Kant’s philosophy of time in relation to McTaggart’s distinction among different ways of characterizing a temporal order, they claim that he is best described as endorsing an A series position according to which there is a metaphysically privileged present that determines the past and the future. Whether Kant might also be understood as a proponent of the B series - according to which there is no privileged present, but rather time is comprised of relations of earlier than, (...) later than, and simultaneity - has not been discussed in the literature. I argue that, for Kant, the appearances can be described as an A series, while the phenomena are to be understood as a B series, neither of which is more fundamental than the other. Contra a common approach in the literature that neglects a metaphysical difference between appearances and phenomena, I argue Kant’s transcendental idealism about time is best understood in relation to his account of appearances and phenomena. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dramatization of Absolute Idealism:Gabriel Marcel and F. H. BradleyJoseph GamacheI. IntroductionThis paper consists of an observation, a suggestion, and an illustration. First, the observation: in the English-language literature on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, there is, so far as I have discovered, a lack of attention paid to the relationship between Marcel and the British philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).1 Why might be this be? I (...) speculate (this is not the suggestion previously advertised) that the following are possible reasons for this omission. First, Bradley's influence is neglected in favor of what some might regard as the more obvious influence of Josiah Royce (1855–1916). After all, Marcel wrote a series of articles on Royce early in his career that were subsequently published as a monograph and eventually translated into English as Royce's Metaphysics. Second, there is the confluence of narratives concerning Marcel's philosophical development and the dethronement of Bradley and of idealism by figures such as Russell and Moore. According to the former narrative, Marcel's idealist phase ends with the first part of the Metaphysical Journal (about 1915).2 Since Bradley is less widely read these days and is treated simply as one more (even if the chief) representative of British idealism, it is easy to infer that, when he shed his idealism, Marcel also shed any connection with Bradley.But all that I have achieved thus far is the articulation of two reasons why people interested in Marcel have not also been interested in Bradley. Are there any reasons to believe that Marcel was influenced by Bradley in a positive way? Here, we can do no better than to gather some selected texts. In his preface to the English translation of the Metaphysical Journal, Marcel writes: [End Page 17]Meditations on the implications of the word "with" and on metaphysical fruitfulness must in my opinion be counted among the most valuable contributions of the Metaphysical Journal. Later, in the collected writings published under the title Du Refus à l'invocation [translated into English as Creative Fidelity], I was to submit to similar analyses the relations, or rather the super-relations, implies by the French word "chez." Here, unless I am mistaken, I made use of the word super-relation for the first time. The vigorous criticism made by F. H. Bradley (in Appearance and Reality) of the current notion of relation—considered as a pure makeshift—is there extended, and I think I will be never be able to recognize too explicitly what I owe to that great thinker.(Marcel, Metaphysical Journal xii)In the foreword to his pre-Metaphysical Journal works published as Philosophical Fragments 1909–1914, Marcel writes of his early (idealist) phase:I find it hard to understand today how, during the years immediately following the reception of my aggregation degree, and even after having had the privilege of hearing Henri Bergson at the College de France, I could still feel the need to undertake a groping inquiry in such a rarefied atmosphere and with the help of tools borrowed from post-Kantian philosophy. Bradley—I had read Appearance and Reality—should have helped me shake off the strait jacket in which my thought was so tightly bound.(Marcel, Philosophical Fragments 23)In addition to these quotations, I might also add (a) that Marcel had wanted to write a thesis on Bradley, but that the idea had already been claimed by a fellow student (Marcel, Awakenings 74; "Autobiographical Essay" 18), and (b) the existence of a correspondence between Marcel and Bradley in the year 1920, which includes Marcel's sharing with Bradley his articles on Royce.3 Putting this all together, the following picture emerges. Bradley influenced Marcel as a student and in his idealist years, and beyond his idealist years, as the above references suggest.So much for the observation; now for the suggestion. I suggest that Marcel can be read as, in various places throughout his corpus, dramatizing certain Bradleyan themes, thereby drawing out the ontological weight—to use Marcel's phrase—of Bradley's philosophical positions. There is some evidence for this suggestion in Marcel's self-reflection in The Existential... (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature.

Many philosophers have been suspicious of any “transcendental argument”. In the literature concerned with arguments such as Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, or the “private language” or “other minds” argument, there have been frequent charges that such attempts are “impossible,” spurious, or, even more frequently, incomplete, that their success depends on some controversial philosophical position, such as verificationism. A recent addition to the latter kind of charge is that a successful TA must involve a commitment to some form of idealism. (...) This is, prima facie, quite a reasonable suspicion. Any argument about the necessary conditions of our belief can tell us something about objects in the world, it would seem, only if it can also be shown that the existence of such objects depends on our beliefs. Moreover, Kant, the originator of the modern form of antiskeptical TA’s, was also a famous idealist, adding to the suspicion. Bernard Williams has argued for this connection in recent articles on Wittgenstein and Shoemaker, and more recently, Ross Harrison, in “Transcendental Arguments and Idealism,” has tried to deny that there is such a connection and to argue that there can be a successful TA without any commitment to idealism. There may be some form of a TA that is nonidealistic, but an examination of Harrison’s case will reveal, I think, not only that he has not discovered such an argument, but that it is unlikely that there could be such a TA, except in trivial cases. Moreover, I also want to show that a consideration of his argument can be of help in discovering what kind of idealism is or is not involved in TA’s, especially in Kant, and what problems are apparent in that version of idealism. (shrink)

This work manages to present a complete and informative overview of Nicholas Rescher s philosphy. A prominent representative of contemporary pragmatism and of 20th century s thought at large, Rescher wrote an impressive amount of volumes and essays on a wide variety of philosophical topics. The present book purports to make his theses and theories accessible in one single volume. Moreover, it provides an apparatus of references to the relevant literature produced by Rescher s critics, and positions his work (...) in the wider setting of its links with various contemporary American and European philosophers. The mixture of pragmatism and idealism, typical of Rescher s stance, is carefully taken into account, along with his contributions to logic, philosophy of science, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, social and political philosophy.". (shrink)

The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies puts forth the question of the extent to which philosophers must go to school with the poets. It begins with a new interpretation of the famous Platonic quarrel with the poetic wisdom of Homer. It brings this question forward through the humanism of thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and the German Idealism of Hegel. It then treats the relation of philosophy and literature in four ways by considering philosophy as literature, (...) philosophy of literature, philosophy in literature, and philosophy and literature. In regard to the first of these, it discusses Jorge Luis Borges’s The Immortal, to the second James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to the third Carl Sandburg’s epic prose poem The People, Yes, and to the fourth, Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools. This work demonstrates that in an area of thought often dominated by fashionable doctrines of literary interpretation, the great works of literature and philosophy remain as permanent residents of our thought and imagination. (shrink)

On the question of whether the universe should be infinite or finite, there has been throughout the history of physics a struggle between materialism and idealism, between dialectics and metaphysics. Materialism asserts that the universe is infinite, while idealism advocates finitude. At every stage in the history of physics, these two philosophical lines have engaged in fierce struggle. Although developments in physics always demonstrate the failure of the finite universe doctrine, with every new advance in science the idealists (...) distort and take advantage of the latest results of physics to "prove" with varying sleights of hand that the universe is finite, serving the reactionary rule of the moribund exploiting classes. In the early part of this century after the rise of quantum theory and relativity theory, physics arrived at a new stage of development. After General Relativity was announced in 1916, a lot of people used it and similar theories of gravity to produce all sorts of models of the universe. The "finite universe" point of view became even more fashionable. Lenin pointed out that "That certain schools of the new physics have various dealings with Machism and other variants of modern idealism, is a fact not to be doubted for a moment." It is clear from reading all sorts of foreign literature that the schools of physics promoting a finite universe are linked up with all sorts of idealist philosophy, including theology. (shrink)

Short description: Part A : Philosophy, Literature, and Knowledge – Chapter I : Idealism and the Absolute – A. J. B. Hampton: “Herzen schlagen und doch bleibet die Rede zurück?” Philosophy, poetry, and Hölderlin’s development of language suffi cient to the Absolute – P. Sabot: L’absolu au miroir de la littérature. Versions de l’Hégélianisme’ chez Villiers de l’Isle Adam et chez Mallarmé – P. Gordon: Nietzsche’s Critique of the Kantian Absolute – Chapter II: Philosophy and Style – J.-P. (...) Larthomas: Le cas Kierkegaard (1813-1855) ou l’écriture comme dialectique de l’écoute – S. Hüsch: Style et signifi cation. Intériorité et communication indirecte chez Søren Kierkegaard – A. Milon: La question du style en philosophie: la grammaire non-style – C. Van Lerberghe: La question du style dans la phénoménologie asubjective de Jan Patocka – Chapter III: Poetry and Philosophy – J.-B. Dussert: Martin Heidegger en ses poèmes – C. de Roche: The poem and the monad: On the reception of Leibniz‘ monadology in Paul Celan’s poetics – M. de Jesus Cabral: Entre théâtre et philosophie : notes sur la poétique de Maurice Maeterlinck – Chapter IV : Literature, Philosophy, and (new) Mythology – A. Martinengo: La raison hors de soi. Herméneutique et mythe chez Paul Ricoeur – G. Boggio Marzet Tremoloso: Démythologisation comme acte mythopoïétique: le cas de Jason de Elisabeth Porquerol. – G. Coulter: Jean Baudrillard: The Literary / Poetic Philosopher – Chapter V : Literature and Ethics – J. Azoulai: L’Éthique de Spinoza dans Bouvard et Pécuchet: un vertige philosophique et littéraire – I. Vendrell: Can Literature be Moral Philosophy? A sceptical view on the Ethics of Literary Empathy – F. Picon: Envisager Todorov: Poétique, éthique et humanisme contemporain – Chapter VI : Philosophy and Textuality – E. Lecler: La littérature : la mort de la philosophie – J. A. Gosetti- Ferencei: Writing in Philosophy and the Literature and Philosophy of Writing (Plato, Mann, Blanchot) –W. Cristaudo: Bringing Back Character and Grammar: Freeing Literature from Excessive Reliance on Philosophy and Theory – C. Alfano: Parenthesising Cracks into the Ground of Philosophy: The Textuality of Stanley Cavell’s Philosophical Writing – Part B: Perspectives of a Dialogue between Philosophy and Literature: Philosophical Refl ections in Literary Creation – Chapter VII : Philosophical Dialogue and Literature – A. Baillot: Tieck et Solger, un dialogue philosophicolittéraire – V. Altachina: Le dialogue philosophique chez Diderot et chez Dostoïevski – Chapter XIII : Bergsonien Infl uences in Literature – C. Dewas: Bergson et Katzantzakis. Les limites du langage comme condition d’une métaphysique de la littérature – E. Pesenti Rossi: La philosophie à l’épreuve de la poésie : Bergson et Ungaretti – Chapter IX : Wittgenstein and Literature – G. Valdemarca: La revanche du sens commun : Wittgenstein, Musil et la chute de la certitude – A. Leaker: From the ‘numinous glow’ to ‘gut squalor’: Transcendence and the Ordinary in Wittgenstein and Don DeLillo’s Underworld – A. den Dulk: Wallace and Wittgenstein: Literature as Dialogue Concerning the Real World – Chapter X: Borges and Semprun: Writers and Philosophers – J.-F. Mattéi: Borges et la philosophie – T. Capmartin: Voyage au bout de la représentation dans Fictions: Quelques remarques ménardiennes sur Borges et le stoïcisme – V. Capdevielle- Hounieu: Jorge Semprún et l’hybridation du littéraire et du philosophique : pour une ‘fi ction essayistique’ – Chapter XI : Literary (Mis-) Readings of Philosophy – P. Lasarte: Misreadings of Arthur Schopenhauer in Sin Rumbo by Eugenio Cambaceres – S. Roldan: Qu’est-ce qui est fort comme la mort selon Maupassant? La détermination ultime d’Olivier Vertin vue sous l’angle de Schopenhauer – B. Nickel: L’infl uence de Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) sur la poésie concrète – Chapter XII: The Impact of Philosophy on 20th Century Literature and Poetry – B. Ertugrul: Walter Benjamin et Ingeborg Bachmann entre littérature et philosophie – J. Leclercq / M. Watthee-Delmotte: Michel Henry : pour un langage de la subjectivité. La pensée du roman Le Fils du roi – J. Hobus: “The happiness of the concentration camps”: Reading Imre Kertész’ Novel Fatelessness with Albert Camus’ Concept of the Absurd – S. Frogel: Man without God: Nietzsche, Kafka and Camus Der Herausgeber Sébastian Hüsch, Studium der Philosophie, Geschichte,. (shrink)

In January 1867 T.H. Green gave a series of Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute, which were then published, on the testimony of 'competent judges', in the third volume of his Collected Works edited by R.L. Nettleship. Green's family background ensured that he had strong interests in the history of Puritanism and the figure of Oliver Cromwell, and he was thoroughly immersed in many of the political and religious controversies of the later quarter of the (...) nineteenth century. Nevertheless, his assessment of the English Commonwealth as a fruit of the Reformation, rather than as a discrete transformation in political culture, has received relatively little attention in the massive literature devoted to Green's political philosophy. This essay assesses these lectures in order to show their importance for understanding in particular his analysis of freedom. It argues that without an understanding of his account of the origins of modern legal freedom born out of the English Revolution, analyses of Green's theory of freedom remain partial and incomplete. It does so by illustrating in detail the content of the lectures, the intellectual and historical debates in English philosophy and German theology that buttressed his arguments, by locating Green's Lectures within wider accounts of the character of English exceptionalism, and by attempting to examine the political context that helped to structure Green's analysis. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism offers a comprehensive, penetrating, and informative guide to what is regarded as the classical period of German philosophy. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling are all discussed in detail, together with a number of their contemporaries, such as Hölderlin and Schleiermacher, whose influence was considerable but whose work is less well known in the English-speaking world. The essays in the volume trace and explore the unifying themes of German Idealism, and discuss their relationship (...) to Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and the culture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. The result is an illuminating overview of a rich and complex philosophical movement, and will appeal to a wide range of readers in philosophy, German studies, theology, literature, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

"Kant, Kantianism and Idealism" presents an overview of German Idealism, the major movement in philosophy from the late 18th to the middle of the 19th Century. The period was dominated by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, whose work influenced not just philosophy, but also art, theology and politics. The volume covers not only these major figures but also their main followers and interpreters. These include Kant's younger contemporary Herder, his early critics such as Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon, and (...) his readers Schiller and Schlegel - who shaped much of the subsequent reception of Kant in art, literature and aesthetics - as well as Schopenhauer, whose unique appropriation and criticism of theories of cognition later had a decisive influence on Nietzsche. The "Young Hegelians" - such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss, whose writings would influence Engels and Marx - are also discussed. The influence of Kant and German Idealism also extended into France, shaping the thought of such figures as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon, whose work would prove decisive for subsequent philosophical, political, and economic thinking in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written (...) by any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)

Literature plays a relevant role in Hegel’s philosophical discourse. On the one hand, literary references are often interwoven with his speculative argumentation, on the other hand, the Aesthetics regards poetry as the highest form of artistic expression, for it is able to represent the different ways of human action and to bring up their hidden ideal presuppositions. The aim of this paper is to show how the concept of action is crucial to the interpretation of literary phenomena in the (...) Aesthetics, but assumes different configurations in relation to the historical transformation of the concept of subjectivity. To verify the specifically aesthetic import of concepts such as action and recognition, which originally belong to the ethical-political sphere, I will examine Hegel’s interpretation of the chivalric literature, which is present in various areas and with different functions in the structure of the Aesthetics, as a component of his theory of subjectivity. This topic has been little studied but offers an interesting perspective on some problematic points of Hegel’s theory: the controversial relation between the structural dimension of the concept of art and historical development of artistic forms, the apparently univocal paradigm of classic beauty, and the definition of artistic modernity. (shrink)

In this chapter, Robb Dunphy is concerned with the nature of G.E. Schulze's scepticism as he presents it in his 1792 work Aenesidemus, and with its relation to the metaphysical projects of Kant, Reinhold, and later German Idealists. After introducing Schulze's text, Dunphy turns to a recent interpretation offered by Jessica Berry, who claims that the extent to which Schulze endorsed a genuinely Pyrrhonian Scepticism has gone unacknowledged, both by his idealist contemporaries and by the majority of the secondary (...) class='Hi'>literature on the period. Berry suggests that this unacknowledged Pyrrhonism in Aenesidemus provides the resources for a more radical criticism of the German Idealists' scientific, systematic metaphysical ambitions, to which they remain fundamentally vulnerable. Despite agreeing that an exploration of Schulze's debt to Pyrrhonism represents a valuable addition to our understanding of his scepticism, in the latter parts of the chapter Dunphy suggests that the Berry's attribution of a Pyrrhonian Scepticism to Schulze should to some extent be rejected, and that such a scepticism is perhaps not quite as problematic for the projects of Kant and the German Idealists as she suggests. (shrink)

The literature on transcendental idealism is vast and controversy-ridden. Some interpreters view this puzzling doctrine as detracting from Kant’s real contribution—his theory of experience. Those who take the doctrine seriously debate whether or not appearances and things-in-themselves constitute two ontologically discrete worlds. Currently, the discussion centers around whether the appearance/thing-in-itself distinction should be read epistemologically, as referring to two different aspects of the same object, or as a metaphysical distinction, since Kant thinks of appearances as non-ultimate reality. The (...) essays in this engaging volume fill a lacuna in the existing literature by addressing Kant’s .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:94. THE HUME LITERATURE FOR 1976 A fairly complete coverage of the recent Hume literature up to 1970 is available in my booklet, A Hume Bibliography from 1930 (York, 1971; obtainable direct from the author, post free, on payment of jé 1.25 within the U.K., c^3.00 or $8.00 elsewhere). Coverage up to 1975 is obtained when this is combined with the addenda and supplement published in the (...) Philosophical Quarterly in January 1976. What follows here will bring the record up to the end of 1976. Readers are invited to inform me of any omissions. The intention is to maintain a complete bibliographical record of critical work on Hume, by the regular publication in Hume Studies of an annual bibliography covering the previous year. In a forthcoming book (Edinburgh University Press; probable title, Fifty Years of Hume Scholarship) I have tried to provide all that the student of Hume needs as a guide to the secondary literature: an introductory essay on the development of Hume scholarship up to the present time, thorough coverage of the Hume literature from 1925 to 19 76, with indexing by author, language, and subject, and also a list of the main writings on Hume earlier this century. The following abbreviations of journal titles have been used: APQ American Philosophical Quarterly JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JHP Journal of the History of Philosophy JP Journal of Philosophy PAS Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society PB Philosophical Books PBA Proceedings of the British Academy PQ Philosophical Quarterly PR Philosophical Review RIP Revue Internationale de Philosophie 95. RM Review of Metaphysics TLS Times Literary Supplement Other abbreviations should be obvious. ALEJANDRO, de, J. M. 'El atomismo gnoseologico de David Hume (1711-1776)', Pensamiento 32, 383-403. ANDERSON, R. F. 'The Location, Extension, Shape, and Size of Hume's Perceptions', in Livingston & King (see below), 153-71. ARDAL, P. S. 'Some Implications of the Virtue of Reasonableness in Hume's Treatise', in Livingston & King, 91-106. ARDLEY, G. 'Hume's Common Sense Critics', RIP 30, 104-2 5. ATKINSON, R. F. 'Hume on the Standard of Morals', in Merrill & Shahan (see below), 25-44. BAGOLINI, L. David Hume e Adam Smith: Elementi per una ricerca di filosofia giuridica e politica. Bologna. BAYLES, M. D. 'Hume on Blame and Excuse', Hume Studies 2, 17-35. BEANBLOSSOM, R. E. 1A New Foundation for Humean Scepticism1, Phil. Studies 29, 207-10. BEAUCHAMP, T. L. 'An Analysis of Hume's Essay "On Suicide"', RM 30, 73-95. BERfIAN, D. "David Hume on the 1641 Rebellion in Ireland', Studies: a Quarterly Review 65, 101-102. BIRO, J. I. 'Hume on Self-Identity and Memory", RM 30, 19-38. BJELKE, J. F. 'Wirklichkeitserkenntnis und Wirklichkeitsimagination bei Hume', Archiv für Geschichte der Phil. 58, 23-39. BOATRIGHT, J. R. 'Hume's Account of Moral Sentiment", RIP 30, 79-90. BOSSERT, P. J. "Hume and Husserl on Time and Time-Consciousness ", J. Br. Soc. Phenomenol. 7, 44-52. 96. BURNS, S. "The Humean Female", Dialogue 15, 415-2 4. [425-40.] BUTLER, R. J. ' Distinctiones Rationis, or the Cheshire Cat which left its smile behind it", PAS 76, 165-76. BUTLER, R. J. 'Hume's Impressions', in Royal Inst, of Phil. Lectures, Vol. 9, 122-36. CAPALDI, N. 'Hume's Theory of the Passions', in Livingston & King, 172-90. CHERRY, C. 'Nature, artifice and moral approbation", PAS 76, 265-82. COHEN, R. 'The Rationale of Hume's Literary Inquiries', in Merrill & Shahan, 97-115. COLVER, A. W. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion and PRICE, J. V. David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. Oxford. [PB_ 18 (1977), 49-54. ] COURTENAY, W. J. et al. Ockham, Descartes, and Hume: Self-Knowledge, Substance, and Causality. Madison, Wis. CONNON, R. W. 'Some Hume MS Alterations on a Copy of the Abstract', JHP 14, 353-6. DAVIDSON, D. 'Hume's cognitive theory of pride', JP- 73, 744-57. DAVIE, W. 'Hume's Catalog of Virtue and Vice', in Merrill & Shahan, 45-57. DERATHÉ, R. 'L'obligation politique selon Hume', RIP 30, 91-103. ESPOSITO, J. L. 'Hume and the Transcendental Idealists', Southern J. Phil. 14, 431-42. FALK, W. D. 'Hume on Is and Ought', Canadian J... (shrink)

A relation between Sartre's phenomenological ontology and the German idealist tradition is frequently assumed in the secondary literature on Sartre. The literature that confronts this question usually adopts a piecemeal approach, treating individual philosophers, usually Hegel, in the mode of comparison and contrast. This approach, though fruitful in a limited fashion, obscures the broader question of Sartre's relation to German idealism as a whole. This study attempts to place Sartre in the context of an internal debate within (...) idealist thought, as one player in an ongoing dialogue. Its task is the establishment of Sartre's phenomenological ontology in Being and Nothingness as essentially idealist in both form and content. ;This work proceeds primarily through interaction with primary texts, beginning with Sartre's early piece, Imagination: A Psychological Critique. From this book we abstract a critical methodology that we discover is ubiquitous in Sartre's early works. In particular, we examine the application of it to the idealists in Being and Nothingness, learning both its failures in terms of representational accuracy and its successes in advancing Sartre's argument. These discoveries lead us to explore the distinction Sartre draws between metaphysics and ontology, which is critical to understanding the nature of Sartre's entire project. Having clarified this distinction, we return our attention to the critical methodology, which displays both an intimate connection to, and important distinctions from, Hegel's dialectical logic. Notably, if Sartre's position is best understood as an ongoing 'moment' in the developing narrative of idealist thought, we conclude that the profound nature of Sartre's relation to Hegel is that of opposition. Sartre's opposition to Hegel in turn may be seen as analogous to the Kantian project of establishing intellectual space for ethics in the face of scientific rationalism. Sartre, I argue, reinstitutes Kant's "Copernican revolution" on the ontological level as a response to the necessitarianism issuing from Hegel's dialectical logic. This response intends to place the realm of ethics forever beyond the possibility of doubt by forbidding metaphysical speculation any functional relevance to human existence. To live as anything other than free moral agents is to live in bad faith. (shrink)

The tremendous advances of research into artificial intelligence as well as neuroscience made over the last two to three decades have given further support to a renewed interest into philosophical discussions of the mind-body problem. Especially the last decade has seen a revival of panpsychist and idealist considerations, often focused on solving philosophical puzzles like the socalled hard problem of consciousness.1–9 While a number of respectable philosophers advocate some sort of panpsychistic solution to the mind-body problem now, fewer advocate that (...) idealism can contribute substantially to the debate. Interest in idealism has nevertheless risen again, as can be seen also from recent overview articles and collections of works.10–14 The working hypothesis here is that a properly formulated idealism can not only provide an alternative view of the mind/matter gap, but that this new view will also shed light on open questions in our common scientific, i.e. materialist, world view. To investigate this possibility, idealism first of all needs a model for the integration of modern science which allows for a mathematically consistent reinterpretation of the physical world as a limiting case of a both material and non-material world, which would make the outcome of idealistic considerations accessible to scientific investigation. To develop such a model I will first try to explain what I mean when I speak of a ‘scientifically tenable’ idealism, including a formulation of the emanation problem which for idealism replaces the interaction problem, then give a very brief summary of the available elements of such a theory in the philosophical literature, before sketching out some ‘design questions’ which have to be answered upon the construction of such models, and finally put forward a first model for a scientifically tenable objective idealism. (shrink)