New Work on Hegel (II): Scepticism in Post-Kantian Philosophy

 

MARTIN BONDELI, JIŘÍ CHOTAŠ & KLAUS VIEWEG (eds) | Krankheit des Zeitalters oder heilsame Provokation? Skeptizismus in der nachkantischen Philosophie | Wilhelm Fink, 2016

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By Joris Spigt 

The edited volume under review here consists of 15 essays that cover the topic of scepticism in the works of Kant, Stäudlin, Schulze, Reinhold, Maimon, Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling, Jacobi and Hegel. This collection of essays has both widened and deepened my understanding of scepticism in the wake of Kant’s philosophy. As such, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in what is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating and multifaceted topics in classical German philosophy.

One of the central figures in the post-Kantian landscape is the self-avowed sceptic Gottlob Ernst Schulze. Because Schulze figures in 10 of the essays, his thought emerges as one of the guiding threads of the volume. With his criticism of Kant’s and Reinhold’s philosophy in his (anonymously published) Aenesidemus (1792), attacks on philosophy in Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie (1801), parody of Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy in ‘Aphorismen über das Absolute’ (1803), and, finally, thoughts on scepticism in ‘Die Hauptmomente der skeptischen Denkart über die menschliche Erkenntniß’ (1805), Schulze was the agent provocateur of his time, as Klaus Vieweg aptly describes him (p. 18). My review essay focuses on the volume’s treatment of different figures’ responses to Schulze’s Aenesidemus. In particular, I shall discuss the essays of Martin Bondeli, Silvan Imhof, and Daniel Breazeale on Reinhold, Maimon, and Fichte, respectively. My reflections on their essays seek to draw out an implicit issue within them: the lack of reflection on the adequacy and significance of the different responses to Schulze’s scepticism.

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“Kant and Cosmopolitanism” Reconsidered

 

PAULINE KLEINGELD | Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship | Cambridge University Press 2012

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By Robert Hanna

What is cosmopolitanism? Notoriously, there is no comprehensive, analytic definition of the term as it is used in either ordinary or specialised (say, legal, political, or scholarly) language, covering all actual and possible cases. It is variously taken to refer to globe-trotting sophistication; to nihilistic, rootless, world-wandering libertinism; to the general idea of ‘world citizenship’; to a single world-state with coercive power; to a tight federation of all nation-states, again with coercive power; or to a loose, semi-coercive international federation of nation-states and related global institutions concerned with peace-keeping, criminal justice, human rights, social justice, international money flow and investment, or world-trade, like the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the (plan for a) World Court of Human Rights, the World Bank, or the World Trade Organization.

Reply to Magrì and Frilli

 

ALFREDO FERRARIN | Il pensare e l’io. Hegel e la critica di Kant | Carocci Editore 2016

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By Alfredo Ferrarin

I am very grateful to Elisa Magrì and Guido Frilli for the time and scrupulous attention they devoted to my essay and for their criticisms. Before I discuss them let me put them into context.

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I have recently written two books, one on Kant (Ferrarin 2015) and one on Hegel (the book under discussion here).^[1] It was only as I was completing them that I realised something I had not thought out as part of the original plan. By the end of my Kant book, I realised that I was often trying to respond to Hegel’s critique of Kant. The traits of Kant’s idea of reason that surfaced with ever greater necessity in my mind gave voice to what I interpreted as Kant’s possible reply to what I began to identify as Hegel’s onesided reading, if not misunderstanding, of Kant.

As I wrote my Hegel book, while deploring that Hegel never took seriously the Doctrine of Method of the First Critique or even the Dialectic which he was one of the few (and first) to praise, I realised that Hegel tried to solve, or give a very different version of, some problems which I had isolated as internal to the Doctrine of Method itself.

Naturally, the two books are mutually independent and address different issues and audiences. Yet, if taken together, they can be portrayed as one complex and sustained argument on reason in Kant and Hegel. This may be why in their critique of my Hegel book both Elisa Magrì and Guido Frilli start out with the relation between Kant and Hegel.

Guido Frilli on Alfredo Ferrarin’s “Il pensare e l’io. Hegel e la critica di Kant”

 

ALFREDO FERRARIN | Il pensare e l’io. Hegel e la critica di Kant | Carocci Editore 2016

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By Guido Frilli

The core theoretical argument of Alfredo Ferrarin’s Il pensare e l’io is that the fundamental divergences between the Hegelian and the Kantian conceptions of reason can be appreciated only by considering an essential and often overlooked continuity. This continuity pertains to the ambivalent relationship between thought and the thinker; or, more properly, between reason as a universal force or transindividual power, and subjective or individual thinking as the sole ground upon which such a power can appear and know itself as such. According to Ferrarin, this continuity is one of shared problems more than of common solutions; but it is critical for grasping both Kant’s and Hegel’s standpoints on reason, as well as making better sense of their essential disagreements. For both, thinking exists only as embodied qua the thinking of an ‘I’, while at the same time it precedes and transcends subjective thinking. Reason is the self-production of truth; it cannot become my reason without corrupting itself. Nonetheless, in order to become self-conscious and at home in its world, reason’s activity must decline itself in the first person. In the biblical terms employed by Hegel, logos becomes flesh; and it becomes flesh as the conscious thinking of an ‘I’. Reason is thus the locus of an unresolved tension between the impersonal and spontaneous force of self-determination, and the activity of a conscious subjectivity this force must embody.