The Absolute Idealism that arose in the 1790s is often seen as an attempt to combine elements of Fichte and Spinoza in order to overcome the various dualisms that lie at the heart of Kant’s Critical Idealism. What is less recognized is that a peculiar form of skepticism also emerged from a commitment to Spinozistic rationalism, and in this paper I explore how both Salomon Maimon and Novalis can be fruitfully seen as apostate rationalists, who are led to a distinctive skeptical position by way of Spinoza.

This paper seeks to elucidate the nature and import of the imagination as Spinoza discusses it in his Ethics. This is an attempt to go beyond the apparently predominant negative tone that seems to permeate Spinoza’s discussion of the imagination as passivity and as epistemic stage that needs to be overcome. As such the focused goal of this present inquiry is to unravel the ways in which the imagination and passivity play a positive role in Spinoza’s epistemology and ethics. This other angle of approaching the topics of imagination and passivity, which have not taken center stage in mainstream Spinoza scholarship, is primarily made possible through Spinoza’s conception of the human condition as potentia agendi et patiendi. Beyond this, however, the paper also aims at emphasizing facets of Spinoza’s rationalism that are all too often overlooked—these include his interest in and positive evaluation of the body, senses, imagination, and the emotions.

For Kant and the German Idealists, self-consciousness is a central notion and can be used to explain the concept of moral responsibility. The paper begins with Sebastian Rödl’s notion of self-consciousness and explains how self-consciousness is related to freedom. A distinction between spontaneity and the causality of thought will be drawn. The first, spontaneity, is used to explain how self-consciousness allows human beings to have unmediated knowledge of their thoughts. The second, the causality of thought, is used to explain what forms of rational action and belief we find in human beings. It is argued that Rödl’s conception of spontaneity is sound, but that his conception of a causality of thought should be rejected. Based on Friedrich Schelling’s essay on freedom, the moral dimension of thought and talk will be introduced in order to derive a conception of moral responsibility.

This article addresses the question of whether Kantian moral formalism (Moralität) or Hegelian concrete ethical life (Sittlichkeit) is more relevant to the understanding of revolutionary changes in the moral attitudes of society. As Sittlichkeit conceives of morality as immanent to the existing conventions of society and Moralität involves principles that transcend any particular community, the former initially appears to be more conservative and the latter more potentially revolutionary. However, Moralität involves an individualized form of moral reasoning, whereas Hegelian modern Sittlichkeit involves a social form of moral reasoning based on relations of reciprocal recognition. It is argued here that Sittlichkeit so understood has the potential to overcome the limitations placed on the moral imagination (the ability to envisage contexts of suffering and repression) by abstract individualized reasoning.

This article considers three objections Immanuel Kant raises against Alexander Baumgarten’s plan for a science of aesthetics at different points in his career. Although Kant’s objections appear to be contradictory, this article argues that the contradiction is the result of an anachronism in the composition of Kant’s Logic. When the contradiction is resolved, it becomes apparent that Kant’s main reason for rejecting Baumgarten’s aesthetics during the pre-critical period—the lack of a priori principles for a critique of taste—loses its force after Kant develops a kind of critique that yields a priori principles and then discovers a priori principles of aesthetic judgment. Instead of withdrawing his objections, Kant finds different reasons to deny that aesthetics can be a science, based on the distinction between determining and reflective judgments.

In recent work, William Blattner claims that Heidegger is an empirical realist, but not a transcendental idealist. Blattner argues that, unlike Kant, Heidegger holds that thinking beyond human life warrants no judgment about nature’s existence. This poses two problems. One is interpretive: Blattner misreads Kant’s conception of the beyond-life as yielding the judgment that nature does not exist, for Kant shares Heidegger’s view that such a judgment must lack sense. Another is programmatic: Blattner overstates the gap between Kant’s and Heidegger’s positions, for both are ontological, not ontic. I solve these problems by showing that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein contains the core of Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism: the apriority of space and time. I conclude that Heidegger exemplifies Kant’s view that empirical realism just is transcendental idealism.

In this paper, I provide an account of what is frequently called Socrates’s “method,” and, more specifically, of what one is being asked by Socrates when he asks “what is x?” I argue that one is being asked to change one’s life, and to orient one’s life around the pursuit of wisdom. To answer Socrates’s question is to subject oneself to a process of extracting from oneself one’s accumulated prejudices; doing so requires one to abandon, not just ideas that have been demonstrated to be false, but the aspects of one’s life that have been built around those previous un-reflected upon ideas. This means that the cumulative commitments of adulthood—predicated as many of them often are on un-reflected upon presumptions—prevent initiation into philosophical life. The call to do philosophy is, for Socrates, the call to subject oneself to perpetual transformation, limiting who is capable of its pursuit.