Cover of Idealistic Studies
Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-20 of 1166 documents


articles
1. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Kyle J. Barbour The Hegelian Heritage of Bradley’s Degrees of Truth and Reality
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this essay, I argue that F.H. Bradley’s controversial theory of “degrees of truth and reality” is the logical development of Hegel’s own theory of truth when it is placed within the metaphysical system of the Science of Logic. Despite Bradley’s own claim that with regards to the theory of degrees of truth and reality he is indebted even more than anywhere else to Hegel, this connection has been little examined in the secondary literature. Through a careful examination of both Bradley’s works and the structure of Hegel’s logic, it will become clear that Bradley’s development of the theory is the only logical conclusion that the consistent Hegelian can make. This essay has clear ramifications for our understanding of Bradley’s philosophy and, through uncovering the logical connections that led Bradley to develop the theory, I reveal an important implication of Hegel’s thought that has been entirely overlooked.
2. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Paul T. Wilford, Samuel A. Stoner Arendt’s Kantian Existentialism and the Political Significance of Jesus of Nazareth
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Despite her emphasis on politics, Hannah Arendt’s account of the existential grounds of action in The Human Condition culminates in a discussion of Jesus of Nazareth that emphasizes the significance of forgiveness for grasping the radicality of human freedom. This essay investigates Jesus’s role in Arendt’s thought by excavating and explicating the premises that undergird her account of Jesus’s political significance. It argues that Arendt’s innovative approach to politics is complemented by a comparably innovative conception of human agency and shows how Arendt’s defense of the autonomy of the political rests on a novel metaphysics of action—a ‘Kantian existentialism’—that underlies and explains her account of Jesus’s political significance.
3. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Andree Hahmann Hegel’s Return to Leibniz? The Fate of Rationalist Ontology after Kant
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This paper examines the development of the modern concept of substance from Leibniz to Hegel. I will focus primarily on the problem of the inner and outer nature of substance. I will show that if one considers Hegel’s discussion of substance against the background of the controversy between Leibniz and Kant about the inner and outer nature of substance, it becomes clear that for Hegel both Leibniz and Kant grasped the whole concept of substance only partially and in its abstract moments. This is because they both concentrate on one aspect of substance and absolutize it. Hegel, on the other hand, not only overcomes the fundamental difference between the inner and outer of substance, but also develops the connection between the different moments of substance, causality and interaction from the rationalist concept of substance itself.
book review essay
4. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Thomas J. Cantone On the Purpose of Purposiveness: Reading Ido Geiger’s Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
book reviews
5. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Michael J. Monahan Biko Mandela Gray and Ryan J. Johnson. Phenomenology of Black Spirit
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
6. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 3
Kelly Swope Timothy L. Brownlee. Recognition and the Self in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
7. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 2
Emmanuel Chaput Madness, Habit and the Genius: On Hegel’s Theory of Embodiment
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this paper, I explore Hegel’s concept of freedom as self-liberation. I consider the struggle between the soul and the body within Hegel’s Anthropology as an example of how conflict can act as a condition for asserting one’s freedom through self-improvement or Bildung. In this regard, there are reminiscent aspects of the famous ‘Lordship and Bondage’ dialectic within Hegel’s treatment of the body-soul relation. If the initial dominion of nature over the soul can be described as madness for Hegel, habit constitutes the mean through which spirit acquires its freedom.
8. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 2
Seyed Masoud Hosseini Fichte’s Contribution to German Aesthetics
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In aesthetics/philosophy of art, Fichte did not produce works as great as Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment or Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. As a result, it was long believed that he had no role to play in the aesthetics of German idealism. Nevertheless, there are a few works in which we can identify the materials for developing an innovative philosophy of art. In this article, it is argued that Fichte takes two fundamental steps in aesthetics: 1) by transferring the weight of the discussion of aesthetics to the philosophy of artistic creation, he makes, as it were, a Copernican revolution in aesthetics and thus transforms the aesthetics of taste into a philosophy of art based on the creative spirit; 2) he raises the status of aesthetics (in fact, the aesthetic sense) to the level of “a (or the) condition for the possibility of philosophy.”
9. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 2
Norman Schultz The Fear of Relativism: Dilthey’s Theory of Worldviews between Historicism and Ahistoricity
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The central thesis of this article posits that Dilthey’s theory of worldviews initially leans towards historical relativism but ultimately reverts to an unsuccessful ahistorical solution involving the classification of universal types of worldviews. To substantiate this thesis, I will elucidate how Dilthey’s position emerged amidst the intellectual conflicts of materialism, Neo-Kantianism, and its relationship to historicism. Focusing on Dilthey’s seminal work, ‘The Types of Worldview’ (1911), I will explore how, in response to the constraints of his era and a prevailing fear of relativism, Dilthey ultimately adopts an ahistoricist approach, as exemplified in his brief exchange with Husserl. In conclusion, this article contends that Dilthey’s hermeneutics represents a partial foray into a genuinely historicist philosophy but falls short of fully justifying historical, objective knowledge.
10. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 2
Ligeng Zhang Does Truth Have Degrees? Bradley’s Doctrine of Degrees of Truth
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
What is the nature of truth? This question has been answered by philosophers in quite different ways, while F. H. Bradley asserts that truths have degrees and that no proposition can be stated to be simply true or false. In this paper, I briefly illustrate what he calls the doctrine of degrees of truth and try to address the problems it entails. I first explain what he means by truth and error/falsehood (he does not make a clear distinction between the two terms); then, I concentrate on his criticisms of three theories of truth, followed by a discussion of his own identity theory of truth. I will be focusing on his doctrine of the degrees of truth and highlight its difficulties. I show that his theory faces some insurmountable difficulties, and it should be motivated by a particular form of monism that he insisted on, saying existence monism.
articles
11. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1
Joshua M. Hall Schiller’s Dancing Vanguard: From Grace and Dignity to Utopian Freedom
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Against caricatures of the poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller as an unoriginal popularizer of Kant, or a forerunner of totalitarianism, Frederick Beiser reinterprets him as an innovative, classical republican, broadening his analysis to include Schiller’s poetry, plays, and essays not widely available in English translation, such as the remarkable essay, “On Grace and Dignity.” In that spirit, the present article argues that the latter text, misperceived by Anglophone critics as self-contradictory, is better understood as centering on gender and dance. In brief, grace is a virtuous power of beautiful gestures associated with women, while dignity is a power of sublime gestures associated with men, and the improvised combination thereof is a divinely androgynous power of gesture that I term “stateliness,” in a three-step choreography of aesthetic education.
12. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1
Peter Luba Rancière’s American Heritage: Transitory Concepts and Gestural Pragmatism
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The main aim of the article is to elucidate and trace Jacques Rancière’s American pragmatic heritage. This is exemplified by several (anti)conceptual methods of thinking that the French theorist shares with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. The article examines their shared notions of the symbolic order, transitoriness of concepts, and subjectivization as a way of democratic empowerment of an individual. These three key ideas are then illustrated in the interpreta-tive praxis with Cy Twombly’s anti-conceptual style of painting and the fluid poetry of Frank O’Hara. The conclusion leads to a synthesis of all of these neo-pragmatic approaches into an innovative way of perceiving art and life—through the minute gestures and movements of thought, which are considered by all these thinkers to be more substantial than the substantive concepts themselves.
13. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1
Dylan Shaul Plato and Descartes in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity: Teaching the Good and the Infinite
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This article investigates Levinas’s readings of Plato and Descartes in Totality and Infinity, in relation to the question of teaching. Levinas identifies Plato’s Form of the Good and Descartes’s idea of the infinite as two models for his own conception of the Other. Yet while Levinas lauds Descartes’s theory of teaching, he is highly critical of Plato’s. Plato’s theory of teaching as recollection or maieutics is judged by Levinas to display merely the circular return of the Same to its own interiority. In contrast, the Cartesian God supplies the idea of the infinite to a subject incapable of generating it for itself, offering an account of teaching that respects the Other’s transcendent exteriority. I nonetheless argue for the possibility of a rapprochement between Levinas and Plato with regard to teaching. Ultimately, this serves to bolster Levinas’s own theory of teaching, for which both Plato and Descartes can rightly serve as fitting predecessors.
14. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1
Amir Yaretzky Schelling and the Priority of Philosophy to Art
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In his early writings up unto his so-called “middle period” Schelling treats art as having a crucial role with respect to philosophy. Yet there is no consensus in the secondary literature as to the nature of this role, and the extent to which Schelling changed his mind on the subject. The paper will defend the claim that Schelling holds consistently, from his early texts to the Philosophy of Art, that philosophy is in some sense prior to art while essentially dependent on it. The paper will explore the development of this position from various perspectives. This will shed light on Schelling’s view on both art and philosophy and his view that in the future the two will merge.
book review
15. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 53 > Issue: 1
Khafiz Kerimov The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History, by Michael Rosen
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
articles
16. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 3
Tal Meir Giladi Hegel on International Recognition
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Scholars have recently argued that Hegel posited international recognition as a necessary feature of international relations. My main effort in this article is to disprove this point. Specifically, I show that since Hegel rejected the notion of an international legal system, he must hold that international recognition depends on the arbitrary will of individual states. To pinpoint Hegel’s position, I offer a close reading of Hegel’s intricate formulations from the final paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right—formulations that are easy to quote out of context just as they are transparent when considered in due context.
17. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 3
Bennett Gilbert Two and One-Half Arguments for Idealism
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
John Foster, an Oxford analytical philosopher, and Borden Parker Bowne, the founder of “Boston Personalism” at the turn of the twentieth century both presented unique arguments for idealism that are deeply different from one another. Because neither is now well known, this paper lays out their reasoning as carefully and as clearly as possible, finding Bowne’s case for personalist idealism to be the stronger of the two in terms of ontology. But the inquiry is framed on the problems of the moral affordances of ontology and of the need of moral philosophy for grounding in ontology. Although this is a very large area, a partial conclusion—the “half argument” of the title—is drawn for further development.
18. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 3
Georg Oswald Kant, Schelling, and Hegel on How to Conceive Matter from a Metaphysical Point of View
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Kant, Schelling, and Hegel research has frequently highlighted differences when considering their three respective concepts of philoso-phy. Especially with regard to natural philosophy, there seems to be little common ground between them. In my paper, however, I want to revise this perspective, picking up on what brings them together. Taking the concept of matter as my primary example, I will argue that neither Kant nor Schelling nor Hegel are interested in conceiving of nature from the viewpoint of empirical observation and as independent of the subject. Rather, their respective philosophical inquiries into nature’s first prin-ciples hinge on critical examinations of reason, providing all three with the conceptual resources to address nature from a metaphysical point of view that is ultimately bound up with rational beings.
19. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 3
Alexander Sattar Positive Aesthetic Pleasure in Early Schopenhauer: Two Kantian Accounts
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Schopenhauer is widely held to accommodate no positive aesthetic pleasure. While this may be the case in his mature oeuvre overall, where he insists on the negative character of all gratification, I reconstruct two early accounts of such pleasure in his manuscripts, both of which are a direct result of Schopenhauer’s engagement with Kant’s first and third Critiques. To do so, I analyze his so-called metaphysics of the ‘better consciousness’ and his transition from it to the metaphysics of will (roughly 1811–14). The first account turns out to be an almost literal adoption of Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience as revealing the supersensible character of nature and the cognizing subject. Likewise, Schopenhauer’s second account is a version of the CJ theory of the free interplay of cognitive faculties. These accounts have been underappreciated in Schopenhauer scholarship, but recognizing their importance for the development of his philosophy is essential for gaining a fuller picture of his aesthetics.
book reviews
20. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 52 > Issue: 3
Juan Rivera Castro Bernardo Kastrup: Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics: The Key to Understanding How It Solves the Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Paradoxes of Quantum Mechanics
view |  rights & permissions | cited by