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Displaying: 1-5 of 5 documents


1. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 49 > Issue: 2
Michael P. Berman The Natural Complexes of Encounters
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The totalizing and absolutizing tendencies of metaphysics can undermine our essential ethical relationality. Is there a metaphysics that is robust enough and conducive to preserving this intuition? In answer, this paper will draw upon Martin Buber and Justus Buchler. Buber’s seminal work, I and Thou (1923), explores the nature of the ethical encounter. Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (1966) develops a general ontology, which can be described as an ordinal metaphysics. Encounters are thoroughly relational for Buber. Buchler’s metaphysics is also thoroughly relational. A phenomenological approach to relationality establishes the medium for this dialogue and provides a common ground for these texts. Not only is there a way to account for Buber’s encounter, but there is also an inherent moral understanding in Buchler’s metaphysics that preserves and is conducive to ethical relationality. Buchler’s metaphysics avoids the totalizing and absolutizing tendencies derided by Buber, while simultaneously promotes a version of the encounter.
2. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 49 > Issue: 2
Fiacha D. Heneghan Are the Frühromantiker Platonists?
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How to classify the artistic and philosophical movement of Early German Romanticism (die Frühromantik) remains a topic of ongoing disagreement. I consider the views of two of the leading interpreters—Frederick Beiser and Manfred Frank—and argue that the latter’s are closer to the truth. Beiser, however, has noticed a lacuna in the literature surrounding the metaphysics and epistemology of the Romantics, namely their debt to an ascendant Plato during their intellectual development. This is right, but Beiser’s idealist reading of the Romantics leans heavily on Platonic sources that are fundamentally incompatible with a consistent anti-foundationalist strain in Romantic thought. I argue that it is unlikely that Plato influenced the Romantics in the way Beiser suggests.
3. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 49 > Issue: 2
Miles Hentrup Hegel's Logic as Presuppositionless Science
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In this article, I offer a critical interpretation of Hegel’s claims regarding the presuppositionless status of the Logic. Commentators have been divided as to whether the Logic actually achieves the status of presuppositionless science, disagreeing as to whether the Logic succeeds in making an unmediated beginning. I argue, however, that this understanding of presuppositionless science is misguided, as it reflects a spurious conception of immediacy that Hegel criticizes as false. Contextualizing Hegel’s remarks in light of his broader approach to the problem of beginning, I contend that Hegel’s Logic is presuppositionless not in the sense that it satisfies a formal epistemological demand to begin free from all mediation, but in that its self-mediating structure facilitates an immanent deduction of the categories.
4. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 49 > Issue: 2
Daniel Rueda Garrido Krause, Spanish Krausism, and Philosophy of Action
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Krausists followed a dialectical method in all their activities. It is an action plan in which theory and practice are established on a continuum. Since it summarizes all human activity, this dialectic implies a philosophy of action. The originality of this article lies precisely in offering an account of the philosophy of action implicit in the work of Krause, which has never before been made explicit. Therefore, the goal of this article is, on the one hand, to isolate this dialectic in the texts of the Spanish Krausists, and, on the other hand, to demonstrate the traditional affirmation about the practical meaning of Krause’s philosophy, as shown in its Spanish version. This practical orientation of his thought was channelled through several disciplines and, especially, through the modern pedagogy known as active education. Throughout the article, I also show how to relate Krause’s philosophy to contemporary philosophical debates.
5. Idealistic Studies: Volume > 49 > Issue: 2
Dylan Shaul Adorno on Kierkegaard on Love for the Dead: Mourning and Melancholia
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This article employs Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to clarify Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard. Adorno finds in Kierkegaard’s view of love for the dead both the consummate reified fetish of our instrumentalizing exchange society, and the only unmutilated relation left to us in our otherwise thoroughly damaged lives. Adorno’s negative dialectics emerges as the melancholy science resulting from a disfigured mourning’s present impossibility, upholding a material moral motive rooted in the unmournability of historical catastrophe. Yet this very melancholia also proves to be the last unlikely refuge of hope—in a Kierkegaardian sense—for a future redemption.