In 1796, the lack of historicity in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre was one of the issues that provoked Friedrich Schlegel’s criticism of the Grundsatz tradition and paved the way for his early-romantic approach to philosophy. Schlegel argues that the critical development of Fichte’s approach demands its transcendental historization, i.e., a philosophical explanation of the temporal, evolutionary process whereby reason has reached Fichte’s self-conscious standpoint. The full understanding of this aspect of Schlegel’s break with Fichte demands a systematic discussion of a major, though still partially reconstructed, aspect of his thought during those years that preceded the new standpoint of the Vorlesungen über die Transzendentalphilosophie of 1800–1801: Schlegel’s critically historicized approach to philosophy. This paper reconstructs this path of Schlegel to early romanticism, and points to one of his virtually neglected sources: the early logical-historical thought of August Hülsen, between 1799 and 1800 a collaborator of Schlegel in the early-romantic journal Athenäum.

From the pragmatic point of view, cognition is an instrument for the cultivation of our interests, among which, interestingly enough, knowledge itself also figures. The cultivation of objective knowledge involves a complex trade-off between generality and security, between definiteness and reliability. Perfection with respect to these desiderata is in general unrealizable, and a compromise between achievability and ideal aspiration is as unavoidable here in cognition as it is elsewhere.

Kant’s account of moral feeling is continually disputed in the secondary literature. My goal is to focus on the Religion and make sense of moral feeling as it appears in this context. I argue that we can best understand moral feeling if we note its place in Kant’s concerns about the possibility of moral conversion. As Kant notes, if the new, morally upright man is of a different character than the man he used to be, then it remains unclear how the new man can properly bear the debts of his old self. To address this issue, we need the presupposition that a person is both continually conscious of her empirical, bodily identity and capable of experiencing a felt recognition of the moral law; without this presupposition, I argue that fair punishment and the just payment of evil debts is impossible.

When McTaggart puts Spinoza on his short list of philosophers who considered time unreal, he is falling in line with a reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of time advanced by contemporaneous British Idealists and by Hegel. The idealists understood that there is much at stake concerning the ontological status of Spinozistic time. If time is essential to motion then temporal idealism entails that nearly everything—apart from God conceived sub specie aeternitatis—is imaginary. I argue that although time is indeed ‘imaginary’—in a sense ‘no one doubts’ as Spinoza says—there is no good reason to infer that bodies, the infinite modes, and conatus are imaginary in the same sense. To avoid this conflation, we need to follow Spinoza (who follows Descartes) in carefully distinguishing between tempus and duratio. Duration is not only real; it has all the structure needed to ground Spinozistic motion, bodies and conatus.

Aristotle differentiates not just soul from body, but proximate from remote matter. Yet Aristotle can be easily misunderstood as holding that the body of the human being is essentially biological in nature, and that the human differs from the beast only in having an immaterial intellect. On the contrary, I show that for Aristotle even the form of embodiment in humans is different from the form of bestial embodiment, and that human embodiment cannot be adequately understood in the biological way appropriate for understanding bestial bodies. Rather, the form of embodiment proper to humans is habit.

Berkeley’s ‘esse is percipi’ has been criticized for implying epistemological solipsism, the main argument being that different minds cannot harbor numerically one and the same idea. Similarly, C. J. Boström, the dominating Swedish philosopher in the nineteenth century, was early scorned because his principle of esse est percipi allegedly contradicts the simultaneous claim that two spirits (God and a human, or two humans) can perceive the same thing under qualitatively different appearances. Whereas the criticism against Berkeley is here regarded as valid, it is argued that Boström successfully defended himself by employing a dual concept of meaning, resembling Frege’s Sinn and Bedeutung some thirty years later, and by postulating an ontology that permits human minds to share in the divine ideas that constitute reality.

Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is to reconstruct this from the “Letters,” which reject Fichte’s claim that the Wissenschaftslehre is an unrivalled system. I read Schelling as charging Fichte with misrepresenting a system’s livability or commensurability with our finitude. My historical aim is to provide a framework for understanding Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift, which argues that a system’s liveability depends on its incompleteness or limitation by our finitude. On my reading, Schelling is early and continually committed to systematicity within the bounds of human finitude.

According to a widespread view, Hegel holds that beauty cannot be found in the creatures and objects of the natural world, but is strictly limited to works of art. I argue in this paper that Hegel’s restriction of beauty to works of art is not as straightforward as it is often taken to be, by showing that the phenomenon of beauty has anthropological roots in Hegel. Juxtaposing the Lectures on Aesthetics with sections from Hegel’s Anthropology in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, I demonstrate that the living human individual has considerable aesthetic potential in Hegel’s view. According to the interpretation developed in the paper, Hegel holds that artistic beauty—at least in its classical form—is inspired by the beauty of the living human individual. This interpretation makes emerge a strong, ambitious conception of artistic beauty according to which beautiful art not only stands in continuity with human nature, but also makes normative claims pertaining to the living human individual.

In the history of interpretations of Hegel, how one reads the chapter on “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology of Spirit determines one’s whole perspective. In fact, Marx’s only comments on the Phenomenology concern this final chapter, taking it as the very “secret” of Hegel’s philosophy. But what is the secret hidden within the thicket of this impenetrable prose? My suggestion is that it turns on a very specific meaning of the “abolition of time” that Hegel describes in the very last paragraphs. But the meaning of this idea is not what Marx criticized in his last Manuscript of 1844, that is, it is not simply a form of idealism which abolishes the finitude of man. Rather this relationship to time accepts such finitude, making it the central axis upon which the possibility of freedom turns. In this paper, I will present a reading of “Absolute Knowing” that focuses on the meaning of overcoming time, and connect it to some thoughts on “disposable time” that Marx discusses in the Grundrisse.

This paper is about the uses made of Feuerbach’s position in Marxist hagiography as part of the process of the conceptual and politi­cal canonization of Marx.

In the past decade and a half, there has been a renewed interest in the philosophical disagreements between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. Entirely overlooked is the fourth volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, unpublished in the author’s lifetime, in which he asserts that Heidegger’s concept of Verfallenheit is the essential point at which their philosophies diverge. This paper re-examines the disagreements between Heidegger and Cassirer, in light of this crucial text. Two questions are considered: (1) What is Cassirer’s criticism of Verfallenheit? (2) In what sense is this matter the essential point of departure between their respective philosophies? I argue that, for Cassirer, the problem with the concept of Verfallenheit is that it undermines the possibility of transpersonal meaning and relegates cultural projects to inauthenticity.

I interpret Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art” in terms of his contemporaneous lectures on Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. I uncover several connections and similarities between the two works, which make possible a new reading of the artwork essay: namely, as an “ontodicy.” This term of Jean-Luc Nancy’s denotes the readiness with which Heidegger’s thinking on Being may be used to justify evil. I argue that Nancy’s term may be applied legitimately to the artwork essay also, i.e., that it can be read as a silent justification of evil.

This paper shows how the authority of the poet in certain of Hölderlin’s later hymns depends on the remembrance of the sacred word. In the last three strophes of his “As on a Holiday,” the holy appears as the Kantian sublime: the divine intellectually elevates the poets while its overwhelming power makes them aware of human limitations. The poets’ physical act of accepting the word enables them to come to speech and signifies acknowledgement of limitation. But the speaker’s illicit effort to enter the realm of the deities results in speechlessness. In poems “The Only One” and “Patmos” Jesus emerges as the mediator between the timeless realm of the gods and temporal world of humans. God’s word—articulated by the God incarnate—gives meaning to finite human existence. Through the commemorative inscription of the divine word, poets gain their voice and speak of human existence as being unto the departed gods.

“‘[C]onscience,’” Nietzsche suggests early in Essay Two of On the Genealogy of Morals, “has a long history and variety of forms behind it” (II.3). Glossing over the explicit equivocity and irony of such statements, most commentators presume that the primary ambition of GM is to reconstruct the emergence and in so doing denaturalize and denounce the reign of conscience, which is treated as equivalent to both bad conscience and slave morality. Such presumption has obscured the central claims, operations, and stakes of the text, indeed of Nietzsche’s late work generally. Although they are intertwined, Nietzsche’s genealogy of conscience is textually, substantively, and strategically distinct from his genealogy of bad conscience, which in turn is involved in but distinct from his genealogy of slave morality. Textually, it is not until Essay Two, section four of On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche begins to ask after the emergence and psychosocial (“physiological”) consequences of bad conscience, while the genealogy of conscience proceeds from the first essay. Substantively, the three genealogies are concerned with manifestly disparate objects. Strategically, the addressees of the three genealogies are diverse, thus are their modes of address: genealogy cannot be reduced to a uniform method.

I argue that not only do Nietzsche and Camus share a sense of the world as fundamentally “strange,” but that each adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader as well. The various strategies of concealment, evasion, and silence they employ to assure their authorial strangeness are in the service of what Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would later call “the death of the author,” the disappearance of the author as authority over his or her own text. I argue further, however, that within this largely shared commitment, Nietzsche and Camus finally have quite different conceptions of the goals of their respective authorships and different manners of pursuing their deaths as authors. These contrasts leave us, finally, with distinct constructions of the author as stranger.

We do not always survive trauma. Elie Wiesel said of Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor who committed suicide at age sixty-seven, “[he] died at Auschwitz forty years earlier.” Though Levi physically survived the holocaust, psychically he did not. And yet, there are countless stories of incredible triumph over trauma. What makes survival possible? What seems to separate those who recover from those who do not—at least in part—is the capacity and opportunity for adaptation. Adaptation is the phenomenon whereby the subject is able to make use of one or more coping mechanisms in order to adjust to traumatic disruption. In this paper I argue that narrative is an especially useful tool for adapting to trauma because it addresses that which is so disruptive about trauma: the inability to process the traumatic event.

It strikes readers as dubious and pointless to compare Husserl and Deleuze straightforwardly on the level of philosophy or history of philosophy, for their thoughts seem to be wide apart or even opposed. Nevertheless, each of their thoughts draws a trajectory of development into one and the same kind of qualitative research, i.e., non-scientific, non-conceptual, fieldwork research trying to grasp the immediately pre-given picture of being (or becoming). In this paper, I call such a qualitative research transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies.’ We might well interpret the concept of ‘life-world’ in later Husserl as ‘region’ and, therefore, his life-world phenomenology as such ‘regional studies.’ Moreover, the concepts of ‘desire,’ ‘force,’ ‘intensity,’ ‘field of immanence’ in Deleuze serve very well to describe the workings of ‘region’ at a deeper level. Therefore, we observe that, under the heading of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies,’ disparate philosophical concepts in Husserl and Deleuze are meaningfully connected and networked. As a result, our exposition of transcendental-phenomenological ‘regional studies’ subsuming Husserl and Deleuze sheds not only new light on the philosophical dialogue between the two, but also introduces a radically new qualitative research on region, regional life and culture.