Eric Entrican Wilson (Emory University)
Am Anfang war die Tat: Fichte's Early Move Away From Representationalism
This paper explores an important connection between Fichte's 1793 "Review of Aenesidemus" and his 1794 Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. In the course of writing the former, Fichte realizes that it is theoretically unacceptable to take for granted the ability to have representations (or "ideas"). This ability must be explained in more basic terms. I argue that Fichte's call for such an explanation in 1793 is answered in the "Deduction of Representation" section of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre. This constitutes his decisive turn away from the dominant representationalist tradition in modern philosophy, and marks one of his most important contributions to German Idealism.
James Kreines (Yale University)
Hegel’s Critique of Pure Mechanism
Hegel's complaint about mechanistic explanation is not, as is commonly held, that it cannot account for the entire universe as a whole. Nearly the opposite is true. To suppose that mechanism alone is explanatory -- Hegel argues -- would be to dissolve everything into one single undifferentiated whole, leaving no way to grasp what it would be to explain anything in particular. This argument suggests that Hegel's broader philosophical project is an investigation of the status of specific explanatory "notions" -- and that this project can be understood neither in terms of the most familiar metaphysical interpretations, nor the most popular non-metaphysical alternatives.
Mason Richey (SUNY Binghamton)
Freedom, the Good, the Non-Identical: Schelling and Adorno
In this paper, I seek to outline briefly what I consider to be an overlooked affinity between Adorno's critique of reason (his reclamation of the nonidentical,) and Schelling's middle and late period works, whose uncovering of narcissistic reason, a reason with false claims to totality, prefigure what Adorno referred to as dialectic of Enlightenment. A central claim of this paper is that both Schelling and Adorno subordinate epistemology and ontology to ethics. Both are striving to conceptualize a thought of the good that does not require reference to the totalizing project of Hegel's transitive use of the concept.
Chair: Aaron Bunch (Loyola University Chicago)
Updated on 25 May 2013