Challenges to German Idealism: Schelling, Fichte, and Kant
Author: Kyriaki Goudeli (Patras University, Greece)
Critic: Richard Findler(Slippery Rock University)
Critic: Jason Wirth (Oglethorpe University)
Chair: J. M. Fritzman (Lewis & Clark College)
German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses
Author: Michael Mack (Syracuse University)
Critic: Arthur Jacobson(Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law)
Critic: John McCumber(University of California, Los Angeles)
Chair: Aaron Bunch (Loyola University Chicago)
Jennifer Bates (University of Guelph)
"The Moral Chemist of theCorpus Mysticum: Why Some Version of Kant's Practical Postulates is Necessary, Even for Hegel"
In order to defend a functional notion of Kant's practical postulates against Hegel's attack in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I discuss these synthetic a priori practical judgments in terms of: Kant's differentiation between hoping and knowing, and between practical and theoretical thinking; I clarify their nature as "possible" by comparing them with the postulates of empirical experience and with mathematical postulates; I discuss their function in order to show they are not limited to monotheism; I conclude that the synthetic a priori practical judgment is moral imagination, and that Hegel's highest ethical act, forgiveness, cannot be thought without it.
Matthew C. Altman (Central Washington University)
"The Prescience of Fichte'sAnstoß: German Idealism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy"
Fichte's idealism is based on the notion that we cannot simply be held by some static truth independently of how we relate ourselves to it. However, for Fichte this self-determination is necessarily in tension with a limit -- anAnstoß or Aufforderung -- that resists rational incorporation. Hegel cites this as a sign of the Wissenschaftslehre's failure, but in light of recent criticisms of Hegelianism, Fichte's account of the self-alienation inherent to human subjectivity seems prescient. His treatment of the original limit on the I's activity provides an important historical touchstone for understanding our post-Nietzschean ambivalence toward the Hegelian project.
Michael Allen (Saint Louis University)
"Hegel Between Non-Domination and Expressive Freedom"
Frederick Neuhouser and Robert Brandom present original but divergent interpretation of Hegel on freedom, in terms of the ideas of non-domination and expressive freedom respectively. Both ideas are of social freedom realized through transformations mediated by norms. But otherwise it remains unclear how non-domination and expressive freedom are related. For Hegel, it would appear than expressive freedom is consistent with domination and indeed threatens the well-ordered republican regime of non-domination. I argue, however, that this is not ultimately a tenable position and that non-domination and expressive freedom are integrally related ideas.
Chair: Jeffrey A. Gauthier(University of Portland)
Updated on 25 May 2013