Pub Date : 2019-11-07DOI: 10.5840/idstudies2019115107
Miles Hentrup
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.
{"title":"Hegel's Logic as Presuppositionless Science","authors":"Miles Hentrup","doi":"10.5840/idstudies2019115107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/idstudies2019115107","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49279779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.5840/idstudies20191023105
Shuchen Xiang
This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relationship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, and Herder’s account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cassirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on finding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times.
{"title":"Organic Harmony and Ernst Cassirer’s Pluralism","authors":"Shuchen Xiang","doi":"10.5840/idstudies20191023105","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/idstudies20191023105","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relationship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, and Herder’s account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cassirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on finding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41693002","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.5840/idstudies2020220109
Luke Wadhams
This article examines Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of boredom. In traditional interpretations of this theory, boredom is understood to be a form of suffering and a key component in Schopenhauer’s argument for the claim that all life is suffering. While such interpretations are correct, I argue that they only capture a single feature of the experience that Schopenhauer describes. Schopenhauer also understands boredom to occasion a unique insight into the nature of reality, and boredom should thereby additionally be thought of as an epistemically significant emotion. To elucidate this epistemic quality, I interpret Schopenhauer’s concept of boredom as revealing the miserable condition of the world, where such revelation compels one to wonder about the nature of this condition, thereby founding a philosophical attitude. Through an evaluation of Schopenhauer’s conceptions of boredom and wonder, I demonstrate that Schopenhauer ultimately conceives boredom as crucial for the development of a philosophical attitude toward existence.
{"title":"Boredom and Wonder in the Work of Arthur Schopenhauer","authors":"Luke Wadhams","doi":"10.5840/idstudies2020220109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/idstudies2020220109","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of boredom. In traditional interpretations of this theory, boredom is understood to be a form of suffering and a key component in Schopenhauer’s argument for the claim that all life is suffering. While such interpretations are correct, I argue that they only capture a single feature of the experience that Schopenhauer describes. Schopenhauer also understands boredom to occasion a unique insight into the nature of reality, and boredom should thereby additionally be thought of as an epistemically significant emotion. To elucidate this epistemic quality, I interpret Schopenhauer’s concept of boredom as revealing the miserable condition of the world, where such revelation compels one to wonder about the nature of this condition, thereby founding a philosophical attitude. Through an evaluation of Schopenhauer’s conceptions of boredom and wonder, I demonstrate that Schopenhauer ultimately conceives boredom as crucial for the development of a philosophical attitude toward existence.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44674034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-01DOI: 10.5840/idstudies2020113108
S. F. Kislev
In British Hegelianism we find, forgotten, a weighty theory of individuality. This theory remains one of the most sustained attempts in the history of philosophy to analyze the individual, not in the social or psychological sense, but as a logical-metaphysical category. The Idealist conceptualization of the individual is bound with their unconventional theory of universals, for they argued that any individual is a “concrete universal,” and vice versa. This article reconstructs the British Idealist theory of individuality, highlighting its key insights: (a) the individual is not a simple unit, but a small system with interrelated parts; (b) the individual is not simply given, but is mediated by thought; (c) the individual is the conceptual glue holding the parts together and assigning them their respective places; (d) the conceptualization of the individual lies at the intersection of logic, aesthetics and systems theory.
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Pub Date : 2019-10-22DOI: 10.5840/idstudies20191016104
Fiacha D. Heneghan
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.
{"title":"Are the Frühromantiker Platonists?","authors":"Fiacha D. Heneghan","doi":"10.5840/idstudies20191016104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/idstudies20191016104","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46926516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-12DOI: 10.5840/IDSTUDIES201989100
J. L. Serrano, Noa Shein
This paper proposes a reassessment of Hegel’s critical reading of Spinoza and of the charge of acosmism, for which this reading is known. We argue that this charge is actually the consequence of a more fundamental criticism, namely Spinoza’s presumable inability to conceive the unity of the finite and the infinite. According to Hegel, the infinite and the finite remain two poles apart in Spinoza’s metaphysics, which thus fails to be a true monism, insofar as it contains an irreducible duality. Against this reading, we argue that Spinoza’s conception of the causal co-determination of finite modes entails the acknowledgment of their essentially infinite nature. The study of this particular instance of coincidentia oppositorum enables to counter some of Hegel’s criticisms as well as to illuminate a fairly unexplored aspect of Spinoza’s substance monism.
{"title":"The Coincidence of the Finite and the Infinite in Spinoza and Hegel","authors":"J. L. Serrano, Noa Shein","doi":"10.5840/IDSTUDIES201989100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/IDSTUDIES201989100","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a reassessment of Hegel’s critical reading of Spinoza and of the charge of acosmism, for which this reading is known. We argue that this charge is actually the consequence of a more fundamental criticism, namely Spinoza’s presumable inability to conceive the unity of the finite and the infinite. According to Hegel, the infinite and the finite remain two poles apart in Spinoza’s metaphysics, which thus fails to be a true monism, insofar as it contains an irreducible duality. Against this reading, we argue that Spinoza’s conception of the causal co-determination of finite modes entails the acknowledgment of their essentially infinite nature. The study of this particular instance of coincidentia oppositorum enables to counter some of Hegel’s criticisms as well as to illuminate a fairly unexplored aspect of Spinoza’s substance monism.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44953825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-12DOI: 10.5840/IDSTUDIES201971897
Christopher P. Noble
Leibniz standardly associates “mechanism” with extended material bodies and their aggregates. In this paper, I identify and analyze a further distinct sense of “mechanism” in Leibniz that extends, by analogy, beyond the domain of material bodies and applies to the operations of immaterial substances such as the monads that serve, for Leibniz, as the metaphysical foundations of physical reality. I argue that in this sense, Leibniz understands “mechanism” as an intelligible process that is capable of providing a sufficient reason for a series of changes. I then apply these findings to enrich our understanding of Leibniz’s well-known mill argument in Monadology ¶17: although material machines and mechanisms cannot produce perceptions, the perceptual activity of immaterial monads is to be understood as “mechanical” according to this analogical sense.
{"title":"Immaterial Mechanism in the Mature Leibniz","authors":"Christopher P. Noble","doi":"10.5840/IDSTUDIES201971897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/IDSTUDIES201971897","url":null,"abstract":"Leibniz standardly associates “mechanism” with extended material bodies and their aggregates. In this paper, I identify and analyze a further distinct sense of “mechanism” in Leibniz that extends, by analogy, beyond the domain of material bodies and applies to the operations of immaterial substances such as the monads that serve, for Leibniz, as the metaphysical foundations of physical reality. I argue that in this sense, Leibniz understands “mechanism” as an intelligible process that is capable of providing a sufficient reason for a series of changes. I then apply these findings to enrich our understanding of Leibniz’s well-known mill argument in Monadology ¶17: although material machines and mechanisms cannot produce perceptions, the perceptual activity of immaterial monads is to be understood as “mechanical” according to this analogical sense.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48103835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-22DOI: 10.5840/IDSTUDIES2019820102
Dylan Shaul
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.
{"title":"Adorno on Kierkegaard on Love for the Dead","authors":"Dylan Shaul","doi":"10.5840/IDSTUDIES2019820102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/IDSTUDIES2019820102","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41582735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-21DOI: 10.5840/IDSTUDIES2019816101
N. Whitman
In the history of philosophy, two standard critiques of the reality of modes in Spinoza’s philosophy come from Pierre Bayle and Georg Wilhelm Hegel. Both philosophers in some way assume that attributes and relations among modes constitute a shared reality in which modes participate. As a result, they assert that Spinoza’s monism leads either to an over-identification of God with contingent modes or to a limited God. In this paper, I will show how attributes and relations among modes in Spinoza’s work simply explain an active modal reality; modes do not depend upon or participate in ideal relations and attributes for their existence. The result is that in Spinoza’s philosophy attributes must be seen as unreal and modal reality must be understood as primary.
{"title":"The Reality of Modes in Spinoza’s Philosophy","authors":"N. Whitman","doi":"10.5840/IDSTUDIES2019816101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/IDSTUDIES2019816101","url":null,"abstract":"In the history of philosophy, two standard critiques of the reality of modes in Spinoza’s philosophy come from Pierre Bayle and Georg Wilhelm Hegel. Both philosophers in some way assume that attributes and relations among modes constitute a shared reality in which modes participate. As a result, they assert that Spinoza’s monism leads either to an over-identification of God with contingent modes or to a limited God. In this paper, I will show how attributes and relations among modes in Spinoza’s work simply explain an active modal reality; modes do not depend upon or participate in ideal relations and attributes for their existence. The result is that in Spinoza’s philosophy attributes must be seen as unreal and modal reality must be understood as primary.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43752481","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-08-08DOI: 10.5840/IDSTUDIES20198699
Marco Stango
The paper presents a Peircean criticism of Wittgenstein’s views on death. By exploring the notion of ‘limit’ central to both Wittgenstein and Peirce, the paper claims that a Peircean pragmatic notion of death can retain the advantages of Wittgenstein’s ‘limit’ notion of death without incurring the shortcomings of the latter, which I identify with semantic and metaphysical externality. I conclude by sketching out some consequences of the Peircean view for a metaphysics of death.
{"title":"Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Death","authors":"Marco Stango","doi":"10.5840/IDSTUDIES20198699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5840/IDSTUDIES20198699","url":null,"abstract":"The paper presents a Peircean criticism of Wittgenstein’s views on death. By exploring the notion of ‘limit’ central to both Wittgenstein and Peirce, the paper claims that a Peircean pragmatic notion of death can retain the advantages of Wittgenstein’s ‘limit’ notion of death without incurring the shortcomings of the latter, which I identify with semantic and metaphysical externality. I conclude by sketching out some consequences of the Peircean view for a metaphysics of death.","PeriodicalId":41879,"journal":{"name":"IDEALISTIC STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2019-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43351567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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