Is Obama a Kantian?

In his speech at his first state dinner honoring the prime minister of India, Obama approvingly quotes Kant: "For it's been said that 'the most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.' Mr. Prime Minister, today we worked to fulfill our duty --bring our countries closer together than ever before. Tonight, under the stars, we celebrate the spirit that will sustain our partnership -- the bonds of friendship between our people." Transcript here.

Maybe this is the influence of Rahm Emanuel, who happened to admire Hegel and "the nineteenth-century German thinkers" during his student days.

(Thanks to David Wood for the tip)

A Fichte Fugue

Exposition: Fichtestube, a Fichte themed restaurant.

Development: A new edition of Fichte's Attempt at at Critique of All Revelation is being edited by Allen Wood and expected sometime next year.

Recapitulation: Fichte TV.

The Philosopher's Guide to NYC

Here at TimeOut NY.

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself

I came across this Wallace Stevens video today. I'll refrain from making any connections between Stevens and romanticism or idealism.

Greatest Philosopher: Second Round

Vote here.

Update: Greatest 19th-Century Philosopher voting here.

Greatest Philosopher of the 20th-Century?

Vote here.

The Examined Life (Film)

Though not related to German Idealism, this new film might be of interest to some readers: The Examined Life. The film is by Astra Taylor, the director of the film Zizek!. Here is some info about the film.

Examined Life features, in order of appearance, Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbuam, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. Astra Taylor chronicles them in the streets of New York City, Chicago, in San Francisco's Mission District and in a London garbage dump amongst many others as they expound their thoughts on ethics, politics, cosmopolitanism, revolution, environmentalism, gender, disability and animal rights and the love of music in relation to philosophy.

Examined Life opens February 25, 2009 at the IFC Film Center in New York with special guest appearances by Cornel West and Astra Taylor.

Fichte's Proof that p

Fichte: P self-posits itself as p, therefore p.

More here, here, and here.

First Edition of Hegel's Phenomenology

This is a steal! Only $15,000 for a first edition of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I wonder if they will let me put it on layaway. Apparently there were only 750 copies originally published, so these are hard to come by. Act now!

On the Very Idea of an Internet Meme

Well, not really, but in the spirit of procrastinating, I'll play along with this so-called meme, which has been evolving across some blogs here, here, and here (where I was tagged):

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence on that page
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people

And here is what we get. Donald Davidson's Essays on Actions and Events, and at page 123 we find:

I dream of a theory that makes the transition from the ordinary idiom to canonical notation purely mechanical, and a canonical notation rich enough to capture, in its dull and explicit way, every difference and connection legitimately considered the business of a theory of meaning. The point of canonical notation so conceived is not to improve on something left vague and defective in natural language, but to help elicit in a perspicuous and general form the understanding of logical grammar we all have that constitutes (part of) our grasp of our native tongue.

In exploring the logical form of sentences about actions and events, I concentrated on certain features of such sentences and neglected others.

I guess my dreams are are a bit more exciting than Davidson's. This is from some of his comments about his essay, "The Logical Form of Action Sentences." Davidson's book was not the first one I grabbed. Strawon's Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties was the obvious choice, but it only has 98 pages.

I hereby tag: Selbsttatigkeit, Carubou, Spontaneity&Receptivity, The Brooks Blog, and The Ends of Thought. Let's see what happens.

A German Idealism Joke

Posting has been very sparse the last few weeks, and will likely continue to be until I return to NY at the beginning of January. I'm down in Texas with the family now. My mom bought me a philosophy joke book (Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar...), and surprisingly it has a brief section on German Idealism. Here's the best joke of the bunch:

Secretary: Herr Doktor, there's a ding an sich in the waiting room.
Urologist: Another ding an sich! If I see one more today, I think I'll scream! Who is it?
Secretary: How would I know?
Urologist: Describe him.
Secretary: You must be kidding!

The Coast of Utopia

Had I a blog back in April, I would have posted on a play I went to at Lincoln Center called The Coast of Utopia. The play is by Tom Stoppard and starred Ethan Hawke and Billy Crudup. I mention the play because the first third is about the influence Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel had on a group of young Russian revolutionaries, the anarchist Bakunin, the liberal socialist Herzen and the literary critic Belinsky.

I was originally interested in the play because of the figure Bakunin. I certainly did not expect to hear Ethan Hawke, as a young Bakunin, utter lines about Fichte:

Agriculture? I'd rather kill myself than study agriculture. But after three years in Berlin I'd be qualified for a professorship. I am prepared for it. I was on the wrong track with Fichte, I admit it--Fiche was trying to get rid of objective reality, but Hegel shows that reality can't be ignored, on the contrary, reality is the interacion of the inner and outer worlds.

Ok, so Stoppard is no Dieter Henrich (more of an Isaiah Berlin), but his attempts to connect the development of German Idealism from Kant to Hegel (and its shift toward the materialism of Marx) with the Bildung of the Russian petty bourgeoisie is fun to watch on stage. You can also read the play. I should mention that the play itself is an achievement--in fact it is really three plays, Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage that make up The Coast of Utopia

One of my favorite lines in the play is spoken by Billy Crudup's character Belinsky: "But the truth of idealism would be plain to me if I had heard one sentence of Schelling shouted through my window by a man on a galloping horse."

Fun with Kant

The Kant Song.

Sir Isaiah Berlin Speaks!

I found this entertaining, which I read about at the blog Virtual Philosopher. It is a recording, available here, of Sir Isaiah Berlin speaking without breathing, with much disgust, and much misunderstanding, perhaps willful misunderstanding, about the Romantic movement and the German Idealists who, according to Berlin were enthusiasts of what he calls the indomitable will that creates values ex nihilo. Here's a quote about the Romantics and Idealists' view: "The heart of the entire process is invention, creation, making out of literally nothing, or out of any materials that may be to hand, and the most central aspect of this view is of course that your universe is, of course, as you choose to make it to some degree, at any rate; that is the philosophy of Fichte, that is to some extent the philosophy of Schelling…" The recording and similar materials can be found at The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.