UK Kant Society Graduate Conference (CFP)

THE FIFTH UK KANT SOCIETY GRADUATE CONFERENCE
10-11 July 2008
University of Manchester
Call for papers
Deadline for submission of papers: May 10th 2008.
The 5th UK Kant Society Graduate Conference will take place on Thursday 10th and Friday 11th July 2008 at The University of Manchester.

We are pleased to announce that our guest speakers this year are Professor Robert Pippin (University of Chicago) and Dr Jens Timmermann (University of St. Andrews).

We invite papers from postgraduate students and from those who have recently completed their PhD to be considered for presentation at the 2008 UK Kant Society Graduate Conference. The conference will consider papers related to any aspect of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy from 1781 onwards.

Please submit papers of no more than 5000 words that are suitable for a presentation of around 35 minutes, allowing 20 minutes for discussion. All papers should be suitable for blind review. Please include a cover page consisting of the paper’s title and abstract, as well as personal contact details including an email address.

Submissions should be sent by email no later than 10th May 2008 to ukksgradconf@aol.co.uk marking the subject line ‘2008 UKKS Graduate Conference Submission’. Further details will be publicised nearer the date of the conference.

More information about the UK Kant Society can be found at:
http://www.keele.ac.uk/research/lpj/kant/

Paula Satne Jones (conference organiser)
Philosophy
Arthur Lewis Building
The University of Manchester
M13 9PL
Email: satnejones@AOL.COM

On Reason

In his new book Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, 2008), Allen Wood points out that Vernunft, the word Kant uses for 'reason', derives from the German word 'to hear' (vernehmen). Wood writes, "A rational (or reasonable) person is above all someone who 'listens to reason,' who is capable of hearing and understanding others when they offer reasons" (p. 18). Wood thinks that on etymological grounds we see that (this is not a philosophical argument), "Reasons..are essentially to be shared between people--they are never only the private possession of those for whom they are reasons" (19). On this view, when one acts according to reasons, one acts on reasons that are intersubjectively grounded. I think this is a view worked out in some detail in Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right and also in Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint, a book I hope to start posting on soon.

I found the etymological point interesting, especially since I don't remember coming across it before. After a quick glance at Caygill's entry on 'reason' in the Kant Dictionary I found no mention of this point. I thought I would check the OED for any similar connections in English. Granted, the phrases we use like 'He just doesn't listen to reason' make a similar point. This phrase appears to go as far back as 1225, "I heard nu reisuns" and in 1440 we have "new resones speke." Reasons are also seen: 1740 J. Clarke, "I never yet saw reason...to believe."

Embodiment in Fichte’s Theory of Self-Consciousness

Here is an abstract for a paper I want to write. I just sent it off to a conference on intersubjectivity and the body.

Subtle Bodies: Embodiment in Fichte’s Theory of Self-Consciousness

The work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte is widely recognized as attempting to develop a theory of self-consciousness that grounds in a first principle Kant’s theory of knowledge and cognition. Fichte’s work is often taken to focus on issues in practical philosophy and issues in epistemology. In my work on Fichte I have been developing a mind reading that shows that Fichte has an intersubjective theory of the mind that is conditional for his moral and epistemological principles. In this paper I will argue that Fichte’s theory of the mind articulates a view of the mind as embodied.

In his Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte develops a transcendental argument or deduction that shows how we must conceive of the body as a necessary condition of self-conscious agency. The body, insofar as it is a necessary condition of self-consciousness, must be more than just a material body. For Fichte, while the body is a material body [Körper], it is also a human body [Lieb]. What is the difference between a material body and a human body? The first important difference is that the human body is the embodiment of the will or the ability to form concepts of an end and bring to fruition the end according to a particular conceptualization. However, this kind of concept formation and action is not reflective, but a conceptual pre-reflective activity. A second difference, which follows from the first, is that the human body is subtle or non-objective in that it is saturated with social commitments and is that locus of intentional expressions. In other words, the body as a human body is expressive of rational contents and plays an essential role in the education of the subject into the stance rational self-conscious agents must take.

My reading of Fichte on the body attempts to show that the body is a minded body that is intersubjectively constituted. I also argue that the body is expressive. Its expressivity plays a necessary role in the education of self-consciousness and the constitution of a rational social order.

Fichte and the Mind

Lately, I've been working to reduce the first chapter of my dissertation to the size of a journal article. One thing I'm doing in the article is attempting to make a distinction between two kinds of readings of Fichte, one which is primarily epistemological in nature and one that considers Fichte as concerned with the mind and mental action. I'm attempting to show the merits of the mind reading.

One idea I have is that on the mind reading what Fichte has to say about intersubjectivity bears not only on how we should think of self-knowledge, but also on how we should think about the mind and its conditions of possibility. I think, and this is where Fichte scholars will most likely get upset, commentators have mostly advanced epistemological readings that elaborate on Fichte's Kantian influences, his epistemic "foundationalism" (I put that in quotes since it's not clear, at least not to me, whether he is a foundationalist of some sort), the role self-positing plays in terms of establishing a theory of knowledge. Beisier's work, Wayne Martin's and even Paul Frank's challenging work seem to take such a line of thinking for granted. How to characterize Neuhouser's book in terms of this epistemology/mind distinction is more difficult.

I think scholars have failed to adequately understand the role of intersubjectivity in Fichte’s theory of self-consciousness because they have predominantly approached Fichte as concerned with how knowledge is possible. When these scholars move from a concern with how knowledge is possible to a concern with the role of intersubjective relations in Fichte’s thought, they analyze intersubjectivity at the level of knowledge. The result is that intersubjective relations become conditional for how one conceives oneself in terms of personal identity, political identity, or social identity. In other words, intersubjective relations are necessary for self-knowledge or forming a self-conception. But, any self-conception already presupposes that a subject is a self-conscious agent that references itself as an I.

If we can make a distinction between self-conceiving agents and self-conscious agents, I think we can understand the role of intersubjectivity differently. This distinction is important because it demarcates two levels of self-consciousness, one level in which self-conscious agents are conscious of themselves as an I, and one level in which agents are conscious of their unique social identities and commitments. I think this distinction maps on to a distinction between self-consciousness and self-knowledge respectively. With such a distinction operative, I think it is possible to locate the level at which intersubjectivity enters (e.g., Is it at the level of self-knowledge or self-consciousness?), and what implications this has for a theory of the mind and self-consciousness. The upshot is obvious for a theory of mind. If intersubjectivity enters at the level in which we are specifying the conditions necessary for having mental life, the the mind is intersubjectively constituted. I think there might be other implications too that have to do with externalism about the mind or mental content as well. I also think such a reading, call it the mind reading of Fichte, involves showing that the mind is mental activity, but not merely a kind of mental activity internal to the skull, but an embodied activity.

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.

Von Kant Bis Hegel (Conference)

Concordia University is hosting the Von Kant Bis Hegel conference October 11-12, 2008. The theme of the conference is Nature, Naturalism and Naturphilosophie. The list of invited speakers is quite impressive.

NY German Idealism Workshop

We are excited to announce that the New York German Idealism Workshop Series is planning two events for the Spring.

Here is the info for the first meeting:

Dietmar Heidemann (Hofstra)
Paper: "Is Kant a Skeptic?"
Date: March 7, 4pm
Place: The New School at 65 5th Ave (corner of 14th St.)
Room: Machinist Conference Room (The room number is 106. The Machinist Conference room is on the Mezzanine level between floors 1 and 2).

The workshop series focuses on Kant and German Idealism, but is not at all limited to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. At each workshop a paper will be presented (approx. 45 minutes), and after a 10-15 minute response paper, we will have a discussion period. Two weeks before the workshop the paper will be circulated by email. This will give us time to consider the work more thoroughly than if we were to only listen to a presentation, as is customary in department workshop series and conferences. Our hope is that such a format will bring about a deeper engagement with the each paper. To receive the paper, contact me by email.

Hegel and Feminism Panel

Angelica Nuzzo is organizing a panel on "Hegel and Feminism" for the New York Society for Women in Philosophy. Here are the details:

"Hegel and Feminism"
Friday, March 14th 4-630 at the Graduate Center CUNY (34th and 5th Ave) - Room (TBA)

"What if Hegel's Master and Slave were Women?", Michell Aboulafia (The Juilliard School)

"Hegel, Lacan, Property and the Feminine", Jeanne L. Schroeder (Cardozo Law School)

"Panel Chair and Discussant", Angelica Nuzzo (Graduate Center/Brooklyn College, CUNY)

Cosmos and History Double Issue on Hegel

Thanks to Tom from Grundlegung for pointing out that Cosmos and History has a double issue online dedicated to "Thinking the Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking." There are some interesting articles there, some by Angelica Nuzzo, H. S. Harris, Karin de Boer, Andrew Haas and many others. Also, Yovel's translation and commentary on Hegel's "Preface" to the Phenomenology of Spirit and Robert Sterns book on the Phenomenology are reviewed. Enjoy!

CFP

This conference might be of interest to people working on German Idealism and related issues:

"Intercorporeality and Intersubjectivity", University College Dublin, June 6 & 7. Abstracts due March 15.

Fichte's Critique of Reinhold

In his book All or Nothing, Paul Franks makes a very strong claim about how many Anglo-American scholars have misunderstood and wrongly interpreted Schulze and Fichte's understanding of Reinhold's 'Principle of Consciousness' [1]. The Principle of Consciousness says: “[I]n consciousness representation is distinguished through the subject from both object and subject and is related to both” [2]. The problem many scholars like F. Neuhouser, T. Pinkard and W. Martin note is that this appears to lead into an infinite regress of subjects. Franks convincingly argues that this was never claimed by Fichte or Schulze. I have been thinking about this a good bit, and have wondered why so many scholars seem to have made this so-called mistake. I wonder if there is in Fichte's "Aenesidemus Review" a claim that appears to resemble the idea that Reinhold's principle leads to a regress. Here is one point Fichte makes in his "Aenesidemus Review":

What kind of principle is [the Principle of Consciousness]? Aenesidemus answers: ‘It is (1) a synthetic proposition, one in which to a subject there is added a predicate (viz., consciousness) which is not already included in the concept of the subject, but rather, is first annexed to it in experience.’ It is well know that Reinhold claims that this principle is merely analytic. We will here overlook the fact that Aenesidemus denies the universal validity of the Principle of Consciousness, thereby assuming that there is a type of consciousness for which this principle does not hold. But there is a deeper reason for Aenesidemus’s and Reinhold’s differing assertions regarding this question, one which lies in the difference between two ways of regarding the Principle of Consciousness. If no consciousness is conceivable apart from these three elements, then they are of course all included in the concept of consciousness, and of course the proposition which asserts this is, with respect to its logical validity a proposition based upon reflection, an analytic proposition. Yet since it involves distinguishing and relating, this very action of representing, the act of consciousness itself, is obviously a synthesis, and indeed, the highest synthesis and the foundation of all other possible syntheses. This raises the very natural question: How is it possible to trace all the action of the mind back to an act of connecting? How is synthesis conceivable without presupposing thesis and antithesis? [3]

There is a good bit to say about this quotation. I am wondering how others might read this. It is important to remember that the Principle of Consciousness is meant to be a foundational principle that expresses the necessary conditions or analytic marks that constitute the genus representation found in Kant’s Stufenleiter. Furthermore, the principle is meant to be a principle that expresses the structure of transcendental apperception, the form of apperception that enables self-conscious thought and empirical apperception or empirical self-conscious thought. That being said, if there is something outside the structure of the principle, something conditional for it, then the principle cannot be foundational. Schulze’s critique of the principle is based on his belief that the principle is a synthetic principle. Schulze’s (or Aenesidemus’s) claim is that ‘consciousness’, ‘consciousness of’ ‘a representation being related to a subject’ is not an analytic mark found in the concept ‘subject’ but is added to the subject when there is some experiential data to be synthesized. A subject, it would follow, need not have consciousness. Being consciousness might be a contingent fact about some subjects.

But this point about analytic and synthetic principles does not seem related to how the quotation ends: "Yet since it involves distinguishing and relating, this very action of representing, the act of consciousness itself, is obviously a synthesis, and indeed, the highest synthesis and the foundation of all other possible syntheses." At this point, it appears Fichte has moved on to an issue that concerns a distinction Kant makes in his B-deduction between the synthetic unity of apperception and the analytic unity of apperception. With this distinction, Kant argues that an analytic unity requires a synthesis, which entails that the synthetic unity conditions the analytic unity of apperception. The claim Fichte would appear to be making, and I recognize I am being incredibly quick here, is that what Reinhold's principle does not account for is how consciousness requires the kind of activity involved in the synthetic unity of consciousness.

----
[1] Paul Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 221ff.

[2] Karl Reinhold, "The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge" in Between Kant and Hegel, (trans.) George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), p. 70.

[3] Fichte, "Aenesidemus Review" in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, (trans.) Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998), pp. 62-63.

Hölderlin's Hyperion

Ross Benjamin's new translation of Hölderlin's Hyperion is set to come out in Spring 2008, but if you can't wait that long you should get a copy of New England Review where some excerpts of the his translation have appeared. Here you can order the current issue for pretty cheap. The translation is noticeably different, and while improving on the poetry found in the William Trask translation (Continuum), Benjamin's translation is clearer and easier to read. Readers might remember that I posted about this new translation here.

Old Comentary on Hegel's Logic

At Now-Times, Alexei has added some links worth checking out. I want to add a link to a commentary by William Torey Harris, editor of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, on Hegel's Logic.

Thom Brooks on Publishing

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) of The Brooks Blog just posted here a revised paper that gives what appears to be sound and very helpful advice on publishing essays, replies, book reviews and book manuscripts for graduate students. I take it that his advice will also be quite helpful for recent graduates and young scholars. You might also want to check out this conversation on publishing book manuscripts at Leiter Reports and this one about graduate students and publishing.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

The other day I was searching for something in Google Books and came across the important 19th Century journal The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. I knew that there were some hard to find translations of Fichte in there as well as some early translations of Hegel, but I did not realize what a goldmine they are, and I certainly did not think to look for them online. Check out some of the journals here. You can actually down load the entire volumes as PDFs. There is another journal called The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and from what I can tell it was started in 1987 and is unrelated.

The first volume of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy is from 1867, and it contains what were at the time new, and I suspect original translations of Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel. Each volume has many translations of German Idealist texts as well as translations of Schlegel, Herder, and articles by Anglo-American philosophers. Anyone interested in the reception of German Idealism in America will find these journals indispensable.

The editor, William Torey Harris, notes in his "Preface" to the first volume that to some the journal's contents might be perceived as "Un-American" in character. It is interesting that there is an apparent distinction between Speculative philosophy and Anglo-American philosophy being made by Harris that resembles the putative divide between analytic and Continental philosophy. It appears that Harris wants to overcome this divide between American philosophy, whatever that may be, and Un-American so-called Speculative philosophy. In doing so, the aim is to achieve universal knowledge, which if objective could not be claimed either American or Un-American. By bringing American scholars in contact with German philosophy, it appears he thinks such a goal can be obtained.

There are too many volumes of the journal online to mention what is worth looking at so I leave it up to you. It's worth mentioning that for some volumes you cannot preview them in Google Books, so if you want to see the contents, you have to download the PDF.

Idealism Texts Online

Recently, I posted about some Hegel material that is online. At the same site there is a good bit of material from other figures:

Kant

Herder

Fichte

Schlegel

Schelling

Book Reviews

There are some new book reviews up at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

1. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Darwall's book has an important chapter on Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right, where Fichte takes up an analysis of the role the second-person standpoint plays in a theory of rationality and self-consciousness, though this is not mentioned in the review.)

2. Kyriaki Goudeli, Pavlos Kontos, and Ioli Patellis (eds.), Kant: Making Reason Intuitive

3. James Phillips, The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant

Hegel's Science of Logic

There is an online reading group reading Hegel's Science of Logic. Various blogs appear to be taking part. You can find a link to all the posts here at Rough Theory.

A New Year!

Not much to post about these days. I'm still getting back into the swing of things, and preparing for the Spring semester. I hope to start posting on Fichte again soon, and in the next few weeks a couple posts from guest bloggers will appear.

My New Year's Resolution, I've just decided, is to devote more time to philosophical posts on the blog. We'll see how that goes. With teaching and attempting to write a dissertation it seems unlikely. I might just start posting bits of the dissertation here and there.

If you have any German Idealism news please forward it my way.

Here is a CFP for the Young Philosopher's Lecture Series (Deadline January 20). Sounds like an interesting program.

Allen Wood to Indiana

Allen Wood is moving from Stanford to Indiana University, Bloomington. You can read more about it at Leiter Reports. Should he stay at Indiana, this would make it a desirable place for students working on German Idealism. I last posted on this move here.