New Kant Journal

There is a new Kant journal, Kant Studies Online, which is peer reviewed and open access. Here are the details:

Kant Studies Online publishes articles written in English on all aspects of Kant’s works including historically informed studies, applications of Kantian thought to contemporary problems, the relationship between Kantian and Neo-Kantian thinking, and detailed scholarly works on interpretation of Kant’s works. It will also include review articles of secondary works on Kant. An issue of the journal will be deemed to exist whenever an accepted article is published. The journal is edited by Gary Banham in association with an editorial board and is published in the spirit of the open access movement. Whilst its target audience is academic philosophers and students it aims to attract non-academic readers by making all its material freely available without restriction.

This is a promising development for Kant scholarship. I imagine as more journals are online and open access, like Philosophers Imprint, they will gain a larger following, more esteem, and publish better scholarship. Four Kant journals come to mind that publish in English: Kantian Review, Kant-Studien, The Kant Yearbook, and now Kant Studies Online. Am I missing any?

Analytic Kantianism

The new issue of Philosophical Topics is dedicated to Kant and it includes essays by excellent philosophers.

Philosophical Topics, Volume 34, Numbers 1 & 2
Analytic Kantianism

Issue Editor: James Conant

Contributors: Robert Brandom, Eli Friedlander, Michael Friedman, Hannah Ginsborg, Arata Hamawaki, Andrea Kern, Michael Kremer, Thomas Land, Thomas Lockhart, Béatrice Longuenesse, John McDowell, A.W. Moore, Sebastian Rödl, and Clinton Tolley.

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.

Book Reviews

Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation

Cambridge recently published a new edition of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (Ed. Gregory Moore).

From the publisher:

This is the first translation of Fichte’s addresses to the German nation for almost 100 years. The series of 14 speeches, delivered whilst Berlin was under French occupation after Prussia’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806, is widely regarded as a founding document of German nationalism, celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Fichte’s account of the distinctiveness of the German people and his belief in the native superiority of its culture helped to shape German national identity throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. With an extensive introduction that puts Fichte’s argument in its intellectual and historical context, this edition brings an important and seminal work to a modern readership. All of the usual series features are provided, including notes for further reading, chronology, and brief biographies of key individuals.

• Selection of key writings, with introduction, notes and chronology aimed at students • Fichte is the second most important 19th-century German political theorist after Marx • Moore is a leading scholar in the field

Contents:

Foreword; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chronology; Notes on the text and translation; Suggestions for further reading; Abbreviations; Addresses to the German Nation; Notes; Glossary.

Jacobi in Google Books

Here are two links to some old texts on F. H. Jacobi. The first text is one of the few studies on Jacobi in English and serves as an introduction to his thought: Jacobi Norman Wilde, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: A Study in the Origin of German Realism. I'm not familiar with the second; it looks to be a thesis: Alexander W. Crawford, The Philosophy of F. H. Jacobi. These are old texts, so here is also George di Giovanni's SEP article on Jacobi.

Why is there not more literature on Jacobi in English? The most recent works I know of that handle Jacobi in some detail are Paul Frank's All or Nothing (Harvard, 2005) and Giovanni's Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors (Cambridge, 2005).

Philosophy Today's Fichte Issue

Below is the table of contents for the Fall 2008 issue of Philosophy Today. They published the proceedings of last spring's North American Fichte Society conference dedicated to Fichte's System of Ethics. The conference was held at DePaul University April 10-13, 2008. I attended the conference though chose not to publish my paper, Fichte on Freedom: How-Possible Questions and Transcendental Arguments, since it is, as I see it, still very much a work in progress. The conference was great, and all of these papers are worth reading.

Philosophy Today

Vol. 52, Iss. 3/4

1. Credits

2. Table of contents

3. APRIORITY FROM THE GRUNDLAGE TO THE SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Sebastian Rand

4. BETWEEN THE IDEAL AND THE EGO IDEAL: COLLECTIVE EVIL FROM FICHTE TO FREUD
Arnold L Farr

5. FEELING IS KNOWING: THE CENTRALITY OF DRIVES AND AFFECT IN FICHTE'S SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Michael Steinberg

6. FICHTE AGAINST KANT IN THE SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Isabelle Thomas- Fogiel

7. FICHTE AND NOVALIS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
Howard Pollack-Milgate

8. FICHTE AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF THE MORAL LAW
Claude Piché

9. FICHTE ON THE HIGHEST GOOD: AGENT UNITY AND PRACTICAL DELIBERATION IN THE JENA SITTENLEHRE
Benjamin D Crowe

10. FICHTE, ETHICS, AND THE PLEASURES OF SELF-DESTRUCTION
F Scott Scribner

11. FICHTE, ETHICS, AND TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY
Tom Rockmore

12.FINITE AND ABSOLUTE REASON IN (AND BEYOND) FICHTE'S SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Steven Hoeltzel

13. HEGEL ON FICHTE'S CONCEPTION OF PRACTICAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNES: A FUNDAMENTAL CRITICISM OF THE SITTENLEHRE IN THE DIFFERENZ-SCHRIFT
Liu Zhe

14. INTRODUCTION
Tom Rockmore

15. ON FICHTE'S CONCEPT OF FREEDOM IN THE SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Marina F Bykova

16. ONE DRIVE AND TWO MODES OF ACTING: COGNITION AND VOLITION
Violetta L Waibel

17. THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL, THE SOCIOPATH, AND FICHTE'S ETHICS
George J Seidel

18. THE CONCEPT OF CONSCIENCE IN FICHTE'S SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Bärbel Frischmann

19. THE CONCEPT OF DRIVE IN THE SITTTENLEHRE (1798): FUNDAMENTAL ASPECTS OF FICHTE'S DOCTRINE OF OIKEIOSIS
Mário Jorge de Carvalho

20. THE EMPIRICAL I IN THE SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Jane Dryden

21.THE FIRST-PERSON STANDPOINT OF FICHTE'S ETHICS

Daniel Breazeale

22. THE FUNCTION AND SIGNIFICANCE OF LONGING IN THE SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Adam Hankins

23.THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION OF THE CATEGORIAL IMPERATIVE IN FICHTE'S SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Jacinto Rivera de Rosales

24. TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE: THE FAILED RECEPTION OF FICHTE'S SYSTEM OF ETHICS
Günter Zöller

PhilPapers

David Chalmers has announced that PhilPapers has now gone public. PhilPapers is a database of philosophy papers maintained by Chalmers and David Bourget. The database is set up around a category system that organizes papers into various philosophical categories. Under the category History of Western Philosophy, for instance, you will find sub-categories like 19th Century Philosophy, 19th Century German Philosophy, Fichte, and Hegel. The groupings contain links to papers, abstracts, and books. Currently, the database has close to 200,000 entries, and it is expected to grow quickly. I imagine this will become an incredibly useful research tool, and an easy way to access online papers. The project grows out of the MindPapers database Chalmers also maintains, an excellent resource for people working in philosophy of mind.

New Books

Here are three book reviews recently published at NDPR.

Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Philosophical Legacies: Essays on the Thought of Kant, Hegel, and Their Contemporaries, Catholic University of America Press, 2008.

Jacqueline Mariña, Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Robert Wicks, Schopenhauer, Blackwell, 2008.

Hamann Conference

I posted a few months back about the conference "Hamann and the Tradition", and since then the full program has been added online. Check out the program here. It is also worth noting that John R. Betz's book, After Enlightenment (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) appeared recently. Betz's book looks to be one of the most exhaustive works on Hamann in English, and is certainly one of the few.

For those of you unfamilar with the work of Hamann, check out my previous posts here and here.

New Hegel Book

There is a review of Sara MacDonald's book Finding Freedom: Hegel's Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women up at NDPR.

New German Idealism Book

Nectarios Limnatis just published his book German Idealism and the Problem of Knowledge: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel with Springer.

Here is the publisher's description:

The problem of knowledge in German Idealism has drawn increasing attention in recent years. This is the first attempt at a systematic critique that covers all four major figures, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In examining the evolution of the German idealist discussion with respect to a broad array of concepts (epistemology, metaphysics, logic, dialectic, contradiction, totality, and several others), the author draws from a wide variety of sources in several languages, employs lucid and engaging language, and offers a fresh, incisive and challenging critique.

Limnatis contrasts Kant’s epistemological assertiveness with his ontological scepticism as a critical issue in the development of the discourse in German Idealism, and argues that Fichte’s phenomenological demarche only amplifies the Kantian impasse, but allows him to launch a path-breaking critique of formal logic, and to press forward the dialectic. Schelling’s later restoration of metaphysics aims exactly at overcoming the Fichtean conflict between epistemological monism and ontological dualism. And it is Hegel who synthesizes the preceding discussion and unambiguously addresses the need for a new philosophical logic, the dialectical logic. Limnatis scrutinizes Hegel’s deduction in the Phenomenology, invokes modern genetic epistemology, and advances a non-metaphysical reading of the Science of Logic as a genetic theory of systematic knowledge and as circular epistemology. Emphasizing the unity between the logical and the historical, the distinction between intellectual (verständlich) and rational (vernünftig) explanation, and the cognitive importance of contradiction, the author argues for the prospect of an evolving totality of reflective reason.

This book is published in Springer's series Studies in German Idealism.

Classic German Journals Online

Following up on my last post, I want to point readers to Perverse Egalitarianism where Mikhail Emelianov has liked to digitized versions of Hegel and Schelling's Kritisches Journal der Philosophie and Der Teutsche Merkur. This online resource is quite a find, and has links to an incredible number of important journals published in Germany roughly between the 1750s-1810, with the bulk appearing around the 1790s. There are links to famous journals edited by Schiller, Herder, Eberhard, and Feder, too much to actually list, so check it out for yourself.

You will see that I have added a link to this page in the sidebar titled "online resources".

Fichte PDFs in Google Books

Perverse Egalitarianism has linked to a PDF of Fichte's Address to the German Nation and an old book on Fichte by William Smith (1841).

Here is also a link to a book on Fichte by Robert Adamson (1881). Here is a link to a PDF of the The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, translated by William Smith. There are 2 volumes of the Popular Works: Vol. 1, Vol. 2. These contain writings on the Wissenschaftslehre, Religion, History and the State. Also, there is a commentary on Fichte's Science of Knowledge by Charles Everett. A very old translation of the System of Ethics.

Fichte's son and early editor, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, wrote a book called Contributions to Mental Philosophy which you can also download as a PDF. This book looks to be a strange one, a mix of "philosophic form" and "scientific outpouring of the heart." Should be interesting. He also wrote an Anthropology which is here in German.

I also found an old translation of Fichte's Vocation of Man which has been translated as The Destination of Man. This edition appeared in a Catholic series of books, and on the title page you will find a portrait of Jesus.

Here is an early translation of Fichte's 1801 Wissenschaftslehre which was translated as New Exposition of the Science of Knowledge.

Finally, here is a commentary by Ellen Talbot on Fichte. I'm sure there is more. Thanks Google Books! All of these links take you to pages where you can download the books as PDFs.

Kant Yearbook 2010 (CFP)

The Kant Yearbook is now accepting submissions for its second issue in 2010. The Kant Yearbook is an international journal that publishes articles on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It is the Kant Yearbook's goal to intensify innovative research on Kant on the international scale. For that reason, the Kant Yearbook prefers to publish articles in English, however articles in German will also be accepted. Each issue will be dedicated to a specific topic.The second issue's topic is Metaphysics, and the deadline for submissions is May 10, 2009.

The Kant Yearbook practices double-blind review; i.e. the reviewers are not aware of the identity of a manuscript's author, and the author is not aware of the reviewer's identity. Submitted manuscripts must be anonymous. That is, the authors' names and references to their work capable of identifying them are not to appear in the manuscript.

Editor:
Dietmar H. Heidemann (Hofstra University)

Editorial Board:
Henry E. Allison (University of California at Davis)
Karl Ameriks (Notre Dame)
Gordon Brittan (Montana State University)
Klaus Düsing (University of Cologne)
Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Boston University)
Kristina Engelhard (University of Cologne)
Brigitte Falkenburg (University of Dortmund)
Hannah Ginsborg (University of California at Berkeley)
Michelle Grier (University of San Diego)
Thomas Grundmann (University of Cologne)
Paul Guyer (University of Pennsylvania)
Robert Hanna (University of Colorado at Boulder)
Georg Mohr (University of Bremen)
Angelica Nuzzo (CUNY)
Robert Stern (Sheffield University)
Dieter Sturma (University of Bonn)
Ken Westphal (University of Kent)
Markus Willaschek (University of Frankfurt)

More info here.

Hegel, Religion, Mysticism

For those of you interested in Hegel, Religion and Mysticism, Robert Wallace, author of Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God (Cambridge, 2005), has a website dedicated to these issues. There you will find pages dedicated to internet resources on mysticism, and also some of his writings on Hegel. Enjoy!

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Book Review)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2008) looks to be an excellent volume. At NDPR it received a very positive review.

Review of Wood's Kantian Ethics

A critical review of Allen Wood's Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, 2007) appeared in the Time Literary Supplement. The review is by Michael Rosen (Harvard). Here is an excerpt to entice you:

Kantian Ethics is an important and challenging book. The position that it presents is original and its argument is supported by an exceptional knowledge of Kant’s thought, of the Kantian literature and of ethical theory more broadly. It is not, however, a particularly attractive one to read. The tone in which Wood criticizes those with whom he disagrees is hectoring and dyspeptic. They show “a deplorable tendency to think in terms of entrenched prejudices”; they commit “whoppers”, have a “tin ear” for Kant, say things that are “strangely arbitrary and nonsensically extreme”, and so on. Philosophical texts are exceedingly complex, and to enter into their world is not easy. When someone feels that they have grasped what others have missed it is perhaps understandable that they should come to think that, as Wood puts it, “what Kant is trying to say is not making it past the censorship of their philosophical prejudices”. I can appreciate this, not least because I found myself thinking similarly about Wood himself. It seemed to me that his grave-robber’s passion for using Kant to support his own moral convictions had sometimes led him to overlook dimensions of Kant’s theory to which, as an archaeologist, he should have given greater weight. But this thought does not diminish the admiration I feel for the seriousness and erudition with which he sets about his task.

New Kant Book on Embodiment

Angelica Nuzzo (Brooklyn College/CUNY Graduate Center) has published a new work titled Ideal Embodiment: Kant's Theory of Sensibility (Indiana University Press, 2008). Here is the publisher's description:

Angelica Nuzzo offers a comprehensive reconstruction of Kant's theory of sensibility in his three Critiques. By introducing the notion of "transcendental embodiment," Nuzzo proposes a new understanding of Kant's views on science, nature, morality, and art. She shows that the issue of human embodiment is coherently addressed and key to comprehending vexing issues in Kant's work as a whole. In this penetrating book, Nuzzo enters new terrain and takes on questions Kant struggled with: How does a body that feels pleasure and pain, desire, anger, and fear understand and experience reason and strive toward knowledge? What grounds the body's experience of art and beauty? What kind of feeling is the feeling of being alive? As she comes to grips with answers, Nuzzo goes beyond Kant to revise our view of embodiment and the essential conditions that make human experience possible.

Terry Pinkard's Papers

Terry Pinkard (Georgetown) has posted a number of his recent papers on his site. There are some interesting papers on Hegel and spirit and Sellars and Post-Kantianism. He has also posted a draft of his new translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which will be published by Cambridge. It is about time a new translation of the Phenomenology appear, and as I have mentioned before, the translation of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, published many years ago by Cambridge, is due for a major revision.