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.

Book Reviews: Hume, Hegel, Thompson

Here are three book reviews I thought readers might find interesting:

Frederick C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel and Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Henry E. Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought, Harvard University Press, 2008.

If you are not familiar with Thompson yet, his work claims to take up a logical treatment of the concept of life in a manner meant to capture, to some extent, the spirit of Hegel's own reflections on life. Thompson's work on life, action, and practice has caused some strong reactions, ranging from the skeptical to the over zealous. In part this is due to his intention to establish some a priori status for concepts like life and life-form. I'm sure we can expect some intersting responses to his work in the years to come.

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.

NY German Idealism Workshop

The next NY German Idealism Workshop will be Friday, February 20 at 4pm at the New School. Here are the details:

Sebastian Rand (Georgia State University)
"Animal Subjectivity in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature"

Place: The New School
4pm, Friday, February 20
Room: D912 (The building is located at 16th and 5th Ave. The main entrance is on 16th st. between 5th and Union Square. The address is 6 16th).

Karen Ng (New School) will respond.

If you plan to attend and would like to receive a copy of the paper, please email me.

Kant and the Early Moderns (Book Review)

Book Review at NDPR:

Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse (eds.), Kant and the Early Moderns, Princeton University Press, 2008.

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.

Hegel's Aesthetics

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry by Stephen Houlgate on Hegel's Aesthetics.

Philosophical Gourmet and Specialty Rankings

Over the past two days, Brian Leiter has previewed some of the rankings (here and here) that will appear in the newest version of the Philosophical Gourmet. This includes the ranking of specialty areas, which can be quite helpful for undergraduates when applying to graduate programs. Looking over the specialty areas I was struck by one ranking in particular. NYU is listed as a top department in 19th Century Continental Philosophy.

It is perfectly clear that NYU has one of the strongest philosophy programs, and the consistency with which it tops Leiter’s general departmental rankings attests to that. However, I can not quite see why it should be considered top in 19th Century Continental Philosophy. If NYU deserves such a ranking, then I admit I must be out of touch with the current state of 19th Century Continental Philosophy in the academy. If it should not be so listed, then I suggest that Leiter take it off the 19th Century list since undergraduates, and certainly some graduates, will inevitably use the specialty rankings when making decisions about where to apply and eventually attend graduate school.

Here are three reasons NYU should not be on the 19th Century list:

1) According to their own graduate course listings, which date back to 1997, there has not been one course that generally counts as a 19th Century Continental course. The only possible course I saw listed that could reasonably fit in this category was in the Spring 2006. This was a course called “Consciousness and Self-Consciousness in Modern Philosophy” and was taught by Dan Garrett, who is well known for his work on Hume and the Moderns, and Beatrice Longuenesse, who has written an important book on Kant and one on Hegel. The course sounds more like a thematic Modern Philosophy course than a 19th Century Continental Course. According to the course description the readings range from Descartes to Hegel, so I imagine some Kant and Hegel were read, and, since one of the guest speakers included Wayne Martin (a Fichte scholar), there is even a chance Fichte was discussed.

2) Based on the listing of current students, there appears to be no current PhD students specializing in 19th Century Continental Philosophy.

3) According to their placement records, no past PhD students dating back to 2003 specialized in 19th Century Continental Philosophy. A 2008 graduate lists “Ethics, Epistemology, Early Modern, Kant” as his AOS.

Here are two reasons NYU should be on the list:

1) Béatrice Longuenesse. Longuenesse is a leading Kant scholar and has published an important book on Hegel. She is currently working on the topic of self-consciousness, an issue that animated German Idealism, and many of the philosophers the Idealist influenced like Sartre, someone Longuenesse has also written about. Since arriving at NYU her teaching has focused on Kant and topics related to self-consciousness.

2) John Richardson. Richardson is well known for his work on Nietzsche and Heidegger. He taught a course on Heidegger in the fall of 2005, but from the course listings, it does not appear he has taught a graduate course on Nietzsche since at least 1996. It is does not look like any of his students wrote on Nietzsche. This judgment is based on only the information on the website. I was not able to find dissertation titles. The placement records do not list them, although they do list AOS.

The Gourmet’s method of ranking programs focuses largely on the quality of faculty. No one can doubt that Longuenesse and Richardson deserve the esteemed reputation they have garnered. Is this enough to consider NYU as a top program with a specialty in 19th Century Continental Philosophy? Without any courses or students working in the field, it does not seem so to me.

I am unclear whether it is only specialists who rank the areas of specialty. It makes sense to have only specialists ranking the specialties of programs. It also makes sense to consider the course offerings and maybe even recent dissertation titles. Some of these points are standard criticisms of Philosophical Gourmet, so I don’t want to rehash them. Based on what I see in the 19th Century Continental category, it appears the specialty rankings could be improved.

Any thoughts?

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.

Paul Redding's Papers and Hegel Scholarship

I want to point readers to a PhD Hegel Scholarship. The scholarship is to work on a project titled "The God of Hegel's Post-Kantian Idealism", with Paul Redding and Paolo Diego at the University of Sydney. This kind of scholarship is a rare and excellent opportunity. The major limitation is that applicants must be Australian citizens, Australian permanent residents or New Zealand citizens. Here are the details.

I also want to point out that Paul Redding has some very interesting papers posted on his homepage. At the bottom of his page you will see an "online papers" section, which includes a great paper on the "Idealism" of Russell and Moore called "Idealism: a love (of sophia) that dare not speak its name". There are also papers up on Hegel and recognition, Brandom and McDowell, naturalism etc.

Inside/Outside Conference (CFP)

Inside/Outside

An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

hosted by the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University

April 2nd and 3rd, 2009

Keynote Speakers: Espen Hammer (University of Oslo/Essex) and Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University)

Foregrounding the relationship inside/outside, this conference seeks to consider the effects of this pervasive structuring relation across philosophy, literature, the human sciences, politics, and the arts. What work does this distinction do? How do we understand its ubiquity? Furthermore, what is our contemporary relation to this (perceived?) opposition: do we overcome, dissolve, ignore, work through, maintain, or dialectically negotiate this relationship? Papers exploring these and related questions are welcome.

Some suggestions: scheme and content, content and form, mind and world, interiority and exteriority, self and other, inclusion and exclusion, human and inhuman, literary, aesthetic, and political strategies and figures, historical investigations and genealogies, theological figurations and disfigurations, contemporary philosophical approaches ("continental" and "analytic") to this question, etc.

Please send full papers (for a 45 minute presentation), abstract (300 words max.), and contact information (including institutional affiliation) to insideoutsideconference@gmail.com

Deadline for all submissions is January 15th, 2009.

www.insideoutsideconference.com

German Idealism Workshop

For readers in the New York area, the final meeting for the New York German Idealism Workshop will be held on December 12. Terry Godlove (Hofstra) will present a paper on Kant at the Stony Brook, Manhattan Campus.

Here is all the info:

Terry Godlove (Hofstra): "The Objectivity of Regulative Principles in Kant's Appendix to the Dialectic".

Address: Stony Brook University-Manhattan, 401 Park Ave. South, 2nd
Floor (between. 27th and 28th St.) Tel.: 646 472 2025
Time: 4:30
Thomas Teufel (Baruch College) will respond to Terry's paper.

Email me if you plan to come and would like a copy of the paper.

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".