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.

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!

Hegel Material Online

Here are some Hegel resources online. This site has some links to many of Hegel's texts and also to commentaries by Hyppolite, Avineri, Findlay, Marcuse and many others.

Philosophers' Carnival

Buffalo Philosophy hosts the Philosophers' Carnival. Make sure to check out the post on McDowell and Kant by Avery at The Space of Reasons.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte: A Romantic Novelist? (David W. Wood)

(A few months ago I promised that Self and World would host some Guest Bloggers. Well, we have our first installment from guest blogger David W. Wood. David recently published with SUNY a translation of Novalis writings, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon. He is currently writing an article on Fichte, Novalis and the arts for Fichte-Studien.)

It is no secret that the philosophy of J.G. Fichte made an enormous impact on the young romantics. According to Novalis’s own admission, he heavily fell under Fichte’s spell: “Fichte is the most dangerous thinker I know. He powerfully enchants one into his circle.” Novalis was not alone: The early Schelling ended up becoming the “town crier of the Fichtean I”, Hölderlin hitch-hiked to the university in 1794 to sit at the feet of the man who was “the soul of Jena”, while Friedrich Schlegel famously placed the Wissenschaftslehre alongside the French Revolution and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister “as one of the three greatest tendencies of the age,” wildly praising Fichte himself “as a philosopher for whom Hamlet would have sighed in vain!” Schlegel and Novalis then carried out a sym-philosophical analysis of the Wissenschaftslehre – a joint study for which they coined the neologism “Fichticizing”.

However, could Fichte himself – the mentor of the Romantic School – ever be classified as a romantic? If explosive documents in the Gesamtausgabe (GA) of Fichte’s works are to be believed, the tentative answer is ‘yes’, and a romantic novelist at that. Frequently derided as the philosophical equivalent of a street-fighter, it now seems there was a much more feminine and ‘romantic’ side to Fichte. For like Hölderlin with Hyperion and Hardenberg (Novalis) with Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Fichte too tried his hand at writing a poetic-philosophic novel. Was Fichte then inspired by the literary efforts of these young romantics? The short answer is ‘no’, since Fichte the budding screenwriter came years before Fichte the philosopher of the Ich.

In 1788 in Zurich, while the three Friedrichs – Schlegel, Hölderlin and Hardenberg – were still fawning over the local Fräuleins and spurning the charms of Diotima, Johann Gottlieb was all pensive and Werther-like, busily composing for posterity a long meditation on love. It was only published 60 years later in 1846, by his son Immanuel Hermann; that is to say, more than 30 years after Fichte’s death, so chronologically we have to rule out any direct novelistic influence of the young romantics on Fichte.

But why has his literary gem been forgotten? – For in all fairness to the great philosopher from Rammenau, he easily holds his own with Goethe and almost out-romantics the romantics. Is not even the title of his piece: Das Thal der Liebenden – “The Valley of the Lovers” – a model of romantic irony? And the question now giving sleepless nights to the leading Fichte scholars: – is it possible to detect in Fichte’s unfinished novella from 1788 a prefiguring of the “A = A” of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/95? Or perhaps, of the nova methodo of the Wissenschaftslehre of 1798/99; or dare we say it, of the Königsberg Wissenschaftslehre of 1807, surely conceived under the Schwärmerei of the recently departed Kant?

Finally, the novella once and for all puts paid to the horrible rumour of Fichte’s inelegant writing style (apparently started by a jealous Schiller), and to the stereotype of a Fichte wanting to create the world from out of his own I (apparently started by the dastardly Hegel) – he obviously wanted to create it through the might of his own pen. In any event, we leave it for sober readers to judge for themselves. Rescuing the tale from undeserved oblivion, we are delighted to provide a first English translation of the beginning of Fichte’s The Valley of the Lovers:

In the most charming region of Veltelin, a stone’s throw from the frontier to Italy, lies a tiny valley – called ‘the valley of the lovers’. Its groves are crammed with berries, oranges and lemons, all of which flourish without being tended, infusing summer and winter with the most exquisite smells. A tiny myrtle forest is nestled in its centre, and within this tiny myrtle forest lies a large grave-mound, encircled by roses permanently in bloom. Over-arched by towering wooded mountains and fenced in by crags, a mortal eye seldom catches sight of it, and the erring foot of a hiker rarely wanders here. All but a handful have penetrated this far. They experienced something like a spiritual breath – the kisses of an angel, wafting against their cheeks; a tender longing filled their souls; and unbeknown, tears streamed from their eyes – it was altogether delicious for them! Images of departed friends or loved ones passed before their souls, and they were overcome with inklings of reunion, with premonitions of eternal life, as they glimpsed the five small flames on the grave-mound in the tiny myrtle forest, symbols of reunited faithfulness after death. ….

Shepherds relate how centuries earlier a young knight had strayed into these parts. Lost at night in the dense thickets, exhausted and famished, he spied afar a fire through the scrub. It belonged to some shepherds guarding their flock. The shepherds willingly shared their meagre meal with him as he warmed himself by the fire. “It’s howling again in those bushes”, said one, as he suddenly approached the group. “The ghost of the poor hermit is whimpering and wailing again! God knows, how my skin crawls whenever I pass by there.” And another replied, “Me too, I’d much prefer to make the one-hour detour. And yet, he was such a good and pious man, the hermit… (GA II/1: 267ff.)

With its cognitive rigor and unmistakable political subtext, we are mystified as to why German scholars have drawn parallels with Lucinde – Friedrich Schlegel’s outrage aux bonnes moeurs. In conclusion, we also recall Novalis’s nocturnal wanderings to Sophie’s grave – and his cry of anguish on failing to find “the idea of infinite love” in Fichte. Star-crossed conjunctions indeed for the Romantic School and the whole course of German literature – if only Fichte had mustered enough philosophical courage to finish and publish The Valley of the Lovers!

(In a subsequent instalment of Fichte and the Romantics we will consider Fichte’s own romantic poetry. Yes, Fichte’s poetry).