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".

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.

Schelling and Hegel Bibliographies

Below are some links to bibliographies which are fairly extensive:

Schelling

Hegel

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Wiki)

The bibliography for the Phenomenology is a wiki page, so you can add things that might be missing.

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.

Fichte-Kongress 2009

Below is some info about the Fichte-Kongress 2009 (site in German).The Internationalen Fichte-Gesellschaft and Internationalen Schelling-Gesellschaft are co-hosting a conference on "Fichte and Schelling: Idealism in Discussion" October 7-9, 2009 in Belgium at Académie Royale des sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. The conference is in German, English, and French, but written contributions can also be in Italian and Spanish.

If you want to participate you must register and submit the title of your presentation by May 15, 2009. Texts for contributions must be received by 30 June 2009 at the latest. Conference email: fichteschellingkongress@gmail.com.

Here are the workshop themes and topics:

1) The Concept of Philosophy (i.e. transcendental philosophy, system, identity etc.).

2) Naturphilosophie (teleology, imagination, life-force, Spinozism)
3) Aesthetics
4) Philosophy of Religion
5) Late Philosophy in Comparison
6) Experience of the Groundless and the Irrational
7) Political and Social Conceptions
8) Freedom in Philosophy
9) Fichte and Schelling and Contemporary Philosophy

(a. The Romantics, b. 20th century philosophy, e.g. Husserl and Heidegger)

You will of course find more details at this website about possible topics and how to register and submit. Thanks to David Wood for the heads up.

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.