Dietmar Heidemann

Hegel’s major claim is that true philosophy provides the complete rational cognition of the absolute. Since by definition the complete cognition of the absolute cannot be cognitively exceeded, true philosophy itself must account for the completeness claim. There are three places in particular where Hegel develops this claim: in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the Science of Logic and in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. I explore the different ways in which Hegel elucidates the rational, non-circular explication of how to philosophically conceive of the complete comprehension of philosophy itself, i.e., his philosophy of philosophy or metaphilosophy.

I argue that in his aesthetics, Kant puts forward arguments that help to answer the question of whether he is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist. The current debate on Kantian conceptualism and non-conceptualism has completely overlooked the importance of Kant’s aesthetics. There are two candidates for non-conceptuality in Kant’s aesthetics. First, non-conceptual content plays a crucial role in aesthetic evaluation. Second, non-conceptual content has a systematic explanatory function in the theory of aesthetic creation of the genius of art. Accordingly, my argument proceeds in two steps: In first analyse the role of non-conceptual content in aesthetic evaluation, i.e., Kant’s claim that aesthetic experience is cognition of a special kind that does not bear on conceptual activities. In then look at the role of non-conceptual content in the genius’s creation of artwork. I argue that art production does not imply conceptual activity and therefore seems to count as a second systematic instance of Kantian non-conceptualism. If my argument is correct, then Kant’s aesthetics implies non-conceptualism with respect to aesthetic evaluation but does not in any objective sense with respect to aesthetic creation.

„The paper discusses Kant’s first argument from space in the „Critique of pure Reason”. It argues that, contrary to what parts of the literature have claimed, the argument provides convincing reasons for the view that in order to locate objects in space outside us we must already presuppose the idea of space such that it cannot be borrowed from the objects perceived in space. The paper shows how the argument can be made transparent not only by clarifying Kant’s usage of “distinct from” and “ausser uns” but also by retracing its main idea back to the 1768 essay “Concerning the Ultimate Foundation of the Differentiation of Regions in Space” and its incongruent counterparts argument.”

The debate about Kantian conceptualism and non-conceptualism has completely overlooked the importance of Kant’s aesthetics. I show how this debate can be significantly advanced by exploring Kant’s aesthetics, that is, the theory of judgments of taste and the doctrine of the aesthetic genius of the third Critique. The analysis of judgments of taste demonstrates that non-conceptual mental content is a condition of the possibility of aesthetic experience. The subsequent discussion of the doctrine of the aesthetic genius reveals that aesthetic ideas must also be conceived in terms of non-conceptual mental content. I finally restrict Kant’s aesthetic non-conceptualism to the way aesthetic perceivers cognitively evaluate artwork, while the doctrine of the genius cannot count as a viable form of aesthetic non-conceptualism.

Conceptualism is the view that cognizers can have mental representations of the world only if they possess the adequate concepts by means of which they can specify what they represent. By contrast, non-conceptualism is the view that mental representations of the world do not necessarily presuppose concepts by means of which the content of these representations can be specified, thus cognizers can have mental representations of the world that are non-conceptual. Consequently, if conceptualism is true then non-conceptualism must be false, and vice versa. This incompatibility makes the current debate over conceptualism and non-conceptualism a fundamental controversy since the range of conceptual capacities that cognizers have certainly has an impact on their mental representations of the world, on how sense perception is structured, and how external world beliefs are justified. Conceptualists and non-conceptualists alike refer to Kant as the major authoritative reference point from which they start and develop their arguments. The appeal to Kant attempts to pave the way for a robust answer to the question of whether or not there is non-conceptual content. Since the incompatibility of the conceptualist and non-conceptualist readings of Kant indicate a paradigm case, hopes have risen that the answer to the question of whether Kant is a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist might settle the contemporary controversy across the board. This volume searches for that answer. This book is based on a special issue of the International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Subjectivity is one of the central philosophical problems in history and in the present. Following the editor's general introduction, fourteen contributions cast light on the problem in diverse philosophical fields - and do so from both systematic and historical perspectives. The essays provide a comprehensive survey of the discussion that has been conducted with renewed vigor for several years in the realm of the philosophy of subjectivity. Subjektivitat ist eines der zentralen philosophischen Probleme in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Im Anschluss an eine allgemeine Einleitung des Herausgebers beleuchten vierzehn Beitrage Subjektivitat auf den verschiedenen philosophischen Problemfeldern - sowohl aus systematischer als auch aus historischer Perspektive.