Christopher Yeomans

Is Heidegger a temporal idealist or a temporal realist? That is, does he believe that time is supplied by the human standpoint, or that we derive it from the structure of the world around us? Blattner makes a compelling case that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, but a failed one. Rousse, however, argues that Heidegger’s position is more promising when he is interpreted not as an unsuccessful idealist, but as an underdeveloped realist. In contrast, we offer arguments grounded in German Idealist treatments of time that Heidegger is a successful idealist who can derive sequential time from nonsequential human temporality.

It was not so long ago that the dominant picture of Kant’s practical philosophy was formalistic, focusing almost exclusively on his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. However, the overall picture of Kant’s wide-ranging philosophy has since been broadened and deepened. We now have a much more complete understanding of the range of Kant’s practical interests and of his contributions to areas as diverse as anthropology, pedagogy, and legal theory. What remains somewhat obscure, however, is how these different contributions hang together in the way that Kant suggests that they must. This book explores these different conceptions of humanity, morality, and legality in Kant as main ‘manifestations’ or ‘dimensions’ of practical normativity. These interrelated terms play a crucial role in highlighting different rational obligations, their source, and their applicability in the face of changing circumstances.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature begins with the concepts of space and time, and all of the concepts and phenomena that follow in the text are spatio-temporal. But the actual content of Hegel’s theory of space and time has remained obscure despite two centuries of interpretation, and obscure for at least two reasons. First, it is unclear how Hegel’s theory relates to those of his immediate predecessors (Newton, Leibniz, Kant) as well as other theories in the history of philosophy. Second, the theoretical function to be played by this theory of space and time has remained unclear. In this paper, we clarify the first issue by interpreting Hegel’s theory as a theory of space-time, and we clarify the second issue by interpreting that theory as securing the theoretical possibility of motion. Of course, it will not be the same theory of space-time as the one that proceeds from modern relativistic physics; but designating Hegel’s theory as a theory of space-time helps to mark it out from its most prominent predecessors and helps to make sense of some of its most distinctive features—particularly Hegel’s insistence that time has three dimensions just as space does. This latter feature—the three-dimensionality of time—serves to distinguish Hegel’s view both from the classical mechanics of Newton and Kant (in which time does not interact with the spatial directions) and from contemporary relativistic physics (in which there is such interaction but time is only a single dimension added to the spatial dimensions). In Hegelian space-time, three-dimensional time is the flip side of three-dimensional space—it is this conception that makes Hegel’s view so distinctive.

The Politics of German Idealism reconstructs the political philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel against the background of their social-historical context. The simple guiding thought of this study is to understand German Idealist political philosophy as political, that is, as a set of policy options and institutional designs aimed at a broadly but distinctively German set of social problems. ‘Political’ here refers to use of the state’s power to enforce law, and ‘social’ to the norms and groups that are regulated by that enforcement but which also antedate or exceed that enforcement. Because the power to enforce law is very much still being actualized by state-building in the period at issue, ‘political’ refers quite narrowly to a certain kind of practical legal project rather than to a perennial set of problems from the history of philosophy. By way of method, the author claims that to reveal the political nature of German Idealist political philosophy requires understanding German Idealism as both taking place in and conceptualizing its own historical present—this is the sense in which it is not only political, but political philosophy. The most important general feature of the historical present of the German Idealists is the way in which the period from 1770 to 1830 was one of transition between early and late modernity, a so-called saddle period (Sattelzeit) in which the metaphor is of a Bergsattel or shallow valley between two mountain peaks.

To oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic, in which teleology is introduced to solve a problem in the individuation of entities. It will turn out that the fullest actualization of the end is in the durable means, which is also thereby individuated. And it will turn out that the paradigmatic historical means—the state—is tensed, as it were, between the end and its realization that makes it synchronically historical. This synchronic historicity is missing in the usual progressive and thus diachronic accounts of the teleological process of history. But first we step back even farther (at least historically). We begin by taking up the two most important philosophical accounts of teleology for Hegel, namely those of Aristotle and Kant. Then we go to Hegel's Logic for his reconstruction of teleological processes against the background of the explanatory need for individuation. We focus on four aspects of Hegel's account: that teleology is a structure of reciprocal interaction, that the purpose is an immanent governing principle, that change is the price of immanence, and that the durable means is the teleological object par excellence. Finally, we trace these features through Hegel's account of world history and conclude with some brief remarks on the historicity of the state described in the Philosophy of Right.

Karen Ng's Hegel's Concept of Life tackles one of the hardest problems – the placement and status of the category of life within treatises on epistemology and logic—within what are already two of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. It does so with good attention to contemporary debates surrounding Hegel's logic and metaphysics, and manages to integrate concerns that have been more typically expressed in continental scholarship—such as the influence of Schelling and Hölderlin—with concerns that have come out of the more recent analytic conversation – such as the status of universals and the attributability of inferentialism to Hegel's thought. Ng argues for a distinctive kind of post‐Kantian reading of Hegel, one which emphasizes Hegel's interests in Kant's thoughts about judgment and teleology in the third Critique rather than the categories and dialectic of the first Critique. In the first section, I want to trace a tension in Ng's thought between inflationary and deflationary understandings of ‘life’ and its associated terms. Here I will try to make out the relevant concept of life that makes the living object the promising form of a richer object of judgment for a self‐conscious subject. In the following section, I try to tease out the relation of life to two very closely related notions, namely the notion of an organism and the notion of a purpose.

Although existing work draws attention to a range of obstacles in realizing fair AI, the field lacks an account that emphasizes how these worries hang together in a systematic way. Furthermore, a review of the fair AI and philosophical literature demonstrates the unsuitability of ‘treat like cases alike’ and other intuitive notions as conceptions of fairness. That review then generates three desiderata for a replacement conception of fairness valuable to AI research: (1) It must provide a meta-theory for understanding tradeoffs, entailing that it must be flexible enough to capture diverse species of objection to decisions. (2) It must not appeal to an impartial perspective (neutral data, objective data, or final arbiter.) (3) It must foreground the way in which judgments of fairness are sensitive to context, i.e., to historical and institutional states of affairs. We argue that a conception of fairness as appropriate concession in the historical iteration of institutional decisions meets these three desiderata. On the basis of this definition, we organize the insights of commentators into a process-structure map of the ethical territory that we hope will bring clarity to computer scientists and ethicists analyzing Fair AI while clearing some ground for further technical and philosophical work.

In this appreciation of Robert Pippin’s work, I focus on locating his project by focusing on the way that the inner-outer distinction in action receives a distinctive shape in modernity. I profile Pippin’s view of this momentous change as a middle path between those who see it primarily in historical terms (Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck) and those who see it in primarily linguistic terms (Robert Brandom and John McDowell). Pippin’s middle way has two aspects. First, purposiveness, rather than any specific goal, provides the speculative identity of inner and outer; this is the conceptual middle path. Second, Pippin thinks that the pattern of historical justification can be used in local arguments for specific institutions without having to defend either Hegel’s own justification for his proposed state much less his conceptualization of world history as a whole; this is the social or historical middle path.

In attempting to understand Hegel’s basic position on the modalities, the central thing to grasp is the precise nature of his modal realism. Hegel is adamant that possibility be understood as an actuality in its own right, and furthermore endorses a convergence of the modalities in which what is actual is equally possible and necessary. But Hegel gives an interpretation to these apparently realist claims that invokes neither possible worlds nor cognitive faculties, nor the fullness of time in which what is merely possible now is necessarily actual at some other time. His realism is rather an _expressivist_ realism, or a realism of _manifestation_. The actuality of the world is understood as the process through which the nature of the world is constantly expressing or manifesting itself, and so the modalities are taken to describe aspects of that process.

There are a number of questions, the answers to which define specific theoretical approaches to Hegel’s philosophy of action. To begin with, does Hegel attempt to give a theory of free will that responds to the naturalistic skepticism so prevalent in the history of modern philosophy? Though some scholars hold that he is interested in providing such a theory, perhaps the majority view is that Hegel instead socializes his conception of the will such that the traditional naturalistic worries are no longer germane.1 A second question is: does Hegel have a theory of action as such that competes with those found in the history of modern philosophy and more particularly in the Anglophone literature from the mid-20th century onwards? Though perhaps the majority view is that Hegel does have such a theory of action, it is commonly held to be independent of any commitments to a conception of free will, and to take a form radically different from the other offerings in the literature in virtue of introducing and essentially retrospective rather than prospective relation between the agent and her action.

Hegel on Philosophy in History is a Festschrift for Robert Pippin, one of the most important contemporary Hegel scholars. Pippin's importance has to do not only with the way in which he opened up the field of Hegel studies beginning in the 1980s, but also with the extraordinary number of other figures and discussions in philosophy with which he has brought Hegel's thought into connection. These aspects of Pippin's importance are connected, of course, since it is the latter that allowed the former to blossom into a whole field with wide-ranging discussions and a fruitful plurality of perspectives rather than to fade after a brief renaissance. Those Hegel scholars who have more recently...

In this paper I discuss two related ideas and cross-reference them, as it were, on the common ground of the Spinozistic text. First, I want to construct a Spinozistic account of domestic violence and a Spinozistic response to such violence. This will involve attempting to explicate the phenomenon (or at least one aspect of it, to be defined) through the terms and conceptual structure of Spinoza's Ethics. Second, I want to discuss a feminist reading (interpretation) of Spinoza, that of Luce Irigaray. The projects work together, as a better Spinozistic account requires a charitable reading of Spinoza to which Irigaray points the way. Irigaray will turn out to be more Spinozistic that Spinoza himself. In addition, the construction of a Spinozistic response to domestic violence will highlight the textual basis of Irigaray’s reading. It is hoped that this will contribute to making Irigaray’s reading accessible to philosophers trained in the analytic tradition. The undercurrent of both discussions will be an attempt to explicate and further what I take to be a shared moral insight in the late twentieth century, namely, that domestic violence, and particularly violence against women as wives and partners, is morally wrong.

It is fair to say that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of mathematics and his interpretation of the calculus in particular have not been popular topics of conversation since the early part of the twentieth century. Changes in mathematics in the late nineteenth century, the new set-theoretical approach to understanding its foundations, and the rise of a sympathetic philosophical logic have all conspired to give prior philosophies of mathematics (including Hegel's) the untimely appearance of naïveté. The common view was expressed by Bertrand Russell: The great [mathematicians] of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were so much impressed by the results of their new methods that they did not trouble to examine their foundations. Although their arguments were fallacious, a special Providence saw to it that their conclusions were more or less true. Hegel fastened upon the obscurities in the foundations of mathematics, turned them into dialectical contradictions, and resolved them by nonsensical syntheses. . . .The resulting puzzles [of mathematics] were all cleared up during the nineteenth century, not by heroic philosophical doctrines such as that of Kant or that of Hegel, but by patient attention to detail (1956, 368–69).

Nach Reinhart Koselleck nennen Historiker die Periode der deutschen Geschichte zwischen 1770 und 1830 ‚die Sattelzeit‘. So wird diese Periode mit einem Bergsattel verglichen, der zwei Gipfel miteinander verbindet, die hier für die frühe Neuzeit und die Moderne stehen. Überall in Deutschland ist diese Periode von tiefgreifenden Reformen der Gesetze und der Verwaltung geprägt. Im Folgenden beschränke ich mich in meiner Darlegung auf Preußen, weil das Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht von 1794 wahrscheinlich das wichtigste Dokument war, durch das diese Reformen in historischer Perspektive begriffen werden können.

Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance ourselves from the particular social institutions that gave conceptualized form to such sociality in Hegel’s own opinion. My attempt in this article is to make our position less awkward by giving us at least one social-ontological leg to stand on. Specifically, I want to defend a principled and conceptual pluralism as forming the heart of Hegel’s theory of action. If this view can be made out, then we will have a social-ontological structure that might be filled out in different ways in Hegel’s time and our own while simultaneously giving real teeth to the notion that Hegel’s theory of action is essentially social.

In this paper, I consider the role of perspective in Hegel’s metaphysics, and in particular the role that multiple perspectives play within the ultimate structure in Hegel’s metaphysics, which Hegel calls ‘the idea [die Idee].’ My (somewhat anachronistic) way into this topic will be to inquire about Hegel’s stance on what Adrian Moore has called ‘absolute representations.’ I argue for the claim that perspective is maintained, even in the absolute idea, which generates the task of understanding the nature of that perspective and its compatibility with absoluteness. I attempt to accomplish this task by asking what a logical perspective could be, and how it might be related to visual perspective. Then I inquire into the relation that perspectives have to each other, i.e., to the system of perspectives. I construe those relations in reciprocal and dynamic terms, so that absoluteness takes the form of a structured round of perspectives rather than a relation to reality “once and for all”.