Angelica Nuzzo

This chapter takes us into the fundamental elements of Baumgarten’s metaphysical system, the concepts of “determination” and “determinability,” and shows how his specific formulation of these concepts was fateful for the development of later German philosophy. Nuzzo notes in particular that Baumgarten’s formulation of these ideas fundamentally structured three key moments in German thought: the public debate on the “Destiny of Mankind” (“_Bestimmung des Menschen_”—lit. “Determination of Mankind”), Salomon Maimon’s development of the “Principle of Determination,” and finally Georg Wilhelm Hegel’s discussion of being in his _Science of Logic_.

This chapter examines the relevance of the “absolute method” developed in Hegel’s _Science of Logic_ for his practical philosophy or philosophy of objective spirit. It argues, first, that the fruitfulness and vitality of Hegel’s practical philosophy as a whole depends in a fundamental way on two conditions, namely, (i) on its being conceived as part of a system of philosophy, and (ii) on its being based on the logic as the first part of the system. It argues, second, that the “absolute method” with which Hegel concludes the _Logic_ presents the structure of a “logic of action.” It follows that since the _Science of Logic_ itself is developed on the basis of the method, the logic is the foundational part of Hegel’s practical philosophy. Ultimately, the chapter contends that this is Hegel’s transformation and radicalization of Kant’s claim of the primacy of practical reason.

This essay analyzes the conceptual constellation that shapes the notion of “motive” in Fichte and Hegel. The discussion concerns the shift from the notion of motive as determination of the will to the idea of motive as value-determination of the action. While for Kant the will’s motive is the exclusive source of the moral validity of the action, the moral motive does not appear in the action. Opposing Kant, Fichte and Hegel conceive the motive of the will so that in order to be determination of the will (i.e., to actually move the will) the motive must become determination of the action. To function this way, however, motives must become “impure,” concrete, particular, themselves contextually determined by the particular social, political, juridical institutions from which they derive their moving force. This transformation leads from Kant’s pure moral philosophy to Fichte’s system of “concrete ethics” and to Hegel’s “philosophy of right.”

The chapter explores the role that different concepts of memory—_Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Andacht_—play in classical German philosophy. Authors such as Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel are central in this discussion. At stake is the thematization of memory across philosophical disciplines as different as psychology, logic, the philosophy of history and religion, and the philosophy of art. The aim of the chapter is also to show how this thematization connects with the fundamental philosophical issues of the time such as the issue concerning the structures of subjectivity—the “I,” self-consciousness, _Geist_—and its relation to objectivity; the problem of the foundation of philosophy and the nature of philosophy as science; the essence of artistic and poetic creativity; the moving principle of history.

The essay proposes to view Hegel's philosophical project as the provocatory task of “philosophizing without first principles.” Key to this view of the activity of philosophizing is Hegel's dialectic‐speculative method, which he establishes in contrast to Kant's transcendental philosophy and to the first principles of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre. The essay proposes two claims. The first is that dialectic‐speculative thinking is thinking without first principles; the second is that principles for theoretical and practical thinking and acting can be established only by that way of thinking, namely, dialectic‐speculative thinking, that can itself proceed without them (or is not determined or constrained by them). To put the point in a dialectical way: principles become necessary for thinking because thinking can dispense of them.

This chapter offers an overview of the development of Fichte’s conception of history, considered in the programmatic claims and principal challenges it entails from the early Jena Wissenschaftslehre, through the so-called popular writings and lectures, up to the later metaphysical views. The general guiding thread is the tension that sees Fichte’s philosophy of history suspended between the transcendental and foundationalist impetus of the Wissenschaftslehre and his attentiveness to and sensitivity for the empirical and material realm of human activity.

“Kant’s ‘Other Nature’” explores the “alternative” view of nature and cosmology that emerges in Kant’s Critique of Judgment to supplement the mechanistic or scientific view of the Critique of Pure Reason. The essay argues for a different intellectual approach to nature, namely, one based not on mechanistic causality but on the concept of “purposiveness.” This approach accounts for a nature and cosmos understood in terms of beauty and sublimity, individuality, and self-organizing beings. We find, then, an interaction between mind and nature as an aesthetic unity, as well as the idea of an aesthetic cosmos that provides the very possibility for the transcendental project. The essay extends this reading of Kant to Toulmin’s ideas of a “new cosmology,” offering a critical Kantian response to the current compartmentalization and specialization of the natural sciences. By way of conclusion, the essay argues that Kant’s transcendental perspective does allow for a concept of nature that has a value of its own, independently of human mental faculties. It is, then, within this broader nature that we can define ourselves.

This essay discusses the “cosmological” issue of the End in the second part of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. At stake is the problem of thinking, reflectively and according to the principle of nature’s formal purposiveness, the end of life and the end of Nature as a whole. The claim is that Kant’s transcendental investigation, generally oriented to the question of “origin,” labors to block out the issue of the End. This is particularly remarkable and indeed problematic in the Critique of Judgment, which is concerned thematically with the topic of life and living nature.