Tom Rockmore

Johann Gottlieb Fichte is a widely known transcendental philosopher and obviously a thinker of the first rank. Yet contemporary interest in and evaluation of "transcendental philosophy" as well as the precise meaning of the terms and its relation to "transcendental method" remains unclear. With renewed attention to German idealism in general and to Fichte in particular, this timely collection of new papers will be of interest to anyone concerned with transcendental philosophy, German idealism, modern German philosophy, and transcendental arguments.

This paper concerns the nature and a significance of metaphilosophy with special attention to German idealism. Metaphilosophy, or the philosophy of philosophy, is understood differently from different perspectives, for instance, if philosophy concerns the consciousness of the object, as the self-consciousness of the knowing process. If we assume that the Western philosophical tradition consists in a long series of efforts to demonstrate claims to know, then metaphilosophy is not present in the ancient Greek tradition. It only arises in the modern tradition through the turn from a theory of knowledge that depends on consciousness, more precisely consciousness of the independent object, to a theory of knowledge that depends on self-consciousness, more precisely consciousness of the independent object as well as consciousness of consciousness of the independent object.

German Idealism as Constructivism is the culmination of many years of research by distinguished philosopher Tom Rockmore—it is his definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism that still plagues our grasp of the history of German idealism and the whole epistemological project today. Rockmore argues that German idealism—which includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—can best be understood as a constructivist project, one that asserts that we cannot know the mind-independent world as it is but only our own mental construction of it. Since ancient Greece philosophers have tried to know the world in itself, an effort that Kant believed had failed. His alternative strategy—which came to be known as the Copernican revolution—was that the world as we experience and know it depends on the mind. Rockmore shows that this project was central to Kant’s critical philosophy and the later German idealists who would follow him. He traces the different ways philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel formulated their own versions of constructivism. Offering a sweeping but deeply attuned analysis of a crucial part of the legacy of German idealism, Rockmore reinvigorates this school of philosophy and opens up promising new avenues for its study.

Metaphysical realism, though not under that name, runs throughout the entire Western tradition at least since Parmenides. His basic ontological claim, that is, that what is is and cannot not be, hence cannot change, influentially creates a central philosophical task. Cognitive foundationalism, whose exemplar is Descartes, is a cognitive strategy intended to respond to metaphysical realism. Plato rejects any form of a representational approach to knowledge in rejecting the backward causal inference from ideas in the mind to the world. The Cartesian strategy is based on a justified inference from the idea in the mind to the world, which reverses the Platonic criticism. Criticism of the Cartesian inference from the idea in the mind to the world supports Plato’s rejection of representationalism in all its forms.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action.

Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death. With Marx’s Dream, Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed alternative view, distinguishing rigorously between Marx and Marxism. Rockmore breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in three key ways. First, he shows that the concern with the relation of theory to practice—reflected in Marx’s famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world, while the point is to change it—arose as early as Socrates, and has been central to philosophy in its best moments. Second, he seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. And, crucially, Rockmore relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, without the special pleading to which Marxist accounts too often resort. Marx’s failures as a thinker, Rockmore shows, lie less in his diagnosis of industrial capitalism’s problems than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound. ​ Only a philosopher of Rockmore’s stature could tackle a project this substantial, and the results are remarkable: a fresh Marx, unencumbered by doctrine and full of insights that remain salient today.

These original essays, never published before, suggest the breadth and richness of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophy and are signs of the contemporary effort to explore the relationship between his system of thought and current philosophical debates. Some of the issues discussed included the relationship between "theoretical" and "practical" reason; the philosophy of language; antifoundationalism; the juridical status of women; duties toward natural beings; and the political implications of the Wissenschaftslehre. In addition, the volume includes an introduciton that surveys the history of Fichte interpretation in the English-speaking world and assesses the current state of Fichte studies.

Distinguished scholar and philosopher Tom Rockmore examines one of the great lacunae of contemporary philosophical discussion—idealism. Addressing the widespread confusion about the meaning and use of the term, he surveys and classifies some of its major forms, giving particular attention to Kant. He argues that Kant provides the all-important link between three main types of idealism: those associated with Plato, the new way of ideas, and German idealism. The author also makes a case for the contemporary relevance of at least one strand in the tangled idealist web, a strand most clearly identified with Kant: constructivism. In terms of the philosophical tradition, Rockmore contends, constructivism offers a lively, interesting, and important approach to knowledge after the decline of metaphysical realism.

Heidegger’s Being and Time has been accused of espousing empty decisionism and relativism. I argue, first, that in fact Being and Time’s stress on the situated character of human judgment is supplemented by a very Kantian account of being human that defi nes appropriate behavior towards all entities possessing a certain character. Its analysis of conscience and guilt attempts to uncover the existential basis for the distinction Kant draws between the phenomenal and the noumenal aspects of the self. Building on this analysis, I claim, Being and Time reaffirms the second version of Kant’s categorical imperative, which states that humanity should never be treated merely as a means, but always also as an end in itself. In the second part of the paper, however, I argue that this proximity to Kant is part of the problem with Being and Time, that some of this work’s shortcomings and dangers in relation to ethics rest precisely in its very Kantian view of what makes an entity worthy of moral concern, and what is owed to others in virtue of their being such worthy entities. As a consequence of this view, not only are all nonhuman animals excluded from moral concern, but, strangely, the intrinsic value of human well-being is itself threatened.

A systematic and historical study of the rela­tion of the positions of Fichte and Marx within the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy as well as the wider his­tory of philosophy. Rockmore’s thesis is that there is a little noticed, less often studied, but nevertheless profound structural parallel between the two positions that can be shown to be mediated through the development of the nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition. Both positions understand man in anti-Car­tesian fashion, not as a spectator, but as an active being. Rockmore demonstrates that there is similarity of the two views of activity in terms of the Aristotelian concept __,_ _then indicates the further parallel be­tween the respective concepts of man that fol­low from Fichte’s and Marx’s views of activity. Turning to the history of philosophy, Rockmore directs the reader to solid textual evidence supporting the influence of Fichte, not only on Marx’s Young Hegelian contem­poraries but on Marx as well. He argues that the Hegelian impact on the interpretation of the nineteenth-century philosophical tradi­tion has served to obscure the parallel be­tween the positions of Fichte and Marx, but that the concept of man as an active being can be used to reinterpret this segment of the history of philosophy and to modify the fre­quently held view of the classical German tradition as a collection of rather disparate thinkers. Finally, he provides a discussion of the intrinsic value of the anti-Cartesian ap­proach to man as such