Tom Rockmore

In this book—the first large-scale survey of the complex relationship between Hegel’s idealism and Anglo-American analytic philosophy—Tom Rockmore argues that analytic philosophy has consistently misread and misappropriated Hegel. According to Rockmore, the first generation of British analytic philosophers to engage Hegel possessed a limited understanding of his philosophy and of idealism. Succeeding generations continued to misinterpret him, and recent analytic thinkers have turned Hegel into a pragmatist by ignoring his idealism. Rockmore explains why this has happened, defends Hegel’s idealism, and points out the ways that Hegel is a key figure for analytic concerns, focusing in particular on the fact that he and analytic philosophers both share an interest in the problem of knowledge

With few exceptions, philosophers typically have contended that knowledge worthy of the name is beyond time and place. This venerable idea was turned on its head in the emergence of a rival view of knowledge as historical in the wake of the French Revolution. A claim that knowledge is not ahistorical but historical resolves some of these difficulties while creating others. This paper will briefly consider several of these difficulties, including how to argue for this position, the differences between contextualism, or a view of knowledge as cultural, and historicism, as well as issues concerning relativism and cognitive objectivity. It will argue that after the decline of foundationalism, a conception of knowledge as historical is our most promising approach.

Fichte is one of the small handful of philosophers on the highest level. But he is still relatively unknown, even in Germany, for a variety of reasons. These include the difficulty of his thought and its expression, which impedes even native Germans; the relatively greater attention paid to Kant and Hegel, and perhaps even to Schelling; and the lack of a critical edition of his writings. In English-language philosophical circles, beyond these handicaps, knowledge of Fichte is further impeded by the persistent paucity of good, or even any, translations of important items in his bibliography.

The philosophical thought of J. G. Fichte, particularly his later work, is at the very center of the paradigm shift under way in the field of German idealism. Crucial to this reassessment is Fichte's _Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo_ of 1796 to 1799, the manuscript at the heart of this essay colleciton and an articulation of the philosopher's _Wissenschaftslehre,_ or overall system of philosophy, which he discussed in lectures at the University of Jena. Coherent, comprehensive, and edited by two of the foremost Fichte scholars in the world, the essays provide a much needed introduction to the major themes of the most important period of Fichte's philosophical thought--and thus to German idealism itself--and make a persuasive case for the originality and continuing significance of the later Jena _Wissenschaftslehre._

Il sera question ici d’examiner le constructivisme hégélien, relativement au problème épistémologique. Le constructivisme, comme concept mathématique, est basé sur la construction de l’objet et remonte à l’antiquité grecque. Le constructivisme philosophique, par contre, est un concept moderne qui applique cette stratégie mathématique au problème de la connaissance. La forme hégélienne, omniprésente dans ses écrits, ne semble jamais avoir reçu l’attention qu’elle mérite. Elle se laisse pourtant examiner par rapport au constructivisme de Kant, parfois étudié sous le terme de révolution copernicienne. J’esquisserai donc la façon dont Hegel transforme une approche a priori et apodictique en procédé a posteriori et faillible. Le constructivisme hégélien offre ainsi des possibilités encore peu connues mais prometteuses pour le débat épistémologique.

It is a fact that Hegel’s immense presence, and above all his own self-serving reading of the history of philosophy as leading up to his own position, has tended to detract attention from other views. Hegel’s position consciously builds upon its predecessors. If philosophy culminates in Hegel’s thought, then other theories are mainly valuable in that they survive as lower moments of the Hegelian synthesis. Hegel insists that he takes up what is positive in prior views. Hence, the mere fact that an earlier idea does not reappear in Hegelian guise is an indication that it is unworthy of further attention.

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.