Tom Rockmore

It is appropriate to ask about the prospects for metaphysics at the present time as we near the end of a century in which, perhaps more than at any other moment in its long history, metaphysics has been under persistent, unrelenting attack. The traditional concern with metaphysics is very old, depending on the definition, as old as philosophy, even its main theme. Depending on the point of view, much is at stake in the continued viability of metaphysics, including the viability of a central philosophical theme or even the very viability of philosophy itself as a meaningful enterprise.

The German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, has long been recognized as an important and original figure in the history of philosophy and Western thought and as a seminal influence upon the Romantic tradition. This book focuses on Fichte's contributions in political theory as set out in his Foundations of Natural Right. The essays, which examine such issues as Fichte as a social contract theorist, his theory of gender relations and his theories on punishment and the criminal law among many other topics, remedy what has been a striking lacuna in the existing scholarly literature.

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 examines the distinction between materialism (or realism) and idealism, which to the best of my knowledge all forms of Marxism regard as central to Marx as well as to Marxism. Materialism comes into ancient philosophy as a philosophical approach to philosophy of nature, which later becomes a philosophical alternative to idealism, and still later becomes a Marxist view of an extra-philosophical, scientific approach supposedly illustrated by Marx. The paper will review Marxist approaches to materialism in Marxism-Leninism and then in classical Marxism before turning to Marx, with special attention to the Paris Manuscripts. I will suggest that if “materialism” is understood in a standard manner as referring to the priority of matter as the main or even the sole explanatory element, then Marx’s alleged materialism is no more than a Marxist myth. I will further suggest that Marx is a materialist in another, non-standard sense of the term as concerns the focus on concrete, social problems.

Philosophy, which does not begin again, always unfolds against the background of the ongoing philosophical tradition, which it needs to interpret. I argue that Heidegger’s theories, like all philosophical theories, can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the historical context. In that sense they are like all other philosophical views, perhaps in theory ahistorical but in practice historical, hence always bound up with and inseparable from their historical moment. If, as I believe, Heidegger’s theories led him in part toward National Socialism, there is no alternative, if philosophy is to survive in a meaningful sense, to rejecting those aspects of his position, which must now be considered as simply and wholly dead, in favor of other aspects of Heidegger’s thinking that, if they are still living, can possibly be saved.

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.