Sebastian Rödl

The paper is an idealist attempt at reconciling the tension between the historical, time-bound emergence of metaphysical truths and their timeless validity. Proceeding from the Aristotelian definition of metaphysics as a science which studies being insofar as it is being, and from Plato’s notion from the Theaetetus that the soul does not grasp being by way of an organ but only through itself, the paper defines knowledge of what is insofar as it is as the knowledge of the absolute, hence, an absolute knowledge. Nevertheless, metaphysics passes through a contingent process of being constituted by persons living in a certain society under certain material conditions; in short, metaphysics possesses a history. Thus, a judgment which apprehends itself through itself, hence, a judgment on being qua being, does not lie outside time, but performs a perpetual annihilation of time and its difference between this and that temporal existence thinking it.

This essay critically analyzes Barry Stroud’s book Metaphysical Dissatisfaction. With reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Rödl challenges Stroud’s claim of an inherent dialectic of knowledge and dissatisfaction internal to the project of metaphysics as a systematic knowledge of what is insofar as it is. According to Rödl, Stroud takes metaphysics to be the endeavor of comparing the ways in which we think with what is in order to establish whether we, as we think in these ways, can actually grasp what is as well. But this construal of metaphysics makes it appear that there are two things, independently described and subsequently compared: i) how we think, and ii) how what is is, as we are thinking it. According to Rödl, Stroud is right to hold that metaphysics (i. e. the science of what is, insofar as it is) investigates being and thinking. But metaphysics does not investigate a relationship between the two. Rather, metaphysics arises from thought, from the kind of understanding of its object that thought itself is.

The essay represents teaching as the coming to be of the human individual. In order to do so, it reflects on the character of human life by which it is knowledge of itself. Being knowledge of itself, human life is self-determining or free. Therefore generality and particularity come together in the human being in a distinctive way: a human being is not an exemplar, instance or specimen of a species, nature or life-form. Rather, she is her own principle. This is captured in the idea of the human being as an individual. The essay reveals teaching to be the form of coming to be which is proper to what is an individual in this sense. In this way, the essay shows teaching to be internal to human freedom.

In Barry Stroud’s book Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction, the eponymous dissatisfaction is said to be due to our inability to obtain certainty about the correspondence between the world and our ways of thinking it. In Stroud’s terms, this dissatisfaction is caused by the failure of the metaphysical enterprise. Beginning with Aristotle’s metaphysics, this paper discusses Stroud’s misunderstanding which stems from his particular construal of the object of metaphysics: There is no metaphysical enterprise and thus, there can be no metaphysical dissatisfaction.

The first part of this essay develops the idea of logic as the science of thought, articulating, and thus being, the self-consciousness of thought. It explains that logic, so understood, is nothing other than metaphysics, the science of what is in so far as it is. Self-consciousness, then, thought itself, is not empty, but the source of all content. The second part of the essay discusses the opening paragraphs of Hegel’sScience of Logic; it shows how, in these paragraphs, thought is revealed to be the source of its own content in virtue of its original negativity. Thus the second part begins to make concrete the idea of logic provided by the first.

Kant asserts that the formula of the schools “nihil appetimus, nisi sub ratione boni” is undoubtedly certain when clearly expressed. Conversely, doubt reflects a failure clearly to express it. Once we comprehend the concepts of the formula, of the good and of desire, there is no doubting it. In recent times, the formula has fallen into doubt. If Kant is right, then this shows a lack of clarity with respect to the concepts the formula conjoins. I want to suggest that Kant is right: the formula of the schools is undoubtedly certain. I first explain in Kant’s own terms why there is no such thing as doubting the formula. Then I approach it from a different angle, provided by what I take to be the unclarity that affects current thought on the topic.

The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from offering an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time.

The essay develops a disjunctive account of perception, showing that it needs to be renamed 'self-conscious power account'. For it is by reference to a self-conscious power of sensory knowledge that, on the one hand, the unity of perception and illusion and, on the other hand, the priority of perception over illusion, specifically, its priority in knowledge, is understood. The concept of a self-conscious power thus transpires as lying at the basis of a sound epistemology and response to sceptical arguments such as the argument from illusion