-
193‘All is Act, Movement, and Life’: Fichte’s Idealism as ImmortalismIn Luca Corti & Johannes-Georg Schuelein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature: New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 121-139. 2023.In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or living power enables his p…Read more
-
Fichte and the Primacy of Practical ReasonIn Jeffery Kinlaw (ed.), Fichte’s Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. forthcoming.
-
599From being to acting: Kant and Fichte on intellectual intuitionBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (4): 762-783. 2022.Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that r…Read more
-
262Logical and Moral Aliens Within Us: Kant on Theoretical and Practical Self-ConceitIn Jens Pier (ed.), Limits of Intelligibility: Issues from Kant and Wittgenstein, Routledge. 2023.This chapter intervenes in recent debates in Kant scholarship about the possibility of a general logical alien. Such an alien is a thinker whose laws of thinking violate ours. She is third-personal as she is radically unlike us. Proponents of the constitutive reading of Kant’s conception of general logic accordingly suggest that Kant rules out the possibility of such an alien as unthinkable. I add to this an often-overlooked element in Kant’s thinking: there is reason to think that he grants—and…Read more
-
346'From Time into Eternity': Schelling on Intellectual IntuitionPhilosophy Compass 1 (4). 2023.Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism…Read more
-
268Schelling, Cavell, and the Truth of SkepticismJournal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 9 (9). 2021.This paper argues that McDowell wrongly assumes that “terror”, Cavell’s reaction to the radical contingency of our shared modes of knowing or our “attunement”, expresses a skepticism that is antinomically bound to an equally unacceptable dogmatism because Cavell rather regards terror as a mood that reveals the “truth of skepticism”, namely, that there is no conclusive evidence for necessary attunement on pain of a category error, and that a precedent for McDowell’s misunderstanding is Hegel’s ar…Read more
-
Facticity and the Fate of Reason After KantOxford University Press. forthcoming.Kant’s science of the conditions of intelligibility leaves post-Kantians with a question: can a science of intelligibility tolerate brute facts? ‘Facticity’ is associated with phenomenology, for which the concept denotes underivable or brute conditions of intelligibility like temporality, sociality, and embodiment. While this suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question, scholars overlook that ‘facticity’ is a concept from German idealism, whose proponents answer the question in t…Read more
-
130Review of Reason and Conversion in Kierkegaard and the German Idealists, Ryan S. Kemp and Christopher Iacovetti (review)Kantian Review 27 (1): 169-173. 2022.
-
437Hiatus Irrationalis: Lask’s Fateful Misreading of FichteEuropean Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 977-995. 2022.‘Facticity’ is a concept that classical phenomenologists like Heidegger use to denote the radically contingent or underivably brute conditions of intelligibility. Yet Fichte coins the term, to which he gives the opposing use of denoting unacceptably brute conditions of intelligibility. For him, radical contingency is a problem to be solved by deriving such conditions from reason. Heidegger rejects Fichte's recoil from facticity with his hermeneutics of facticity, supplanting Fichte's metaphor of…Read more
-
241Quietism, Dialetheism, and the Three Moments of Hegel's LogicIn Robb Dunphy & Toby Lovat (eds.), Metaphysics as a Science in Classical German Philosophy, Routledge. 2023.The history of philosophy risks a self-opacity whereby we overestimate or underestimate our proximity to prior modes of thinking. This risk is relevant to assessing Hegel’s appropriation by McDowell and Priest. McDowell enlists Hegel for a quietist answer to the problem with assuming that concepts and reality belong to different orders, viz., how concepts are answerable to the world. If we accept Hegel’s absolute idealist view that the conceptual is boundless, this problem allegedly dissolves. P…Read more
-
437Facticity and Genesis: Tracking Fichte’s Method in the Berlin WissenschaftslehreFichte-Studien 49 177-97. 2021.The concept of facticity denotes conditions of experience whose necessity is not logical yet whose contingency is not empirical. Although often associated with Heidegger, Fichte coins ‘facticity’ in his Berlin period to refer to the conclusion of Kant’s metaphysical deduction of the categories, which he argues leaves it a contingent matter that we have the conditions of experience that we do. Such rhapsodic or factical conditions, he argues, must follow necessarily, independent of empirical give…Read more
-
187Post-Kantian Idealism and Self-TransformationIn G. Anthony Bruno & Justin Vlasits (eds.), Transformation and the History of Philosophy, Routledge. 2023.While the idea that philosophy requires self-transformation is historically pervasive, it exerts considerable influence on the post-Kantians who first aim to systematize Kant’s idealism by grounding it on a first principle. In the 1790s, Fichte and Schelling offer competing accounts of the self-transformation that they regard as essential to positing a first principle. Their accounts raise two central questions. First, what makes this kind of self-transformation possible? Second, are there diffe…Read more
-
202Transformation and the History of Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2023.From ancient conceptions of becoming a philosopher to modern discussions of psychedelic drugs, the concept of transformation plays a fascinating part in the history of philosophy. However, until now there has been no sustained exploration of the full extent of its role. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is an outstanding survey of the history, nature, and development of the idea of transformation, from the ancient period to the twentieth century. Comprising twenty-two specially commis…Read more
-
335Jacobi’s Dare: McDowell, Meillassoux, and Consistent IdealismIn Dominik Finkelde & Paul M. Livingston (eds.), Idealism, Relativism, and Realism: New Essays on Objectivity Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide, De Gruyter. pp. 35-56. 2020.Does Kant’s restriction of knowledge to phenomena undermine objectivity? Jacobi argues that it does, daring the transcendental idealist to abandon the thing in itself and embrace the “strongest idealism”. According to Bruno, McDowell and Meillassoux adopt a similar critique of Kant’s conception of objectivity and, more significantly, echo Jacobi’s dare to profess the strongest idealism – what McDowell approvingly calls “consistent idealism” and Meillassoux disparagingly calls “extreme idealism”.…Read more
-
397Schelling on the Unconditioned Condition of the WorldIn Thomas Buchheim, Thomas Frisch & Nora Wachsmann (eds.), Schellings Freiheitsschrift - Methode, System, Kritik, Mohr Siebeck. 2021.In the Freedom essay, Schelling charges that (1) idealism fails to grasp human freedom’s distinctiveness and that (2) this failure undermines idealism's attempt to refute pantheism, as exemplified by Spinoza. This raises two questions, which I will answer in turn: what, for Schelling, is distinctive of human freedom; and how does the idealists’ failure to grasp it render them unable to refute pantheism? To answer these questions, I will reconstruct Schelling’s argument that freedom has the disti…Read more
-
171A precursor to the hard problem of consciousness confronts nihilism. Like physicalism, nihilism collides with the first-personal fact of what perception and action are like. Unless this problem is solved, nature’s inclusion of conscious experience will remain, as Chalmers warns the physicalist, an “unanswered question” and, as Jacobi chides the nihilist, “completely inexplicable". One advantage of Kant’s Copernican turn is to dismiss the question that imposes this hard problem. We need not ask h…Read more
-
168Review of Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, Omri Boehm (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1 (x). 2014.
-
186Review of Interpreting Schelling: Critical Essays, ed. Lara Ostaric (review)Critique 1 (x). 2016.
-
667Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Doctrine and CritiqueIn María Del Del Rosario Acosta López & Colin McQuillan (eds.), Critique in German Philosophy: From Kant to Critical Theory, Suny Press. pp. 133-154. 2020.Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. …Read more
-
183Skepticism, Deduction, and Reason’s MaturationIn G. Anthony Bruno & A. C. Rutherford (eds.), Skepticism: Historical and Contemporary Inquiries, Routledge. pp. 203-19. 2018.A puzzle arises when we consider that, for Kant, the categories are 'original acquisitions' of our understanding to which we must nevertheless prove our entitlement via 'deduction', on pain of dogmatism. I resolve this puzzle by articulating skepticism’s role in the transcendental deduction, drawing on Kant’s construal of the skeptical 'question quid juris' in the juridical terms of entitlement to property. I then situate skepticism’s transformative potential within what Kant regards as reason’s…Read more
-
235Determinacy, Indeterminacy, and Contingency in German IdealismIn Robert H. Scott (ed.), The Significance of Indeterminacy: Perspectives From Asian and Continental Philosophy, Routledge. 2018.This paper addresses debates in German idealism that arise in response to the modal shift in logic, proposed by Kant, from a logic of thinking to a logic of experience. With the Kantian logic of experience arises a problem of radical contingency or 'rhapsodic determination' for logic. While Fichte and Hegel attempt to resolve the problem of contingency by constructing rational systems aimed at established the grounds for logic, I show how Schelling brings into view, in a proto-existentialist mov…Read more
-
Schelling’s Question Quid JurisIn McGrath Sean & Bruff Kyla (eds.), The Palgrave Schelling Handbook, Palgrave. forthcoming.
-
174The Facticity of Time: Conceiving Schelling’s Idealism of AgesIn Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity, Oxford University Press. 2020.Scholars agree that Schelling’s critique of Hegel consists in charging reason with an inability to account for its own possibility. This is not an attack on reason’s project of constructing a logical system, but rather on the pretense of doing so with complete justification and so without presuppositions, as if it were obvious why there is a logical system or why there is anything meaningful at all. Scholars accordingly cite the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ as emblematic…Read more
-
198Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2020.Despite F. W. J. Schelling’s relative exclusion from the ongoing German idealist renaissance in Anglophone scholarship, recent critical and historical engagement with idealist texts affords an unprecedented opportunity to discover the richness and value of his thinking. This volume provides a wide-ranging presentation of Schelling’s original contribution to and internal critique of the basic insights of German idealism, his role in shaping the course of post-Kantian thought, and his sensitivity …Read more
-
352Empirical Realism and the Great Outdoors: A Critique of MeillassouxIn Marie-Eve Morin (ed.), Continental Realism and its Discontents, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 1-15. 2017.Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the…Read more
-
449Freedom and Pluralism in Schelling’s Critique of Fichte’s Jena WissenschaftslehreIdealistic Studies 43 (1-2): 71-86. 2013.Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is …Read more
-
301Varieties of Transcendental Idealism: Kant and Heidegger Thinking Beyond LifeIdealistic Studies 45 (1): 81-102. 2015.In recent work, William Blattner claims that Heidegger is an empirical realist, but not a transcendental idealist. Blattner argues that, unlike Kant, Heidegger holds that thinking beyond human life warrants no judgment about nature's existence. This poses two problems. One is interpretive: Blattner misreads Kant's conception of the beyond-life as yielding the judgment that nature does not exist, for Kant shares Heidegger's view that such a judgment must lack sense. Another is programmatic: Blatt…Read more
-
311Meillassoux, Correlationism, and the Ontological DifferencePhaenEx 12 (2): 1-12. 2018.Meillassoux defines “correlationism” as the view that we can only access the mutual dependence of thought and being—specifically, subjectivity and objectivity—which he attributes to Heidegger. This attribution is inapt. It is only by accessing being—via existential analysis—that we can properly distinguish beings like subjects and objects. I propose that Meillassoux’s misattribution ignores the ontological difference that drives Heidegger’s project. First, I demonstrate the inadequacy of Meillas…Read more
London, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
2 more
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
19th Century Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |