Kevin Harrelson

This essay examines the argumentative context in which early Neo-Kantian philosophers defined and defended "epistemology." The paper defends Richard Rorty's claim that the priority of epistemology influenced how the history of modern philosophy was written but corrects his story by showing that epistemology was defended mainly via antifoundational arguments. The essay begins with a few programmatic arguments by Kuno Fischer and Eduard Zeller but focuses mainly on Otto Liebmann's Kant und die Epigonen. I argue that Liebmann completes the agenda of Fischer and Zeller by giving a detailed account of how a metaphysical system is impossible for anyone who begins with modest, Kantian epistemological principles.

This article considers the implications of inferentialist philosophy of language for debates in the historiography of philosophy. My intention is to mediate and refine the polemics between contextualist historians and ‘analytic’ or presentist historians. I claim that much of Robert Brandom’s nuanced defence of presentism can be accepted and even adopted by contextualists, so that inferentialism turns out to provide an important justification for orthodox history of philosophy. In the concluding sections I argue that the application of Brandom’s theory has important limits, and that some polemics by contextualists against presentists are therefore justified.

In this paper I sketch some arguments that underlie Hegel's chapter on judgment, and I attempt to place them within a broad tradition in the history of logic. Focusing on his analysis of simple predicative assertions or ‘positive judgments’, I first argue that Hegel supplies an instructive alternative to the classical technique of existential quantification. The main advantage of his theory lies in his treatment of the ontological implications of judgments, implications that are inadequately captured by quantification. The second concern of this paper is the manner in which Hegel makes logic not only dependent on ontology generally, but also variant in regard to domains of objects. In other words, he offers a domain-specific logical theory, according to which the form of judgment or inference is specific to the subject of judgment. My third concern lies with the metaphilosophical consequences of this theory, and this includes some more familiar Hegelian themes. It is well known that Hegel frequently questioned the adequacy of the sentential form for expressing higher order truths. My reading of his theory of predication explains and contextualizes this tendency by demystifying notions like the so-called speculative proposition.