Guenter Zoeller

The paper assesses Martin’s recent logico-phenomenological account of judgment that is cast in the form of an eclectic history of judging, from Hume and Kant through the 19th century to Frege and Heidegger as well as current neuroscience. After a preliminary discussion of the complex unity and temporal modalities of judgment that draws on a reading of Titian’s “Allegory of Prudence”, the remainder of the paper focuses on Martin’s views on Kant’s logic in general and his theory of singular existential judgment in particular. The paper argues against Martin’s key claims of the primacy of formal logic over transcendental logic and of the synthetic nature of judgment in Kant. It also takes issue with each of the four interpretations of singular existential judgment in Kant offered by Martin: existence as logical predicate, as copula, as thesis and as logical subject.

Fichte hat nur eine, die allererste und nicht einmal förmlich zum Abschluß gebrachte, Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre publiziert, doch in den nächsten knapp zwei Jahrzehnten bis zu seinem Tod im Januar 1814 die Wissenschaftslehre noch insgesamt fünfzehn Mal öffentlich vorgetragen und dabei dreizehn Mal neu oder verändert dargestellt. Hinzukommen noch drei umfangreiche Ausarbeitungen, die den öffentlichen Vortrag der Wissenschaftslehre vorbereiten bzw. begleiten: »Eigne Meditationen über ElementarPhilosophie« aus den Jahren 1793-94, die Aufzeichnungen betitelt »Seit d. 1.April 1808. nach den Reden an die deutsche Nation« aus dem Jahre 1808 und wesentliche Teile der als Diarium geführten Notate aus den Jahren 1813 und 1814. Nur wenige von Fichtes Zeitgenossen - praktisch nur die Zuhörer seiner fortgesetzten Vorlesungen über die Wissenschaftslehre in Berlin, Erlangen und Königsberg - haben diese öffentlichen, aber unveröffentlichten Arbeiten zur Kenntnis nehmen können.

Allerdings findet sich die transzendentale Theorie bei Kant in einiger Verlegenheit, wenn es darumgeht, den Status der apriorischen Bedingungen von Erfahrung positiv zu bestimmen. Reine Anschauung und reines Denken werden als Formelemente aller Erfahrung bzw. von deren Gegenständen verstanden. Die Empirie ist demzufolge ein Kompositum von aposteriorischem Material und apriorischer Form. Kants formalistische Auffassung der transzendentalen Bedingungen von Erfahrung läßt nun das eigentliche Zustandekommen der reinen Formen und den ihrer Formfunktion zugrundeliegenden Status ungeklärt. Mehr noch, Kants Verfahren überträgt die problematische Natur des transzendentalen Bedingungsgefüges auf das von letzterem durch Formpräsenz Begründete. Das in die Erfahrung formend eingegangene reine Anschauen und Denken ist selber keine Erfahrung und scheint auch das dadurch Geformte, die Erfahrung, in den nicht zureichend geklärten Bereich des Nicht-Empirischen hinüberzuziehen.

This is the first book in English on the major works of the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It examines the transcendental theory of self and world from the writings of Fichte's most influential period, and considers in detail recently discovered lectures on the Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy. At the center of that body of work stands Fichte's attempt to integrate the theories of volition and cognition into a unified but complex 'system of freedom'. The focus of this book is the intricate interplay between thinking and willing in the birth of experience out of the spirit of freedom. Combining incomparable erudition, sensitive readings of some of the most difficult of philosophical texts, clarity in exposition and an acute awareness of historical context this book takes its place as the ideal introduction to Fichte's thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this immense opus. There are also several commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal...

Since 1962 a group of researchers at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Reinhard Lauth has been publishing the collected works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The Academy edition proceeds chronologically in four parallel series: series 1 contains the works published by Fichte himself; series 2 contains unpublished works; series 3 contains the correspondence; and series 4 contains transcripts of Fichte’s lectures from other hands. The edition is now nearing completion. No other philosophical editorial project worldwide can match it in terms of scope and execution.