Daniel Dahlstrom

Challenging art historians' scientific pretensions as well as their neglect of theoretical questions, the author traces art history's development from the turn of the century by critically reviewing the early and lesser known writings of Erwin Panofsky, "the most influential art historian in the twentieth century." In a brief sketch of art history's nineteenth century roots, the first chapter reviews what is retained and what is discarded in Hegel's, Burckhardt's, and Dilthey's successive conceptions of historiography. The march of the Hegelian absolute through history may have been decried a fiction, but not the effort to construe history culturally and contextually.

According to the author, Heidegger's understanding of the metaphysical roots of modern technology also indicates a way out of its life-threatening grip. Technik und Gelassenheit is an attempt to clear that alternative path according to and after Heidegger. Unaware of the extent of "die ökologische Katastrophe wie das atomäre Inferno," Heidegger was too generous to metaphysics and unable to hope that technology itself would be part of the turn from metaphysics. Schirmacher aims to cultivate that very hope, taking up where Heidegger left off, by developing a notion of the unity of Technik and Gelassenheit.

Mendelssohn's Philosophical Writings, published in 1761, bring the metaphysical tradition to bear on the topic of 'sentiments'. Mendelssohn offers a nuanced defence of Leibniz's theodicy and conception of freedom, an examination of the ethics of suicide, an account of the 'mixed sentiments' so central to the tragic genre, a hypothesis about weakness of will, an elaboration of the main principles and types of art, a definition of sublimity and analysis of its basic forms, and, lastly, a brief tract on probability theory, aimed at rebutting Hume's scepticism. This volume also includes the essay 'On Evidence in Metaphysical Sciences', selected in 1763 by the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences over all other submitted essays, including one by Kant, as the best answer to the question of whether metaphysical sciences are capable of the same sort and degree of evidence as mathematics.

In the section of the Critique of Pure Reason entitled "Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding," Kant criticizes Aristotle for having "thrown together" his list of categories. On the basis of what Kant says in that same section, however, it has seemed to many readers that Kant's presentation of the categories on the basis of the table of the logical forms of judgment is no less "rhapsodic." In this and other related respects the so-called metaphysical deduction of the categories has long been a major stumbling block for students of Kant's theoretical philosophy. What precisely is the "principle" on the basis of which, according to Kant, the basic concepts of transcendental philosophy are to be sought? Why and how are the categories derived from forms of judgment? If something like this derivation can be shown to be legitimate, how is it possible to demonstrate that the logical forms of judgment have been adequately and completely identified?

This paper concerns Hegel’s much-neglected discussion of the rational observation of nature in the first part of the chapter on reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The paper focuses, in particular, on the themes of nature’s inexhaustibilit y, animal life’s holistic character, and the earth’s individual distinctiveness insofar as Hegel appeals to them to challenge a certain kind of self-understanding of what it means to observe nature rationally. In addition to examining the significance and trenchancy of this challenge, the paper inquires whether these same themes have implications for Hegel’s own philosophical understanding of reason as spirit.