Daniel Dahlstrom

Abstract:Whereas research on Moses Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours has largely focused on the proofs for the existence of God and the elaboration of a purified pantheism in the Second Part of the text, scholars have paid far less attention to the First Part where Mendelssohn details his mature epistemology and conceptions of truth. In an attempt to contribute to remedying this situation, the present article critically examines his account, in the First Part, of different types of truth, different types of knowledge, and the case against idealism. The examination stresses potential but overlooked strengths of his account (e. g., a conception of immediate knowledge that is both far broader than the sensory field and distinctive for having change as its object), questions of ambiguity if not inconsistency in his concepts of existence and substance, and the potential import of these questions for the role he assigns to common sense.

Kant's philosophical achievements have long overshadowed those of his German contemporaries, often to the point of concealing his contemporaries' influence upon him. This volume of new essays draws on recent research into the rich complexity of eighteenth-century German thought, examining key figures in the development of aesthetics and art history, the philosophy of history and education, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. The essays range over numerous thinkers including Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Meyer, Winckelmann, Herder, Schiller, Hamann and Fichte, showing how they variously influenced, challenged, and revised Kant's philosophy, at times moving it in novel directions unacceptable to the magister himself. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this distinctive period of German philosophy.

The jumble of themes contained in Feuerbach’s Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit testify to the youthfulness of a work published when its author was a mere 26. These “thoughts” contain a scathing polemic against the veiled egoism of pietism and rationalism, an off-beat blend of Jacob Boehme’s theosophical mysticism with Lucretius’ arguments against personal immortality, and unique renditions of Hegel’s conceptions of nature, history, and God. There is even a somewhat tedious attempt to disprove the possibility of extraterrestial living beings! Yet these Todesgedanken were enormously significant in Feuerbach’s own life and intellectual development and in the development of Hegel’s philosophy after the latter’s death. The easy discovery of their authorship cost Feuerbach his academic career but they also helped him crystallize an idea of human beings’ true destiny which prompted his decision to become a writer. That destiny is death or, better, the genuine courage and love and earthly immortality that death alone makes possible. “True religion, true humility, true and complete surrender to and submersion in God is possible only when the human being recognizes death as true, real, and entire”. The appeal and importance of Feuerbach’s Todesgedanken lie in its impassioned, non-theist testimony to this speculative significance of death.

Hegel’s account of conscience at the conclusion to the chapter on morality in the Philosophy of Right has had more than its share of detractors. Theunissen tries to explain why the account is “so meager,” Findlay deems it “thoroughly scandalous,” and Tugendhat goes so far as to label it the pinnacle of a “no longer merely conceptual, but rather moral perversion.” Even commentators committed to rescuing Hegel’s discussion of conscience from such extreme reproaches agree that it is “one-sided” and “problematic.” The source of this widespread conclusion about Hegel’s political incorrectness is not difficult to discern. In the wake of the nationalistic excesses and horrors of the last two centuries, there is an understandable suspicion about the motivations underlying claims that “the state cannot recognize conscience in its distinctive. form, that is, as subjective knowing”. When Hegel declares that the “formal subjectivity” of conscience, as the final achievement of morality, is “on the verge of turning into something evil”, he seems clearly out of step with the reigning liberal political traditions, traditions that regard the individual’s freedom to abide by his or her conscience as both an unassailable right and an inherent good.

BOOK REVIEWS 473 Chapter 4 concerns Peirce's "pragmatic metaphysics" and is the culmination of the development of Rosenthal's pluralism thesis. Together with the observation that the categories are categories of process, and through a close examination of the category of Firstness, she emphasizes the importance of sense-qualities that are inseparable from negative and positive possibilities Cmay-bes" and "would-bes") and their relevance to the controversies over whether Peirce is a realist, an idealist, or a phenomenalist. She says that Peirce did not see that the language he had available from the tradition was not adequate; thus, he proposed that objective idealism is the best answer to the question of whether the universe is mind or matter, even though he in fact repudiated objective idealism. In considering Peirce's cosmology, Rosenthal draws on Peirce's discussions of the law of mind, considering the ineradicable place of spontaneity in the emergence of new intelligibility or the evolution of laws. She concludes with a reiteration of the point that although knowledge involves convergence, convergences are always within a common world that inquirers partially but continually remake. Rosenthal's book is far too rich to do it justice in this short space. It challenges the reader to see why Peirce's thought is particularly relevant to contemporary debates, not only over how to interpret Peirce but, more importantly, about how his philosophy may help..

The aim of this paper is to revisit Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of Rilke with a view to eliciting its implications for our future and that of phenomenology. The paper focuses on how Heidegger, despite regarding Rilke as a much-needed poet in these destitute times, criticises the metaphysical and Nietzschean underpinnings of his poetic account of the open and animal existence within it. In addition to shedding considerable light on Heidegger’s own conception of the open and human existence within it, focusing on this criticism unde rscores how the sort of phenomenological thinking exemplified in Heidegger’s reading of Rilke essentially and uniquely provides an opening of the future.

This essay takes a critical look at a specific altruistic interpretation of the moral nature, legitimacy, and value of unselfish actions. The aim of the essay is to raise questions about this altruistic attitude toward the morality of unselfish actions by focussing on certain assumptions that inform that attitude. It is argued that, among those assumptions, the most counterintuitive and deleterious is the notion that the morality of an unselfish action can and should be established by appeal to the possibility of resentment springing from the performance or non-performance of the action. After a short presentation and explanation of these assumptions and their questionableness, the essay investigates the extent to which an altruistic attitude animates contemporary discussion of the moral character of unselfish actions. This investigation is limited to a sketch of a particular development of contemporary ethical theory, from Thomas Nagel's initial attempt to explain the possibility of pure altruism to his revisions of his early theory into a concept of a revised altruism, and culminating in the intersubjective altruism, elaborated by Christine Korsgaard as a consequence of her critique of Nagel's moral theory. In conclusion, after iterating the fundamental inadequacy of appeals to possibilities of resentment, an explanation for the altruistic attitude is ventured. This explanation tries to secure the measure of validity of the assumptions of the altruistic attitude as well as its limitations by suggesting its grounding in an ethics of honor, delimited by an ethics of love and friendship.

This paper elaborates four asymmetrical, developmental stages of the phenomenon of human freedom, starting with a rudimentary sort of freedom, thebasic experience of a relatively unencumbered power to act in alternative ways. The paper argues that structural elements of this rudimentary form of freedomare demonstrable in three distinct, supervening forms of freedom: instrumental freedom, the experience of the self-reflective ability to pursue certain aims, perfectionist freedom, the experience of the capacity to master oneself according to some ideal, and, finally, interpersonal freedom, the experience of empowerment and alternatives only available through commitments to others.

Immanuel Kant's "critical philosophy" is rightly renowned for its criticism of the metaphysical pretensions of reason unaided by experience. It therefore seems ironic that, within a single generation, some of Kant's most important followers argued that the critical philosophy could be made fully critical only by recourse to the very metaphysical themes that Kant had apparently criticized. The story of the emergence of German Idealism has never been fully told. The story is full of tensions, contradictions, and reversals, all of which seemingly conspire to render a meaningful and unified account impossible. While defying any simple or simplistic explanation, the various and sometimes conflicting impulses that led to the emergence of German Idealism together constitute an intelligible and rich line of development. In this volume, an international group of leading scholars shows how the various aspirations at work in the emergence of German Idealism―moral, religious, aesthetic, political, and epistemological―can be understood as both consummating and overcoming Kant's critical philosophy. The volume also includes a chronology of the major works in the development of German Idealism, as well as a new translation of the seminal and still-controversial essay, "The Earliest System Programme of German Idealism."

This paper attempts to marshall some of the evidence of the transcendental character of Heidegger's later thinking, despite his repudiation of any form of transcendental thinking, including that of his own earlier project of fundamental ontology. The transcendental significance of that early project is first outlined through comparison and contrast with the diverse transcendental turns in the philosophies of Kant and Husserl. The paper then turns to Heidegger's account of the historical source of the notion of transcendence in Plato's thinking, its legacy in various forms of transcendental philosophy, and his reasons for attempting to think in a post-transcendental way. The paper concludes by identifying four vestiges of the transcendental turn in Heidegger's later thinking.

Challenging twentieth-century skepticism regarding the notion of subjectivity, the author sets for himself the task of elaborating several models of self-consciousness, each differentiated by an advancing degree of complexity. Düsing’s book is accordingly both critical and constructive; its aim is to construct a viable theory of subjectivity and a clear foundation for scientific research, thereby forestalling the naive practice, common among researchers of neural processes, of assuming an arbitrary conception of consciousness and self-consciousness. At the same time, Düsing creatively appropriates theories of subjectivity produced in the period from Kant to Hegel and distinguished by a sophisticated differentiation and combination of concepts of pure self-consciousness and a concrete self.

Morning Hours is the first English translation of Morgenstunden by Moses Mendelssohn, the foremost Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment. Published six months before Mendelssohn's death on January 4, 1786, Morning Hours is the most sustained presentation of his mature epistemological and metaphysical views, all elaborated in the service of presenting his son with proofs for the existence of God. But Morning Hours is much more than a theoretical treatise. It also plays a central role in the drama of the Pantheismusstreit, Mendelssohn's "dispute" with F. H. Jacobi over the nature and scope of Lessing's attitude toward Spinoza and "pantheism". In Morning Hours Mendelssohn attempts to set the record straight regarding his beloved Lessing in this connection, not least by demonstrating the absence of any practical difference between theism and a "purified pantheism".