Sally Sedgwick

This paper presents a systematic reconstruction of Kant’s project of a transcendental philosophy in general and a transcendental logic in particular. The focus is on Kant’s account of the a priori conditions for the cognitive reference to objects. The paper proceeds in four sections, each addressing a defining feature of transcendental philosophy, especially of transcendental logic, by means of contrast with an alternative, correlated or opposed feature also involved in Kant’s transcendental project. Section 1 differentiates between the transcendental and the a priori, section 2 distinguishes the logical from the psychological, section 3 contrasts the logical and the aesthetic, while section 4 links the transcendental and the empirical. Dieser Beitrag liefert eine systematische Rekonstruktion von Kants Projekt einer Transzendentalphilosophie im Allgemeinen und einer Transzendentallogik im Besonderen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf Kants Theorie der apriorischen Bedingungen für die kognitive Beziehung auf Gegenstände. Der Beitrag verfährt in vier systematischen Schritten, deren jeder ein definitorisches Wesensmerkmal der Transzendentalphilosophie und speziell der Transzendentallogik im kontrastierenden Vergleich mit alternativen, korrelierten oder opponierten Merkmalen behandelt. Der erste Abschnitt differenziert zwischen dem Transzendentalen und dem Apriorischen. Der zweite Abschnitt unterscheidet das Logische vom Psychologischen. Der dritte Abschnitt kontrastiert das Logische und das Ästhetische, während der vierte Abschnitt das Transzendentale mit dem Empirischen in Zusammenhang bringt.

In their writings on world history, Kant and Hegel share an ultimately consoling assessment of humanity’s prospects for moral progress. Nonetheless, the two philosophers derive different kinds of consolation from their world historical reflections. They do so, I argue, because of their respective metaphysical commitments. In this paper, I suggest that the kind of consolation each derives from world history may be understood to derive from their unique assumptions about the resources of human feeling as a source of the good.

In the Preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel indicates that the “philosophical” or “scientific” mode of cognition that emerges from the journey of consciousness contrasts with its “mathematical” counterpart which ignores time. The task of this paper is to draw clues from the Preface to the role Hegel assigns temporality in the Phenomenology. The thesis defended is that underlying the rigidity he discovers in mathematical cognition is what he takes to be a mistaken view of the origin of concepts, and an insensitivity to their path. In effect, this insensitivity amounts for Hegel to an ignorance of their temporality.

From the various discussions of Kant’s theoretical philosophy throughout Hegel’s works, it is not difficult to come away with the impression that Hegel thinks that the Kantian categories are derived from experience, and that the method of a “transcendental” investigation of the forms of subjectivity is nothing other than that of generalization upon observation. As early as the 1802-03 essay, Faith and Knowledge, for example, he characterizes the critical philosophy as the “completion and idealization” of Lockean “empirical psychology.” In § 41 of the Encyclopedia he tells us that Kant’s systematization of the “special forms of the a priori element … of thought … is solely based upon psychological and historical grounds.” Moreover, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he refers to Kant as going “psychologically,” i.e., “historically,” to work in his accounts of intuition, understanding, and reason in a manner that is “entirely empirical, and not developed out of the concept.”

Why is it so important for Hegel to structure his various philosophical works as developmental narratives? It is argued in this work that his motivation is in large part metaphysical. That is, he intends his developmental accounts to demonstrate that human thinking and willing themselves develop. He seeks to convince us that there have been advances in the nature of human thought or reason and in our resulting freedom, and that those advances are somehow fated or necessary. In addition, Hegel’s preoccupation with development conveys his interest in how human reason is anchored in and shaped by its past. A central objective of this book is to specify the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history.

The period from Kant to Hegel is one of the most intense and rigorous in modern philosophy. The central problem at the heart of it was the development of a new standard of theoretical reflection and of the principle of rationality itself. The essays in this volume, published in 2000, consider both the development of Kant's system of transcendental idealism in the three Critiques, the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and the Opus Postumum, as well as the reception and transformation of that idealism in the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.

The author of this article challenges a central thesis of Robert Pippin's book, "Hegel's Idealism": namely, that Hegel's idealism is a "completion" or "extension" of an insight first discovered but inadequately developed and appreciated by Kant. It is argued that Pippin does not establish his claim that implicit in the very idea of the transcendental unity of a perception as it is presented in the Transcendental Deduction of the "Critique of Pure Reason" is the key to a form of idealism which resolves the contradictions and dualisms of the Critical philosophy