Michelle Kosch

The dissertation traces the approach to the problem of free will---in particular, the question of whether moral evil can be freely chosen---from Kant through Schelling to Kierkegaard. The goal is to clarify the historical transition from German idealism to the first version of existential philosophy, by showing the philosophical concerns of the latter to be implicit in unresolved problems in the former. I begin by examining Kant's attempt to reconcile what is essentially an incompatibilist notion of free will with the claims of theoretical objectivity, and show that the only argument for the reality of human freedom this reconciliation allows him to give is one that connects freedom altogether too strongly with practical reason, threatening to render moral evil not simply irrational, but actually impossible. I then trace the development of Schelling's account of freedom, showing that the transformation in his view marked by the Freedom Essay of 1809 is motivated primarily by the goal of overcoming this difficulty in Kant's account. In his later work, I argue, Schelling's aim is to articulate a theory of knowledge consistent with this account of freedom. I then interpret Kierkegaard's critique of what he calls the "esthetic" and the "immanent ethical" standpoints and his account of the meta-ethical status of Christianity in light of this development. I argue that the standard interpretations of these aspects of Kierkegaard's position are mistaken, and that Kierkegaard's philosophical debt to Schelling has been seriously underestimated. His account of human agency as it is presented in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death is founded upon the account presented by Schelling in the Freedom Essay, and his critique of idealist epistemology is based upon the position laid out in Schelling's late work. Finally, I contrast Schelling's and Kierkegaard's positive accounts of theoretical and moral objectivity, and point to some difficulties in Kierkegaard's view

J.G. Fichte’s 1798 System of Ethics is seldom read, despite the fact that it remains, after more than two centuries, one of the most original and insightful efforts at a systematic normative ethical theory on Kantian foundations. Part of the reason for its obscurity lies in the perceived implausibility of Fichte’s account of practical deliberation and of the authority of individual conscience. The view typically attributed to Fichte is a conjunction of four claims: that moral deliberation consists entirely in consultation of one’s conscience; that conscience is a faculty that gives immediate epistemic access to substantive moral truths; that conformity with the verdict of conscience is the sole criterion of the moral worth of actions; and that an individual’s conscientious decision is therefore morally incorrigible. This set of views is indeed implausible; but Fichte in fact held none of them. Hegel was the first to attribute them to him and, incredibly, Hegel’s has remained for 200 years the dominant interpretation, even among scholars of Fichte. In this paper I explain how Fichte actually thought about practical deliberation and the role of conscience, and diagnose the sources of appeal of the Hegelian interpretation.

Michelle Kosch examines the conceptions of free will and the foundations of ethics in the work of Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. She seeks to understand the history of German idealism better by looking at it through the lens of these issues, and to understand Kierkegaard better by placing his thought in this context. Kosch argues for a new interpretation of Kierkegaard's theory of agency, that Schelling was a major influence and Kant a major target of criticism, and that both the theory and the criticisms are highly relevant to contemporary debates.

The explicit topic of Fear and Trembling's third Problema (the longest single section, accounting for a third of the book's total length), the theme of Abraham's silence stands not far in the background in every other section, and its importance is flagged by the pseudonym—Johannes de silentio—under which Kierkegaard had the book published. Here I aim to defend an interpretation of the meaning of the third Problema's central claim—that Abraham cannot explain himself, 'cannot speak'—and to argue on its basis for an interpretation of the work as a whole.

In an earlier paper I argued that J.G. Fichte (rather than Kant or Hegel or some amalgam) was the primary historical model for the ethical standpoint described in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or II . There I offered a list of reasons for thinking that Hegel was less important than some believed and that Kierkegaard addressed Kantianism largely in its Fichtean form. In the interim I have discovered another reason to add to that list: as it happens, there was a quite general consensus among philosophers in the 1830s, ’40s and ’50s not just that Fichte’s ethics was Kantian ethics in its most perfect form, but even that it was the best example available of normative ethics on a philosophical (rather than a religious) foundation. So Kierkegaard’s use of Fichte as a foil was the perfectly obvious choice in the context. That is a curious fact, given the complete obscurity of Fichte’s ethics today, and one whose interest should not be confined to Kierkegaard scholars.