Carlos Schoof

The main purpose of this article is to offer a framework for a possible interpretation of some humanist and post-humanist motives in Descartes' thought. According to this, the article wants to show, appealing to textual evidence, how Cartesian philosophy started a questioning on the status of \the human", questioning that allows us to reconsider the harsh judgment we make about the anthropocentric and rationalist character of his philosophy. However, we would like to show also the limits this questioning had, and how many of Descartes' ideas derived indeed into problematic phenomena that many contemporary philosophers, reasonably, denounce.

This article’s aim is to show why Hegel considers to have solved two tasks that Kantian transcendental philosophy tried to accomplish, but could not due to its presuppositions: the metaphysical deduction and the transcendental deduction of the categories. First, I offer textual evidence to show how Hegel reinterprets the epistemological problem of a categorical deduction as the old metaphysical problem of the transition from unity to multiplicity. I enumerate the scientific requirements that a deduction of the categories must satisfy from the Hegelian point of view. Secondly, I expose the errors that Hegel attributes to Kant in both deductions, but always in light of its relation to the problem of the one and the many. Finally, I show why Hegel claims to have solved the Kantian task through the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic, which correspond to the transcendental deduction and the metaphysical deduction,respectively.

In this essay I expose two historical examples of the ambivalence of the place of philosophical knowledge in society. The symptomatic starting point is Aristotle’s characterization of the philosopher. Then, through the specification of Descartes’s views on philosophy, culture, the human and the artificial, I will show that there exists certain tension between the development of philosophy as a free knowledge available to everyone and philosophy as a specialized knowledge only suitable for initiates. Nowadays, when philosophy is in a critical situation maybe because of that ambivalence, the need arises to overcome this problem and democratize it.

This paper provides an account of the purpose and methodology of Conjectural Beginning of Human History (1786). I show that Kant subordinates the theoretical goal of plausibly reconstructing the origin of humankind to the practical goal of helping the reader understand herself as a moral agent that must contribute to the achievement of humankind’s moral destination. First, I show that Conjectural Beginning is an innovative instance of conjectural history. Second, I argue that its methodology involves experience, imagination, and reason, whose conjoined use explains why Kantian conjectural history fares better than others. Third, I argue that the essay contributes, through a moral exhibition of the imagination, to the reader’s moral self-knowledge and cures some misconceptions that obstruct her commitment to moral progress.

In the present thesis, I argue that Karen Ng’s attempt to draw on resources from Hegel’s Science of Logic to defend a naturalist interpretation of the Hegelian account of cognition is not as promising as she thinks it is. In the first section, I offer an overview of the debate between anti-naturalist and naturalist interpretations of the Hegelian logical space of reasons. I clarify some terms involved in the debate and locate Ng’s novel interpretation in a wider philosophical discussion. In the second section, I offer some arguments to resist Ng’s interpretation, according to which the Idea of Life is never overcome in later stages of the Science of Logic. I uncover Ng’s interpretive presuppositions and put pressure on her interpretation. Finally, I consider two potential objections to my arguments and sketch a different line of thought to approach Hegel’s Idea of Life.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a general view of the philosophical affinities between Plato and Hegel through the analysis of the Hegelian interpretation of the Parmenides. We will show how the Hegelian approach to Plato, and his understanding of idealism and dialectics, is determined by Hegel’s debate with the philosophy of Kant. A brief exposé of the differences between Kantian transcendental idealism and Hegelian absolute idealism will be needed. Then, we will show some traits of the Hegelian hermeneutics of Plato in order to understand how the first part of the Parmenides admits parallelisms with certain excerpts of Hegel’s work, both regarding its philosophical purpose as well as stylistically. Finally, the Author expounds the Hegelian evaluation of the dialectical exercise from the second part of the Parmenides. There, Platonic Dialectic fails and does not accomplish its philosophical purpose, and becomes a valuable skepticism consubstantial to philosophical thought.