Chong-Fuk Lau

This paper takes a fresh look at Kant’s transcendental idealism with a new reading of negative noumena as abstract entities. It shows that the three criteria for abstractness, i.e., non-spatiotemporality, causal inefficacy, and non-indiscernibility, are true of Kant’s negative noumena. Phenomena, by contrast, are concrete entities in space and time, which can be understood as spatiotemporally instantiated noumena. Kant’s distinction between noumena in the positive and negative sense will be reinterpreted as a distinction between non-spatiotemporally instantiated concrete entities and uninstantiated abstract entities. It argues that noumenal ignorance is confined to positive noumena, which can be identified with things in themselves.

Hegel sees philosophy as the only rigorous science that does not have any presupposition, but he rejects the possibility of an absolute foundation for philosophy, instead maintaining that only the system as a whole can be free from all presuppositions. Hegel’s system lays claim to presuppositionlessness, not on the ground of any presuppositionless beginning, but rather as a holistic system of concepts in which inevitable presuppositions are made transparent and comprehended. This paper examines Hegel’s analysis of the concept of immediacy and his critique of the foundationalist conception of philosophy. Although Hegel’s critique is targeted against his predecessors and contemporaries, it has important implications for Husserl’s phenomenology, which represents one of the most ambitious foundationalist projects in the history of philosophy. The final part discusses the later development of Husserl’s thought and his introduction of the concept of lifeworld in light of Hegel’s critique.

Even though the Cartesian mind-body dualism has largely been dismissed in contemporary philosophy, the idea that the conscious mind can be a bodiless and non-spatial entity is still held to be possible. This paper examines a series of arguments by Jaegwon Kim, Peter Strawson, and Immanuel Kant against the possibility of a disembodied mind. It is argued that although the concept of a disembodied mind is coherent, it derives from a more fundamental concept in which the mind and the body are originally unified. The unity of mind and body, which can be called a person, is logically prior to the concept of the mind as a disembodied person, and thus the possibility of a disembodied mind turns out to depend on the existence of the physical and spatial world.

Die Urteilskritik, die in Hegels Lehre vom spekulativen Satz enthalten ist, stellt eine radikale Kritik der traditionellen Auffassung des prädikativen Urteils dar. Sie betrifft nicht nur dessen logische Form, sondern insbesondere dessen ontologische Implikationen. Der Form nach ist das prädikative Urteil für Hegel unfähig, das Wahre angemessen darzustellen. Hegels Konsequenz ist aber gerade nicht, stattdessen eine "spekulative" Sprachform zu erfinden, die der Endlichkeit der natürlichen Sprache enthoben wäre. Er will vielmehr die Sprache durch sich selbst, in einer konsequent kritischen Umgangsweise, über ihre Grenzen und Voraussetzungen aufklären. Den ontologischen Implikationen nach leistet Hegel eine radikale Revision jener Substanzontologie, die im Hintergrund des prädikativen Urteils steht. An die Stelle der These von der Selbständigkeit der Einzeldinge setzt Hegel eine monistische Subjektivitätsphilosophie, die sich im holistischen System des Begriffs realisiert.

For Kant, both morality and the possibility of objective knowledge presuppose freedom. His theory of freedom is based on the distinction between phenomena and noumena, concepts which represent two different ways of viewing things. The question, however, is whether it is justified to take the noumenal perspective in addition to the phenomenal one. Isn’t freedom an illusion, if we regard ourselves as free, while in fact we are not? The crux of the problem lies in recognizing that there is no objective fact as far as freedom is concerned, for objective fact is a category that belongs to the phenomenal world. Nevertheless, it is argued that freedom must be presupposed in order to account for the objectivity of the phenomenal world as a whole.

This paper analyzes Kant’s epistemological reorientation of ontology, explaining in what sense Kant’s complex theory of transcendental idealism and empirical realism should be understood as an ontological realism under the framework of epistemological idealism. The paper shows that Kant’s concept of existence is only applicable to empirical objects in the spatiotemporal causal framework. Accordingly, not only things in themselves, but also epistemic conditions such as the transcendental subject and the faculties of sensibility and understanding cannot be said to exist. They are theoretical constructs in the transcendental discourse to account for the normative conditions of objective cognition and reality.

This paper aims to make better sense of Hegel’s Philosophy of Objective Spirit and defend it against the charge of political conservatism and optimism. I will argue for the left Hegelian position in the theological-philosophical respect, thereby leaving the left-right divide in the social-political respect largely open. I will explain that Hegel’s commitment to the inherent rationality of the state and the course of human history as the progress of freedom does not imply blind optimism, since his thesis is not to be taken as a factual description. Hegel’s point is rather a conceptual one: to comprehend the human world means to comprehend it as a holistically rational entity and process, which is the essential nature of comprehending in the context of the humanities. I will further clarify Hegel’s point by introducing relevant ideas from contemporary philosophy of mind and language, comparing it in particular with Davidson’s principle of charity

The paper outlines a deflationary interpretation of Hegel’s metaphysics, as presented in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. It focuses mainly on the Science of Logic as a theory of categories, which explores the movement of the Concept. The major idea is to read Hegel’s identification of logic and metaphysics as a thesis on deflating metaphysics into logic and semantics. Hegel’s metaphysics, which may better be called logico-metaphysics, does not describe the objective world directly. Rather, as a second-order theory, it unfolds and makes transparent the fundamental concepts that are necessary for our understanding of the world and our orientation in it. The paper begins with a brief discussion of Hegel’s idea of philosophy as system. The argument is made that Hegel should be interpreted holistically, in contrast to the popular approach of distinguishing between what is living and what is dead in his philosophy. In the second and third parts of the paper, an analysis is given of Hegel’s criticism of Kant, with an explanation of how Hegel’s Logic further develops Kant’s project of transforming traditional metaphysics. Here, the interesting fact that Hegel’s logical categories are not derived from an absolute first principle is pointed out. Instead, the task of Hegel’s Logic is to comprehend and systematize the concepts that have already been evolved in the history of philosophy. In the last part of the paper, the deflationary approach is extended to Hegel’s Realphilosophie. While Hegel’s Logic takes the place of ontology, his Philosophy of Nature and Spirit offers a comprehensive metaphysica specialis, laying conceptual foundations for understanding various dimensions of reality, from nature through the ethical-political world to different cultural domains. The paper takes Hegel’s Philosophy of Objective Spirit as an example to illustrate how the deflationary interpretation sheds light on Hegel’s “practical” philosophy as a second-order theory that does not aim to uncover first-order normative principles for guiding actions, but rather to develop the concepts necessary for normative judgments.

This paper develops a new functionalist interpretation of Kant that aims to unify his cognitive psychology with transcendental idealism. It argues that Kant’s faculty of cognition describes neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal mind, but a theoretical construct of the transcendental subject, comparable to the abstract Turing machine. This interpretation can be called “transcendental functionalism,” which determines what functions the mind has to realize if it is to be capable of objective cognition. Transcendental functionalism resolves problems associated with other functionalist interpretations of Kant by drawing a systematic distinction between transcendental cognitive functions and their empirical realizations. While transcendental functions stipulate abstract conceptual requirements, their empirical counterparts realize the functional constraints in appearances within the spatiotemporal and causal framework. This distinction also allows a better explanation of why Kant abandoned the subjective deduction of categories in the B-deduction.

This paper analyzes and compares the doctrines of categories of Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, each of which is first discussed separately. The paper explains the essential double perspective of the problem, showing how a logico-linguistic analysis of the form of rational discourse serves for them as an important clue to ontological problems. Although Aristotle and Kant’s doctrines differ significantly, they both endorse a kind of isomorphism between language/thought and reality. By contrast, Hegel, who takes a critical attitude toward the capability of human language and discursive thinking, rejects the possibility of deriving the structure of reality from the forms of predication or judgment. Nevertheless, the forms of judgment do play an equally crucial role in Hegel’s doctrine, though in a very different way from his predecessors. It is the structural “deficiency” of the judgmental form that turns out to be the driving force for the dialectical movement of the Concept. By shifting the primary concern from the categories themselves to the transitions between them, Hegel opens up the possibility of a dynamic system of categories.

Kant insists that the use of concepts must be subject to empirical conditions if they are to have objective validity. This article analyses Kants distinction between empirical and transcendental truths. Since transcendental concepts are pure concepts without spatio-temporal content, their objective validity is of the same second-order kind as that of unschematized categories. This characteristic of transcendental concepts implies that the cognitive powers picked out by them are not particular psychological mechanisms, but rather abstract functional structures. Transcendental concepts owe their objective validity to the realizability of the functional structures by empirical cognizers like humans. This relation in turn helps to explain the nature of transcendental truths