•  9
    Reconsidering Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (2): 361-382. 2024.
    Is Heidegger a temporal idealist or a temporal realist? That is, does he believe that time is supplied by the human standpoint, or that we derive it from the structure of the world around us? Blattner makes a compelling case that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, but a failed one. Rousse, however, argues that Heidegger’s position is more promising when he is interpreted not as an unsuccessful idealist, but as an underdeveloped realist. In contrast, we offer arguments grounded in German Idealist …Read more
  •  10
    It was not so long ago that the dominant picture of Kant’s practical philosophy was formalistic, focusing almost exclusively on his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason. However, the overall picture of Kant’s wide-ranging philosophy has since been broadened and deepened. We now have a much more complete understanding of the range of Kant’s practical interests and of his contributions to areas as diverse as anthropology, pedagogy, and legal theory. What remains…Read more
  •  16
    Hegel’s Theory of Space-Time (No, Not That Space-Time)
    with Ralph Kaufmann
    In Luca Corti & Johannes-Georg Schuelein (eds.), Life, Organisms, and Human Nature: New Perspectives on Classical German Philosophy, Springer Verlag. pp. 97-117. 2023.
    Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature begins with the concepts of space and time, and all of the concepts and phenomena that follow in the text are spatio-temporal. But the actual content of Hegel’s theory of space and time has remained obscure despite two centuries of interpretation, and obscure for at least two reasons. First, it is unclear how Hegel’s theory relates to those of his immediate predecessors (Newton, Leibniz, Kant) as well as other theories in the history of philosophy. Second, the theore…Read more
  •  7
    The Politics of German Idealism reconstructs the political philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel against the background of their social-historical context. Christopher Yeomans' guiding thought is to understand German Idealist political philosophy as political, i.e., as a set of policy options and institutional designs aimed at a broadly but distinctively German set of social problems. 'Political' here refers to use of the state's power to enforce law, and 'social' to the norms and groups which …Read more
  •  25
    To oversimplify quite a bit, scholars’ presentation of Hegel's teleology constitutes a continuum according to how more-or-less secured the progress towards the goal is supposed to be, which tracks roughly the nature of the end and its necessity. In this article, rather than focus on the end and progress towards it, we will focus on the means and structure of teleological relationships on Hegel's account. This focus follows from an essential feature of Hegel's discussion of teleology in the Logic…Read more
  •  36
    Karen Ng's Hegel's Concept of Life tackles one of the hardest problems – the placement and status of the category of life within treatises on epistemology and logic—within what are already two of the most difficult texts in the history of philosophy—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. It does so with good attention to contemporary debates surrounding Hegel's logic and metaphysics, and manages to integrate concerns that have been more typically expressed in continental scholarsh…Read more
  •  209
    Fairness as Equal Concession: Critical Remarks on Fair AI
    Science and Engineering Ethics 27 (6): 1-14. 2021.
    Although existing work draws attention to a range of obstacles in realizing fair AI, the field lacks an account that emphasizes how these worries hang together in a systematic way. Furthermore, a review of the fair AI and philosophical literature demonstrates the unsuitability of ‘treat like cases alike’ and other intuitive notions as conceptions of fairness. That review then generates three desiderata for a replacement conception of fairness valuable to AI research: (1) It must provide a meta-t…Read more
  •  6
    Modernity and the Inner-Outer Problem
    Australasian Philosophical Review 2 (4): 403-411. 2018.
    In this appreciation of Robert Pippin’s work, I focus on locating his project by focusing on the way that the inner-outer distinction in action receives a distinctive shape in modernity. I profile Pippin’s view of this momentous change as a middle path between those who see it primarily in historical terms (Hannah Arendt and Reinhart Koselleck) and those who see it in primarily linguistic terms (Robert Brandom and John McDowell). Pippin’s middle way has two aspects. First, purposiveness, rather …Read more
  •  137
    "Introduction" to selections from Marx
    In Benjamin D. Crowe (ed.), The Nineteenth Century Philosophy Reader, Routledge. pp. 233-239. 2015.
  •  165
    The One and the Many in the Philosophy of Action
    In Vivasvan Soni & Thomas Pfau (eds.), Judgment and Action: Fragments toward a History, Northwestern University Press. pp. 175-190. 2017.
  •  244
    Philosophy of Action
    In Dean Moyar (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, . pp. 475-495. 2017.
    There are a number of questions, the answers to which define specific theoretical approaches to Hegel’s philosophy of action. To begin with, does Hegel attempt to give a theory of free will that responds to the naturalistic skepticism so prevalent in the history of modern philosophy? Though some scholars hold that he is interested in providing such a theory, perhaps the majority view is that Hegel instead socializes his conception of the will such that the traditional naturalistic worries are no…Read more
  •  249
    Hegel
    In Kevin Timpe (ed.), Routledge Companion to Free Will., Routledge. pp. 356-363. 2017.
  •  163
    Tom Rockmore: Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 60 686-687. 2007.
  •  164
    Béatrice Longuenesse: Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (review)
    The Philosophical Review 121 472-474. 2012.
  •  177
    James Kreines and Rachel Zuckert (eds): Hegel on Philosophy in History (review)
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (4): 740-741. 2017.
  •  201
    Spinoza, Feminism, and Domestic Violence
    Iyyun 52 (1): 54-74. 2003.
    In this paper I discuss two related ideas and cross-reference them, as it were, on the common ground of the Spinozistic text. First, I want to construct a Spinozistic account of domestic violence and a Spinozistic response to such violence. This will involve attempting to explicate the phenomenon (or at least one aspect of it, to be defined) through the terms and conceptual structure of Spinoza's Ethics. Second, I want to discuss a feminist reading (interpretation) of Spinoza, that of Luce Iriga…Read more
  •  347
    Hegel on Calculus
    with Ralph Kaufmann
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 34 (4): 371-390. 2017.
    It is fair to say that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of mathematics and his interpretation of the calculus in particular have not been popular topics of conversation since the early part of the twentieth century. Changes in mathematics in the late nineteenth century, the new set-theoretical approach to understanding its foundations, and the rise of a sympathetic philosophical logic have all conspired to give prior philosophies of mathematics (including Hegel's) the untimely appearan…Read more
  •  727
    Hegels Handlungslehre und das Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht
    Rechtsphilosophie. Zeitschrift Für Die Grundlagen des Rechts 4 (1): 24-35. 2018.
    Nach Reinhart Koselleck nennen Historiker die Periode der deutschen Geschichte zwischen 1770 und 1830 ‚die Sattelzeit‘. So wird diese Periode mit einem Bergsattel verglichen, der zwei Gipfel miteinander verbindet, die hier für die frühe Neuzeit und die Moderne stehen. Überall in Deutschland ist diese Periode von tiefgreifenden Reformen der Gesetze und der Verwaltung geprägt. Im Folgenden beschränke ich mich in meiner Darlegung auf Preußen, weil das Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht von 1794 wahrsc…Read more
  •  339
    Hegel’s Pluralism as a Comedy of Action
    Hegel Bulletin 40 (3): 357-373. 2019.
    Our reception of Hegel’s theory of action faces a fundamental difficulty: on the one hand, that theory is quite clearly embedded in a social theory of modern life, but on the other hand most of the features of the society that gave that embedding its specific content have become almost inscrutably strange to us (e.g., the estates and the monarchy). Thus we find ourselves in the awkward position of stressing the theory’s sociality even as we scramble backwards to distance ourselves from the parti…Read more
  •  358
    Perspective and Logical Pluralism in Hegel
    Hegel Bulletin 40 (1): 29-50. 2019.
    In this paper, I consider the role of perspective in Hegel’s metaphysics, and in particular the role that multiple perspectives play within the ultimate structure in Hegel’s metaphysics, which Hegel calls ‘the idea [die Idee].’ My (somewhat anachronistic) way into this topic will be to inquire about Hegel’s stance on what Adrian Moore has called ‘absolute representations.’ I argue for the claim that perspective is maintained, even in the absolute idea, which generates the task of understanding t…Read more
  •  266
    When it comes to social criticism of the economy, Critical Theory has thus far failed to discover specific immanent norms in that sphere of activity. In response, we propose that what is needed is to double down on the idealism of Critical Theory by taking seriously the sophisticated structure of agency developed in Hegel’s own account of freedom as self-determination. When we do so, we will see that the anti-metaphysical gestures of recent Critical Theory work in opposition to its attempts to d…Read more
  •  463
    Math by Pure Thinking: R First and the Divergence of Measures in Hegel's Philosophy of Mathematics
    with Ralph M. Kaufmann
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4): 985-1020. 2017.
    We attribute three major insights to Hegel: first, an understanding of the real numbers as the paradigmatic kind of number ; second, a recognition that a quantitative relation has three elements, which is embedded in his conception of measure; and third, a recognition of the phenomenon of divergence of measures such as in second-order or continuous phase transitions in which correlation length diverges. For ease of exposition, we will refer to these three insights as the R First Theory, Triparti…Read more
  •  950
    Perspectives without Privileges: The Estates in Hegel's Political Philosophy
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 469-490. 2017.
    For a variety of reasons, Hegel's theory of the estates remains an unexpected and unappreciated feature of his practical philosophy. In fact, it is the key element of his social philosophy, which grounds his more properly political philosophy. Most fundamentally, it plays this role because the estates provide the forms of visibility required by Hegel's distinctive theory of self-determination, and so the estates constitute conditions for the possibility of human agency as such. With respect to p…Read more