Claudiu Baciu

The following text presents the concept of knowledge that founds the Hegelian Phenomenology of Mind, as this concept is developed mainly in the “Introduction.” Starting with Hegel’s critique of the Kantian epistemological presuppositions, it shows that in Hegel’s method the terms of “object” and “subject” of knowledge receive a new signification. Due to this signification, Hegelian “knowledge” is no longer a knowledge of outer reality, but a dynamic knowledge of knowledge itself, i.e. a knowledge of the different forms and phenomena of knowledge that emerge dialectically in human history.

Kant’s philosophy revolves around the concept of a priori, a term meaning not only that something happens before any experience, but that some cognitions of ours are necessary and universal. His fundamental question was in his first Critique of how synthetic a priori judgments are possible. The a priori also plays an essential role in the second Critique, such an important role that the idea of the categorical imperative is impossible to understand if one does not understand how the a priori is involved in Kant’s practical philosophy.

The paper starts by describing the distinction between substantialist thought and functionalist thought. According to philosophical functionalism the object of human knowledge is always a result of an inner construction, and not a passive reflection of the outer world. The Critique of Pure Reason was the first modern materialization of this new philosophical program. One of the most important results of the Kantian criticism was the reconstruction of the concept of ontology. The possibility of ontology, according to its new concept, was given by the idea of identity between the possibility of reality, pertaining to human thinking andknowledge, and that which we call “reality”. The entire German Idealism took over this new concept of ontology. The specific Hegelian undertaking in the Phenomenology of Spirit was to show that this identity is not posited at the beginning, but is described in its development for consciousness. The study tries to show that this undertaking is a functionalistic one because here reality, as an object of consciousness, receives its specific configuration on the ground of the logical unity of the moments belonging to each form of consciousness and to their totality.