•  108
    In the Vocation of Man, Fichte makes the striking claim that life is eternal, rational, our true being, and the final cause of nature in general and of death in particular. How can we make sense of this claim? I argue that the public lectures that compose the Vocation are a popular expression of Fichte’s pre-existing commitment to what I call immortalism, the view that life is the unconditioned condition of intelligibility. Casting the I as an absolutely self-active or living power enables his p…Read more
  • Rationalism
    Jacobi Online Dictionary. forthcoming.
  •  589
    From being to acting: Kant and Fichte on intellectual intuition
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (4): 762-783. 2022.
    Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that r…Read more
  •  199
    This chapter intervenes in recent debates in Kant scholarship about the possibility of a general logical alien. Such an alien is a thinker whose laws of thinking violate ours. She is third-personal as she is radically unlike us. Proponents of the constitutive reading of Kant’s conception of general logic accordingly suggest that Kant rules out the possibility of such an alien as unthinkable. I add to this an often-overlooked element in Kant’s thinking: there is reason to think that he grants—and…Read more
  •  261
    Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism…Read more
  •  214
    Schelling, Cavell, and the Truth of Skepticism
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 9 (9). 2021.
    This paper argues that McDowell wrongly assumes that “terror”, Cavell’s reaction to the radical contingency of our shared modes of knowing or our “attunement”, expresses a skepticism that is antinomically bound to an equally unacceptable dogmatism because Cavell rather regards terror as a mood that reveals the “truth of skepticism”, namely, that there is no conclusive evidence for necessary attunement on pain of a category error, and that a precedent for McDowell’s misunderstanding is Hegel’s ar…Read more
  • Facticity and the Fate of Reason After Kant
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    Kant’s science of the conditions of intelligibility leaves post-Kantians with a question: can a science of intelligibility tolerate brute facts? ‘Facticity’ is associated with phenomenology, for which the concept denotes underivable or brute conditions of intelligibility like temporality, sociality, and embodiment. While this suggests an affirmative answer to the post-Kantian question, scholars overlook that ‘facticity’ is a concept from German idealism, whose proponents answer the question in t…Read more
  •  334
    Hiatus Irrationalis: Lask’s Fateful Misreading of Fichte
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (3): 977-995. 2022.
    ‘Facticity’ is a concept that classical phenomenologists like Heidegger use to denote the radically contingent or underivably brute conditions of intelligibility. Yet Fichte coins the term, to which he gives the opposing use of denoting unacceptably brute conditions of intelligibility. For him, radical contingency is a problem to be solved by deriving such conditions from reason. Heidegger rejects Fichte's recoil from facticity with his hermeneutics of facticity, supplanting Fichte's metaphor of…Read more
  •  137
    The history of philosophy risks a self-opacity whereby we overestimate or underestimate our proximity to prior modes of thinking. This risk is relevant to assessing Hegel’s appropriation by McDowell and Priest. McDowell enlists Hegel for a quietist answer to the problem with assuming that concepts and reality belong to different orders, viz., how concepts are answerable to the world. If we accept Hegel’s absolute idealist view that the conceptual is boundless, this problem allegedly dissolves. P…Read more
  •  313
    The concept of facticity denotes conditions of experience whose necessity is not logical yet whose contingency is not empirical. Although often associated with Heidegger, Fichte coins ‘facticity’ in his Berlin period to refer to the conclusion of Kant’s metaphysical deduction of the categories, which he argues leaves it a contingent matter that we have the conditions of experience that we do. Such rhapsodic or factical conditions, he argues, must follow necessarily, independent of empirical give…Read more
  •  118
    Post-Kantian Idealism and Self-Transformation
    In G. Anthony Bruno & Justin Vlasits (eds.), Transformation and the History of Philosophy, Routledge. 2023.
    While the idea that philosophy requires self-transformation is historically pervasive, it exerts considerable influence on the post-Kantians who first aim to systematize Kant’s idealism by grounding it on a first principle. In the 1790s, Fichte and Schelling offer competing accounts of the self-transformation that they regard as essential to positing a first principle. Their accounts raise two central questions. First, what makes this kind of self-transformation possible? Second, are there diffe…Read more
  •  116
    Transformation and the History of Philosophy (edited book)
    Routledge. 2023.
    From ancient conceptions of becoming a philosopher to modern discussions of psychedelic drugs, the concept of transformation plays a fascinating part in the history of philosophy. However, until now there has been no sustained exploration of the full extent of its role. Transformation and the History of Philosophy is an outstanding survey of the history, nature, and development of the idea of transformation, from the ancient period to the twentieth century. Comprising twenty-two specially commis…Read more
  •  243
    Does Kant’s restriction of knowledge to phenomena undermine objectivity? Jacobi argues that it does, daring the transcendental idealist to abandon the thing in itself and embrace the “strongest idealism”. According to Bruno, McDowell and Meillassoux adopt a similar critique of Kant’s conception of objectivity and, more significantly, echo Jacobi’s dare to profess the strongest idealism – what McDowell approvingly calls “consistent idealism” and Meillassoux disparagingly calls “extreme idealism”.…Read more
  •  286
    Schelling on the Unconditioned Condition of the World
    In Thomas Buchheim, Thomas Frisch & Nora C. Wachsmann (eds.), Schellings Freiheitsschrift: Methode, System, Kritik, Mohr Siebeck. 2021.
    In the Freedom essay, Schelling charges that (1) idealism fails to grasp human freedom’s distinctiveness and that (2) this failure undermines idealism's attempt to refute pantheism, as exemplified by Spinoza. This raises two questions, which I will answer in turn: what, for Schelling, is distinctive of human freedom; and how does the idealists’ failure to grasp it render them unable to refute pantheism? To answer these questions, I will reconstruct Schelling’s argument that freedom has the disti…Read more
  •  118
    This paper focuses on the normative turn in Fichte’s critique of dogmatism to show how an inward shift in perspective changes the meanings of all of our terms and, therewith, the nature of objectivity. The world that seems factual and to exclude normativity is displaced by a world constituted by the normative framework of judging and acting subjects. Hence, the world that poses an alleged hard problem of consciousness is displaced by one whose problems are, in the first instance, practical rathe…Read more
  •  113
    Review of Kant’s Critique of Spinoza, Omri Boehm (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 1 (x). 2014.
  •  408
    Schelling’s Philosophical Letters on Doctrine and Critique
    In María Del Del Rosario Acosta López & Colin McQuillan (eds.), Critique in German Philosophy: From Kant to Critical Theory, Suny Press. pp. 133-154. 2020.
    Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. …Read more
  •  138
    Skepticism, Deduction, and Reason’s Maturation
    In G. Anthony Bruno & A. C. Rutherford (eds.), Skepticism: Historical and Contemporary Inquiries, Routledge. pp. 203-19. 2018.
    A puzzle arises when we consider that, for Kant, the categories are 'original acquisitions' of our understanding to which we must nevertheless prove our entitlement via 'deduction', on pain of dogmatism. I resolve this puzzle by articulating skepticism’s role in the transcendental deduction, drawing on Kant’s construal of the skeptical 'question quid juris' in the juridical terms of entitlement to property. I then situate skepticism’s transformative potential within what Kant regards as reason’s…Read more
  •  175
    This paper addresses debates in German idealism that arise in response to the modal shift in logic, proposed by Kant, from a logic of thinking to a logic of experience. With the Kantian logic of experience arises a problem of radical contingency or 'rhapsodic determination' for logic. While Fichte and Hegel attempt to resolve the problem of contingency by constructing rational systems aimed at established the grounds for logic, I show how Schelling brings into view, in a proto-existentialist mov…Read more
  • Schelling’s Question Quid Juris
    In Sean McGrath & Kyla Bruff (eds.), The Palgrave Schelling Handbook, Palgrave. forthcoming.
  •  121
    Scholars agree that Schelling’s critique of Hegel consists in charging reason with an inability to account for its own possibility. This is not an attack on reason’s project of constructing a logical system, but rather on the pretense of doing so with complete justification and so without presuppositions, as if it were obvious why there is a logical system or why there is anything meaningful at all. Scholars accordingly cite the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ as emblematic…Read more
  •  142
    Schelling’s Philosophy: Freedom, Nature, and Systematicity (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    Despite F. W. J. Schelling’s relative exclusion from the ongoing German idealist renaissance in Anglophone scholarship, recent critical and historical engagement with idealist texts affords an unprecedented opportunity to discover the richness and value of his thinking. This volume provides a wide-ranging presentation of Schelling’s original contribution to and internal critique of the basic insights of German idealism, his role in shaping the course of post-Kantian thought, and his sensitivity …Read more
  •  278
    Empirical Realism and the Great Outdoors: A Critique of Meillassoux
    In Marie-Eve Morin (ed.), Continental Realism and its Discontents, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 1-15. 2017.
    Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the…Read more
  •  403
    Our understanding of Schelling’s internal critique of German idealism, including his late attack on Hegel, is incomplete unless we trace it to the early “Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism,” which initiate his engagement with the problem of systematicity—that judgment makes deriving a system of a priori conditions from a first principle necessary, while this capacity’s finitude makes this impossible. Schelling aims to demonstrate this problem’s intractability. My conceptual aim is …Read more
  •  268
    In recent work, William Blattner claims that Heidegger is an empirical realist, but not a transcendental idealist. Blattner argues that, unlike Kant, Heidegger holds that thinking beyond human life warrants no judgment about nature's existence. This poses two problems. One is interpretive: Blattner misreads Kant's conception of the beyond-life as yielding the judgment that nature does not exist, for Kant shares Heidegger's view that such a judgment must lack sense. Another is programmatic: Blatt…Read more
  •  250
    Meillassoux defines “correlationism” as the view that we can only access the mutual dependence of thought and being—specifically, subjectivity and objectivity—which he attributes to Heidegger. This attribution is inapt. It is only by accessing being—via existential analysis—that we can properly distinguish beings like subjects and objects. I propose that Meillassoux’s misattribution ignores the ontological difference that drives Heidegger’s project. First, I demonstrate the inadequacy of Meillas…Read more