Kristin Gjesdal

The tradition of philosophical hermeneutics does not offer a definitive answer to the question “What is truth?” and the inquiry into the relationship between truth and interpretation. Instead, it presents a number of ways in which this question can be asked and discusses the validity and relevance of some plausible responses. Modern hermeneuticians emphasize the interpretative nature of human thought and existence. For Heidegger and Gadamer, truth concerns the way we lead our lives. Dilthey and Nietzsche contemplate the role of the human sciences in a landscape of shifting historical and cultural horizons, arriving at quite different conclusions with respect to the possibility of truth and objectivity. Events and symbolic expressions are products of human intentions and desires, and must be understood as such. For Dilthey, this dimension of meaning is, so to speak, the imprint of human historicity.

The long Nineteenth Century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well-known, yet offer stimulating and path-breaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements of romanticism, idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy's agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the Nineteenth Century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that was accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers--often for the first time--the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The Editors' introductions offer a comprehensive introduction to the contributions of women philosophers in the period, but also to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars.

The Drama of History plumbs the rich relationship between drama and philosophy. Kristin Gjesdal offers a lively and accessible discussion of the philosophical aspects of Henrik Ibsen's work. She shows how well-known nineteenth-century philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche develop their thoughts in interaction with the dramatic arts. At the heart of this interaction is a shared interest in exploring the existential condition of human life as lived andexperienced in history. In this sense, Gjesdal engages philosophy's capacity beyond its narrow academic confines.

This collection of fifteen newly commissioned essays has a dual purpose. Through an emphasis on the reception of Spinoza in German nineteenth-century thought, the volume seeks to shed new light on his work. Likewise, the focus on Spinoza’s influence in the long nineteenth century illuminates novel aspects of the philosophical lineage from idealism to Marxism, psychoanalysis, and beyond. The contributions are at the cutting edge of research on modern German philosophy, not only when it comes to canonical figures like Herder, Kant, and Marx, but also philosophers whose importance has since been neglected such as Salomon Maimon and Lou Salomé. The volume will be of interest to, among others, scholars working in the history of philosophy, in intellectual history, and in Jewish, religious, and German studies.

ABSTRACT This article, a version of which was presented in January 2020 to the North American Nietzsche Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, is a commentary on Andrew Huddleston's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. While praising Huddleston's balancing of systematic and critical scholarship, the article also takes up the wider framework in which Nietzsche's contribution should be understood and the possible limitations to his philosophical contribution.

Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen's Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of Hedda Gabler evokes reflection on beauty, love, passion, death, nihilism, identity, and a host of other topics of an existential nature. It is no surprise that Ibsen's work has gained the attention of philosophically-minded readers from Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salome, and Freud, to Adorno, Cavell, and beyond. Once staged at avant-garde theaters in Paris, London, and Berlin, Ibsen is now a global phenomenon. The enigmatic character of Hedda Gabler remains intriguing to ever-new generations of actors, audiences, and readers. Hedda Gabler occupies a privileged place in the history of European drama and as a work of literature, and, as this volume demonstrates, invites profound and worthwhile philosophical questions. Through ten newly commissioned chapters, written by leading voices in the fields of drama studies, European philosophy, Scandinavian studies, and comparative literature, this volume brings out the philosophical resonances of Hedda Gabler in particular and Ibsen's drama more broadly.

_Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy _offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters, the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field. __KEY DEBATES IN EUROPEAN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY__ Kristin Gjesdal Contributors Editor's Introduction I. Kantian Presuppositions 1. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism by Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism: A Response to Rolf-Peter Horstmann by Paul Guyer II. Fichte 3. Fichte's Original Insight by Dieter Henrich 4. Fichte's Original Insight: Dieter Henrich's Pioneering Piece Half A Century Later by Günter Zöller III. Romanticism 5. Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank 6. Response to Manfred Frank, "Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism" by Michael N. Forster IV. Hegel 7. From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human Sociality by Axel Honneth 8. On Honneth's Interpretation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness" by Robert B. Pippin V. Schelling 9. The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature by Dieter Sturma 10. Nature as Unconditioned? The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Early Works by Dalia Nassar VI. Schopenhauer 11. The Real Essence of Human Beings: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Will by Christopher Janaway 12. Emancipation from the Will by David E. Wellbery VII. Comte 13. Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology by Johan Heilbron 14. Why Was Comte an Epistemologist? by Robert C. Scharff VIII. Mill 15. Mill: The Principle of Liberty by John Rawls 16. John Rawls on Mill's Principle of Liberty by John Skorupski IX. Darwin 17. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose by Robert J. Richards 18. Response to Richards by Gabriel Finkelstein X. Kierkegaard 19. Kierkegaard's _On Authority and Revelation _ by Stanley Cavell 20. A Nice Arrangement of Epigrams: Stanley Cavell on Søren Kierkegaard by Stephen Mulhall XI. Marx 21. Marx's Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor by Jürgen Habermas 22. Epistemology and Self-Reflection in the Young Marx by Espen Hammer XII. Dilthey 23. Wilhelm Dilthey after 150 Years by Hans-Georg Gadamer 24. Gadamer on Dilthey by Frederick C. Beiser XIII. Nietzsche 25. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology by Bernard Williams 26. Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology by Paul Katsafanas XIV. Freud 27. Bad Faith and Falsehood by Jean-Paul Sartre 28. Freud by Sebastian Gardner XV. Twentieth-Century Developments 29. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy by Richard Rorty 30. Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing: Rorty's "Ambidextrous" Analytic Redescription of Nineteenth-Century Hegelian Philosophy by Paul Redding References for Republished Texts Accompanying Original Works

In the young Henrik Ibsen's intellectual quarters, abroad as well as in his native Norway, Hegelianism was very much the philosophical systemde rigueur. Hegel's student Marcus Jacob Monrad taught phenomenology and aesthetics at the University of Christiania throughout the 1850s, and promoted a wider Hegelian way of thinking through frequent book reviews and newspaper articles. In Italy, soon to be his home away from home, Ibsen socialised with the art-historian Lorentz Dietrichson, whose views on the history of art were outspokenly Hegelian. Ibsen was also in touch with the Hegelian circle gathering around the painter I. C. Dahl at the Academy of Art in Dresden. While Ibsen rarely engages in explicit philosophical discussion, he makes a significant exception when responding to the Danish translation of John Stuart Mill'sUtilitarianism. He admits that he has no professional expertise in this area but continues to observe that, insofar as ‘there are writers [like Mill] who lay down the law about philosophy without any knowledge of Hegel or German thought in general,’ it seems to him that ‘anything is allowed.’ To think philosophically without Hegel appears to Ibsen as tantamount to thinking without a reference point or standard.

Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, is an essential and valuable branch of philosophy. Hermeneutics is also a central component of the methodology of the social sciences and the humanities, for example historiography, anthropology, art history, and literary criticism. In a sequence of accessible chapters, contributors across the human sciences explain the leading concepts and ideas of hermeneutics, the historical development of the field, the importance of hermeneutics in philosophy today, and the ways in which it can address contemporary concerns including intercultural relations, relations between subcultures within a single society, and relations across race and gender. Clearly structured and written in non-technical language, this Companion will be an important contribution to a growing field of study.

Among Edvard Munch’s many portraits of Henrik Ibsen, the famous Norwegian dramatist and Munch’s senior by a generation, one stands out. Large in scope and with a characteristic pallet of roughly hewed gray blue, green and yellow, the sketch is given the title Geniuses. Munch’s sketch shows Ibsen, who had died a few years earlier, in the company of Socrates and Nietzsche. The picture was a working sketch for a painting commissioned by the University. While Munch, in the end, chose a different motif for his commission, it is nonetheless significant that he found it appropriate to portrait the Norwegian dramatist in the company of key European philosophers, indeed the whole span of the European philosophical tradition from its early beginnings to its most controversial spokesman in the late 1800s. In my article, I seek to take seriously Munch’s bold and original positioning of Ibsen in the company of philosophers. Focusing on Hedda Gabler—a play about love lost and lives unlived—I explore the aesthetic-philosophical ramifications of Ibsen’s peculiar position between realism and modernism. This position, I suggest, is also reflected in Munch’s sketches for the set design for Hermann Bahr’s 1906 production of the play.

The philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer interests a wide audience that spans the traditional distinction between European and Anglo-American philosophy. Yet one of the most important and complex aspects of his work - his engagement with German Idealism - has received comparatively little attention. In this book, Kristin Gjesdal uses a close analysis and critical investigation of Gadamer's Truth and Method to show that his engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his conception of hermeneutics. She argues that a failure to engage with this aspect of Gadamer's philosophy leads to a misunderstanding of the most pressing problem of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics: the tension between the commitment to the self-criticism of reason, on the one hand, and the turn towards the meaning-constituting authority of tradition, on the other. Her study provides an illuminating assessment of both the merits and the limitations of Gadamer's thought.

Through a detailed study of Herder's Enlightenment thought, especially his philosophy of literature, Kristin Gjesdal offers a new and sometimes provocative reading of the historical origins and contemporary challenges of modern hermeneutics. She shows that hermeneutic philosophy grew out of a historical, anthropological, and poetic discourse in the mid-eighteenth century and argues that, as such, it represents a rich, stimulating, and relevant engagement with the potentials and limits of human meaning and understanding. Gjesdal's study broadens our conception of hermeneutic philosophy - the issues it raises and the answers it offers - and underlines the importance of Herder's contribution to the development of this discipline. Her book will be highly valuable for students and scholars of eighteenth-century thought, especially those working in the fields of hermeneutics, aesthetics, and European philosophy.

The essay takes as its point of departure the way in which the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer has recently been adopted by philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. While appreciating the way in which Truth and Method has gained new relevance within an Anglo-American context, I ask whether sufficient attention has been paid to Gadamer’s romantic heritage. In particular I question the way in which his notion of tradition and historical truth, designed as it is to overcome the ramifications of Descartes and the Kantian enlightenment, is modeled on the example of art and aesthetic experience.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hegel and Herder on Art, History, and ReasonKristin GjesdalThe introduction of a historical perspective in aesthetics is usually traced back to Hegel's 1820 lectures on fine art. Given at the University of Berlin, these lectures were amongst Hegel's most successful and best attended.1 By then a recognized intellectual figure, Hegel sets out to salvage art from its subjectivization in Kantian and romantic aesthetics, but ends up declaring that art, considered in its highest vocation, is a thing of the past. This judgment on art—that its greatness is a thing of the past—follows from Hegel's attempt to combine a notion of art's historicity with a conception of its absolute essence. Hegel, however, was not the first to think systematically about the historicity of art. For this aspect of art—and, indeed, of reason too—was explored philosophically a good sixty years before Hegel's Berlin lectures by a young and aspiring student of Kant's, namely Johann Gottfried Herder. In a series of essays and fragments, Herder develops an advanced and elaborate alternative to Hegel's conception, a fundamentally non-essentialist approach to art, history, and reason.Over the past twenty years or so, Hegel's attempt to combine an essentialist and an historicist approach to art has been revitalized, with increasing force and sophistication, by Arthur Danto.2 The attempts to rehabilitate Herder's aesthetics, however, have been few and far between.3 This is the aim of the present essay, which seeks to contrast the young Herder's non-essentialist understanding of the historicity of art with Hegel's essentialist views on the artwork's historicity, pleading for a rehabilitation of the former.4 I approach this task from three different directions. First, I offer a brief account of Herder's and Hegel's views on reason, history, and art. Second, I look closer at their conceptions of classical tragedy and sculpture, which, due to Winckelmann's studies, [End Page 17] were perceived at the time as the gateway to a historically sensitive conception of culture as such. Finally, I round off by looking at some of the hermeneutic implications of Herder's non-essentialist standpoint.IAccording to Hegel, a phenomenologically mature and accountable philosophy is distinguished by its readiness to reflect on its own, historical presuppositions. It must acknowledge the critical commitments of modern thinking, but also take into account how these commitments are the result of spirit's laborious journey through history. Only by combining the perspective of modernity with the resources of tradition may philosophy inhabit a place where systematicity and historicity concur. Reality may now be exhausted in the form of a speculative logic. This, according to Hegel, is the end of history, but as the end of history, it is also the dawn of a new era, that of free and self-determining spirit.Hegel's notion of the end of history testifies to a formidable optimism about the power of critical thought. In modernity, Hegel claims, art and religion no longer emerge as adequate media of self-reflection. It is philosophy that has taken on this task. Considered from the standpoint of modernity, religion and art are no longer appropriate forms of expression; now only the conceptual optics of philosophy adequately reflects our deepest truths and values.5Artistically speaking, this moment may well emerge as a loss. For even though Hegel never claims that art, as such, will no longer be produced,6 he reckons it will not be produced in the same spirit as before. No longer expressive of a shared, ethical and political commitment, art is not brought forth by necessity. Intellectually speaking, however, the end of art triggers a different response. Not only does the end of art represent another step towards the conceptual self-determination of spirit. It also follows that only when a phenomenon such as art has finally fulfilled its historical possibilities can it be brought to philosophical clarity about itself. Only after art can we know conceptually what art is. Aesthetics can only begin at the point when art, considered in its highest vocation, no longer holds a historical future.IIAs a young and...

The relationship between 20th-century phenomenology and the transcendental program launched by Immanuel Kant is crucial, but delicate. First there is Husserl, who seemed both attracted to and seriously critical of Kant's first Critique. Then there is Heidegger's ambition to scour the entire field of the three Critiques. Most important in this context, is probably his reading of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics . Faithful to his notion of a salvaging “destruction” of the philosophical tradition, Heidegger argues that the earliest version of Kant's work, the so-called A-deduction, is radically different from the philosophy promoted by the neo-Kantians. Kant, he claims, was not really interested in epistemology in the narrow meaning of the term. He was, rather, a philosopher verging upon a genuine ontology of Being, but who, for reasons that remain unknown, felt forced to leave these tracks behind in order to pursue the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Then there is the second Critique, which Heidegger approaches through a discussion of the Kantian notions of freedom and causality. And, finally, there are his remarks about the Critique of Judgment, scattered all over his writing on art from the early 1930s onwards. However, Heidegger never produces a proper, systematic account of the relevance of the third Critique. Such an account, I argue in this essay, is provided by Hans-Georg Gadamer