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203From Kant to post-Kantian idealism: German idealismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1). 2002.German idealism has been pictured as an unwarranted deviation from the central epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, and its close historical association with German romanticism is adduced in support of this verdict. This paper proposes an interpretation of German idealism which seeks to grant key importance to its connection with romanticism without thereby undermining its philosophical rationality. I suggest that the fundamental motivation of German idealism is axiological, and tha…Read more
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134All or nothing: systematicity, transcendental arguments, and skepticism in German idealismHarvard University Press. 2005.In this work, the first overview of the German Idealism that is both conceptual and methodological, Paul W. Franks offers a philosophical reconstruction that is...
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71Peirce's ‘Schelling-Fashioned Idealism’ and ‘the Monstrous Mysticism of the East’British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 732-755. 2015.Peirce remarks on several occasions in the 1790s on affinities between his evolutionary metaphysics and Schelling's Idealism, behind which, he avers, lies ‘the monstrous mysticism of the East’. What are these affinities? Why are they affinities with Schelling rather than with Hegel? And what is the mysticism in question? I argue that Schelling, like Peirce but unlike Hegel, is committed to evolution, not only across species boundaries, but also across the boundary between the inorganic and the o…Read more
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52Everyday Speech and Revelatory Speech in Rosenzweig and WittgensteinPhilosophy Today 50 (1): 24-39. 2006.
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43Desdemona's Lie: Nihilism, Perfectionism, HistoricismJournal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (2): 225-245. 2013.O, who hath done this deed?nobody; I myself."Yea, I am the atheist and the godless one, who, against the will that wills nothing, will tell lies, just as Desdemona did when she lay dying.” 1 There is a distinctively Nietzschean ring to this sentence, which is taken from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s open letter to Fichte in 1799, the text in which the term “nihilism” seems to have been used in a philosophically significant way for the first time. There is, in particular, an unmistakable resonance …Read more
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43Review of William F. Bristow, Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (8). 2008.
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42Skepticism after KantIn James Conant & Andrea Kern (eds.), Varieties of Skepticism: Essays After Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, De Gruyter. pp. 17-58. 2014.
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36I—Sebastian Gardner: German IdealismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 76 (1): 211-228. 2002.[Sebastian Gardner] German idealism has been pictured as an unwarranted deviation from the central epistemological orientation of modern philosophy, and its close historical association with German romanticism is adduced in support of this verdict. This paper proposes an interpretation of German idealism which seeks to grant key importance to its connection with romanticism without thereby undermining its philosophical rationality. I suggest that the fundamental motivation of German idealism is …Read more
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35A Primer on German Enlightenment, With a Translation of Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s the Fundamental Concepts and Principles of EthicsPhilosophical Review 106 (1): 141. 1997.The first part of this book provides the best short overview of the German Enlightenment available in English. Although, as the author says, she “sheds no new light on the German Enlightenment but follows current views”, those views are largely unavailable in English. With admirable lucidity, Roehr covers topics such as the nature of enlightenment, theology, Freemasonry, responses to the French revolution, and moral philosophy.
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29Comment on Rolf-Peter Horstmann's 'what is Hegel's legacy and what should we do with it?'European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2). 1999.
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27From Quine to Hegel: Naturalism, Anti-Realism and Maimon’s Question Quid FactiDiscipline filosofiche. 29 (1): 9-29. 2019.
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21Mythology, essence, and form: Schelling’s Jewish reception in the nineteenth centuryInternational Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (1-2): 71-89. 2019.Habermas explained the attraction of German Idealism to twentieth century Jewish philosophers by appealing to the impact of kabbalah on the German Idealists. Schelling was his principal example. In this article, I trace two lines of Jewish reception of Schelling in the nineteenth century. Among German-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of his philosophy of mythology, not because of his relation to kabbalah. Among Galician-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of what t…Read more
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20The rationality of history and the history of rationality: Menachem Fisch on the analytic idealist predicamentOpen Philosophy 3 (1): 699-715. 2020.Two essential Kantian insights are the significance for rationality of the capacity for criticism and the limits of cognition, discovered when criticism is pursued methodically, that are due to the perspectival character of the human standpoint. After a period of disparagement, these Kantian insights have been sympathetically construed and are now discussed within contemporary analytic philosophy. However, if Kant’s assumption of a single, immutable, human framework is jettisoned, then the ratio…Read more
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18Analytic HasidismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (4): 325-346. 2023.Sam Lebens has written a richly inventive and thought-provoking book that contributes greatly to philosophy of religion and to contemporary Jewish philosophy. While there is much that merits response, I will focus here on one central theme of the book: the doctrine, dubbed (Extreme) Hasidic Idealism by Lebens, that we exist only in God’s imagination — accordingly that we are nothing but divine ideas. I will also argue that the book exceeds its self-presentation as a work in the “analytic style” …Read more
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15Inner Anti-Semitism or Kabbalistic Legacy? German Idealism’s Relationship to JudaismIn Jürgen Stolzenberg, Fred Rush & Karl P. Ameriks (eds.), Glaube Und Vernunft/Faith and Reason, De Gruyter. pp. 254-282. 2010.
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13Comment on Rolf‐Peter Horstmann's ‘What is Hegel's Legacy and What Should We Do With It?’European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 288-291. 1999.
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12Analytic Hasidism: Reflections on Sam Lebens’ Principles of JudaismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (4): 321-342. 2022.Sam Lebens has written a richly inventive and thought-provoking book that contributes greatly to philosophy of religion and to contemporary Jewish philosophy. While there is much that merits response, I will focus here on one central theme of the book: the doctrine, dubbed (Extreme) Hasidic Idealism by Lebens, that we exist only in God’s imagination — accordingly that we are nothing but divine ideas. I will also argue that the book exceeds its self-presentation as a work in the “analytic style” …Read more
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10Should Jews and Christians Fear the Gifts of the Greeks?In Kevin Hart & Michael A. Singer (eds.), The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians, Fordham University Press. pp. 211-215. 2022.
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8Reform and/or Revolution? Comments on Karin de Boer, Kant’s Reform of MetaphysicsKantian Review 27 (1): 127-132. 2022.Karin de Boer has given the best account so far of the reform of Wolffian metaphysics that Kant promised. But does such a reform cohere with the revolutionary goal that Kant also affirmed? Standpoint is singled out as the central meta-concept of Kant’s revolutionary goal, and it is argued that, in the second and third critiques, Kant himself developed his revolutionary insight into the perspectival character of both concept and judgement in ways that he did not anticipate at the time of the firs…Read more
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6Gibt es nachkantischen Skeptizismus?In Markus Gabriel (ed.), Skeptizismus Und Metaphysik, Akademie Verlag. pp. 295-316. 2011.
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4All or nothing: Systematicity and nihilism in Jacobi, Reinhold, and MaimonIn Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge companion to German idealism, Cambridge University Press. pp. 95--116. 2000.
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4The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on TsimtsumIn Agata Bielik-Robson & Daniel H. Weiss (eds.), Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, De Gruyter. pp. 39-60. 2020.
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3Transcendental Arguments, Reason, and Skepticism: Contemporary Debates and the Origins of Post-KantianismIn Robert Stern (ed.), Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, Oxford University Press. pp. 111--145. 1999.
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