Paul Franks

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” and illustrates the need to overcome the analytic/Continental divide.

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” and illustrates the need to overcome the analytic/Continental divide.

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 first critique, when his promise to reform metaphysics was made. The question is raised what room Kant’s revolution leaves for doctrinal and not merely disciplinary judgements in both general and special metaphysics, and also whether the opening of new vistas may have drained metaphysical reform of its interest.

[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 axiological, and that its augment of Kant's idealism is intelligible in terms of its combined aim of consolidating the transcendental turn and legitimating the kind of relation to value articulated in German romanticism. /// [Paul Franks] German idealists regard Spinozism as both the realism that outflanks Kant's idealism and the source of the conception of systematicity with which to fortify idealism. But they offer little argument for this view. To fill the gap, I reconstruct arguments that could underlie Jacobi's and Pistorius's tentative but influential suggestions that Kant is or should be a Spinozist. Kant is indeed a monist about phenomena, but, unlike Spinoza, a pluralist about noumena. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the Third Antinomy can be solved by a more thoroughgoing Spinozistic monism. The resulting Spinozism outflanks Kant by acknowledging Jacobi's charge that philosophy annihilates immediacy and individuality, whereas Kant's commitment to things in themselves can seem a half-hearted attempt to avoid the charge. However, the German idealist contention is that only a synthesis of such a Spinozism with Kantian idealism can retrieve immediacy and individuality, thus overcoming nihilism.

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 rationality of historical succession is called into question. Moreover, if the revolutionary character of framework transitions is acknowledged, then reason is historicized and even its character as reason is threatened. I argue that Menachem Fisch’s approach to criticism and rationality offers an escape from this post-Kantian predicament that acknowledges revolutionary framework transitions and that draws upon the dialogical traditions of Jewish thought, and I also argue that Fisch’s approach should be seen as thematizing, to use the terms of Kant’s aesthetics and of Fichte’s account of natural right, the reflecting rather than determining status of critical judgement, which involves second-personal address.

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 organic. Moreover, Schelling, like Peirce but unlike Hegel, embeds this account of evolution in an account of the evolution of God through love. The monstrous mysticism of the East, I argue, is Lurianic kabbalah, to which Schelling is demonstrably indebted, and which is committed to an evolutionary theism on which is based, if not an account of natural evolution, an account of reincarnation as a mechanism by which life-forms progress from inorganic to organic bodies as they develop their consciousness. Publicized by..

Why are Kant and Hegel so notoriously hard to understand? It has hitherto gone unnoticed that Kant and Hegel account for philosophy's necessary obscurity by recasting what they think is an ancient tradition of philosophical esotericism. Reconstructing these accounts generates new interpretations of Kant's deduction of freedom and Hegel's deduction of the concept of science . Both deductions aim to make philosophy universally accessible. Each raises, but fails to settle, the question of philosophy's exclusions. ;Following a procedure of Cavell's, I offer a thematics of esotericism, permitting a wide variety of esotericisms. Recent discussion knows only one: elitist obfuscation. I trace several eighteenth century controversies, showing that elitist obfuscation was rejected by Kant and others, but that other esotericisms remained available. I argue against the interpretation of Kant as a secret obfuscatory elitist. ;I then characterize the shift in Kant's thinking leading to his deduction of freedom and his account of esotericism. Building upon work by Allison and Henrich, I interpret the fact of reason as a practical deduction, consisting in an actualization of the capacity for freedom. The first-personal character of the deduction underlies Kant's explicit recasting of esotericism in his response to Schlosser's Seventh Letter esotericism . Kant's metaphysics of morals is esoteric because it is accessible only through the fact of reason: the first-personal actualization of the capacity for freedom shared by all human beings. Kant locates philosophy's "true secret", which Plato grasped only obscurely, in this esoteric, yet universally accessible, practical metaphysics. ;Finally, I interpret Hegel's Phenomenology as a practical deduction whose first-personal character is expressed by the Hegelian "we". This avoids the circularity problem facing interpretations based upon Kant's theoretical deduction of the categories, and enables the reconstruction of Hegel's account of the esotericism of determinate negation. I argue that Fichte's and Schelling's accounts of esotericism endanger Kant's commitment to universal accessibility and that Hegel seeks to preserve Kant's commitment without abandoning their insights. However, neither Kant nor Hegel accounts sufficiently for the resistance their work encounters

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 they took to be his non-mythological version of kabbalah. In both cases, Schelling offered a middle road between, on the one hand, traditionalist rejection of modernity and non-Jewish philosophy and, on the other, varieties of antinomianism.

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 that its augment of Kant's idealism is intelligible in terms of its combined aim of consolidating the transcendental turn and legitimating the kind of relation to value articulated in German romanticism. /// [Paul Franks] German idealists regard Spinozism as both the realism that outflanks Kant's idealism and the source of the conception of systematicity with which to fortify idealism. But they offer little argument for this view. To fill the gap, I reconstruct arguments that could underlie Jacobi's and Pistorius's tentative but influential suggestions that Kant is or should be a Spinozist. Kant is indeed a monist about phenomena, but, unlike Spinoza, a pluralist about noumena. Nevertheless, it is arguable that the Third Antinomy can be solved by a more thoroughgoing Spinozistic monism. The resulting Spinozism outflanks Kant by acknowledging Jacobi's charge that philosophy annihilates immediacy and individuality, whereas Kant's commitment to things in themselves can seem a half-hearted attempt to avoid the charge. However, the German idealist contention is that only a synthesis of such a Spinozism with Kantian idealism can retrieve immediacy and individuality, thus overcoming nihilism.

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 between the sentence quoted from Jacobi and the thought that begins and ends the Third Essay of GM: the thought that “man … prefers to will nothingness than not will” (GM III:1; KSA 5:339) 2 along with the idea that our ..