Susan Hahn

Contemporary analytic color theorists ask, “Why can’t we see something as both red and green?” Goethe asks instead, “Why does the eye try to see reddish-green in a way not possible in nature?” To explain red-green unity, Goethe drew on idealist elements that took him beyond a pure empiricism. Virtually without exception, what has blocked our view of these idealist elements is a near universal misreading of Goethe as a pure empiricist. Hegel alone saw in Goethe’s red-green color experiments implied idealist elements that called for a different concept of unity. One flexible enough to allow for a concept of sameness that allows for difference. In this, we see an important anticipation of the structure that influenced Hegel’s unity-in-difference principle.

David Kirby Charles Baxter David H. Lynn Marie Myung-Ok Lee Barbara Hamby Mary Morris Debora Greger Reginald Shepherd Amit Majmudar Page Hill Starzinger Ricardo Pau-Llosa Julianna Baggott G.E. Murray Patrice de La Tour du Pin--translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz R.T. Smith Rebecca Rasmussen Steven A. Dabrowski Celeste Ng Nancy Eimers Chard deNiord Laura Kasischke Derek Mong Judith Valente Debra Nystrom John J. Clayton Erika Dreifus David Wagoner Charlie Smith Pimone Triplett Megan Harlan Jonathan Fink Corey Marks Anne Harding Woodwortth.

Hegel's most interesting and controversial claims about nonconceptual knowledge arise in contexts of value. This thesis examines Hegel's views in the Phenomenology of Spirit on the relation between nonconceptual and conceptual knowledge, specifically in connection with ancient ethics and aesthetics. My dissertation demonstrates that Hegel's views about nonconceptual knowledge are the basis for a coherent, richly-interconnected theory of expression, representation, action, moral action, interpretation, and self-understanding. To demonstrate my thesis concretely, the first two chapters focus on nonconceptual, nonverbal forms of thought in connection with historical aesthetic and ethical contexts. The last two chapters return to themes appearing in earlier chapters about the role that language, interpretation, and self-understanding play in altering the nature of ethical actions

Why wasn’t Hume a sceptic about matters of taste? He was a thoroughgoing sceptic about fundamental matters in traditional metaphysics, such as cause, causal necessitation, inductive inferences, the self, even external objects. Yet, without exception, Hume’s aesthetics is read as abruptly reversing his sceptical position and promoting a timeless and objective standard for judging beauty. I reject the dominant approach for displacing the gains of his scepticism. To impute to Hume knowledge of a standard that depends essentially on a relation to certain persons makes him sound more like an idealist than an empiricist philosopher with naturalistic leanings. Instead, I read his aesthetic naturalism against the background of his sceptical commitments, by reconstructing his dilemma of taste along the lines of his general scepticism about cause. I argue that he deduces ‘that’ an unknown standard is operative, but in a qualified sense not ruled out by his scepticism

The Impossibility of Poetry Adorno's aesthetic theory bears the profound scars of his personal experience of fascism. Even after Auschwitz, he feared that modern bourgeois society is a breeding ground for new forms of fascist terror. It was said that, after Auschwitz, one could no longer write poems. But Adorno insisted that postwar art is an indispensable means for telling the truth about how the social order was fundamentally changed by that catastrophe.1 Not to tell the truth is to be guilty of complicitous silence; yet, the unbearable truth is that society is pervasively and radically evil. As long as…

The latest volume in the Cambridge Histories of Philosophy series, The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century brings together twenty-nine leading experts in the field and covers the years 1790-1870. Their twenty-seven chapters provide a comprehensive survey of the period, organizing the material topically. After a brief editor's introduction, it begins with three chapters surveying the background of nineteenth century philosophy: followed by two on logic and mathematics, two on nature and natural science, five on mind and language, including psychology, the human sciences and aesthetics, four on ethics, three on religion, seven on society, including chapters on the French Revolution, the decline of natural right, political economy, and social discontent, and three on history, dealing with historical method, speculative theories of history and the history of philosophy. The essays are framed by an editor's introduction and a bibliography.

Hegel's most interesting and controversial claims about nonconceptual knowledge arise in contexts of value. This paper examines the relation between nonconceptual and conceptual knowledge in Hegel's Phenomenology, specifically in connection with early Greek aesthetics. I take up Hegel's claim that the ancient Greeks expressed in their myths, religious narratives, sculpture, and artistic materials certain high powered philosophical truths which they shouldn't express in words. I raise a paradox about his claims and show how his claims about ineffable knowledge clash with his general propositional criterion of knowledge, namely, that for something to count as knowledge it must be expressible in words. However I argue that Hegel's thoughts about the matter were coherent and I solve the paradox