William F. Bristow

In this article I propose that the tension between two of Herder’s most important contributions to Western thought and culture, the incomparability thesis and the history thesis, is reconciled by Herder’s own innovative project and method of universal history. Whereas the incomparability thesis demands that peoples are known in their uniqueness without comparison to other peoples, the history thesis implies knowing peoples in relation to each other as distinct parts of a universal history of humanity. I interpret Herder’s method and project of universal history as a precursor of Hegel’s project and method of his Phenomenology of Spirit. The comparison between Herder’s and Hegel’s methods and projects shows that Herder’s universal history is a philosophical inquiry—empirical, critical, skeptical, and open-ended—into the meaning and telos of human existence. I propose in concluding that Herder’s innovative practice of philosophy as universal history is a third significant contribution to European thought.

In Understanding Moral Obligation, Robert Stern presents an interesting account of the history of ethics from Kant through Hegel and Kierkegaard. I argue that Stern in this account misinterprets Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Works of Love by reading them as presenting a Divine Command Theory of moral obligation, as a philosophical account meant to compete with those of Kant and Hegel. It mistakes, indeed subverts, Kierkegaard's purposes to read him as engaging in a philosophical dialectic in these texts. I argue that Stern's reading renders Kierkegaard's contribution internal to a philosophical dialectic that Kierkegaard means to speak against, from a position expressly and resolutely external to it.

This article critically examines Christine Korsgaard's claim in her Tanner Lectures to find in self-consciousness itself the norms that would answer our need for practical reasons, insofar as that need is constituted through our capacity for reflection. It shows that the way in which Korsgaard sees “the need for a reason” as arising out of self-consciousness implies a dilemma: on the one hand, we want as the ultimate source of our reasons an authority of which we cannot coherently demand legitimation in turn; on the other, our freedom demands that nothing count for us as a reason except insofar as it is in turn endorsed in reflection. Relying on resources drawn from the tradition of reflection, this paper argues that Korsgaard's attempt to resolve this tension is unsuccessful and appeals, in response to this failure, to faith in the authority of our reasons in the absence of foundational justification of them.

Hegel's objection -- Is Kant's idealism subjective? -- An ambiguity in 'subjectivism' -- The epistemological problem -- The transcendental deduction of the categories and subjectivism -- Are Kant's categories subjective? -- Hegel's suspicion : Kantian critique and subjectivism -- What is kantian philosophical criticism? -- Hegel's suspicion : initial formulation -- A shallow suspicion? -- Deepening the suspicion : criticism, autonomy, and subjectivism -- Directions of response -- Critique and suspicion : unmasking the critical philosophy -- Hegel's transformation of critique -- The rejection of Kantian critique : philosophy, skepticism, and the recovery of the ancient idea -- Hegel's epistemology in the shadow of Schelling -- Schulze's skepticism contra the critical philosophy -- Ancient versus modern skepticism : Hegel's difference -- Against the modern conception of rational cognition -- Against modern self-certainty -- The history of skepticism: decline into dogmatism -- Philosophy counter culture and time -- The return to Kantian critique : recognizing the rights of ordinary consciousness -- Two conceptions of philosophical critique -- The return to critique and the relation of philosophy to its history -- The rights of ordinary consciousness and the need for critique -- Critique as the realization of the science of metaphysics -- Hegel's self-transformational criticism -- Presuppositionless philosophy -- The problem of the criterion -- Self-transformational criticism -- The problem of the we' -- Our transformation -- Hegel's alternative model : critical transformation as self-realization.

Argues that there is a significant respect in which Kant's categories are to be understood as subjective, namely, in the sense that they are to be understood as the self-legislated rules of our understanding. Argues that the subjectivism of Kant's idealism, by which is meant the relativization of knowledge of objects to our standpoint, is a consequence of the subjectivity of the categories, on this interpretation of their subjectivity. On the reading opposed here, Kant's subjectivism is strictly a consequence of the ideality or subjectivity of our distinctive forms of intuition, space and time.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes the interesting, but obscure claim that the normative constraints that constitute the objectivity of our representations have their source ultimately in transcendental apperception. Keller focuses on this claim. He interprets Kant’s condition of transcendental apperception as the claim that I must represent myself in an impersonal way, and he argues that impersonal self-consciousness is a necessary condition under which I can distinguish my particular take on things from the way things are independently of my own perspective on them. He elaborates his interpretation and defense of the condition of transcendental self-consciousness by discussing its role in each of the central arguments in the Critique in which the notion importantly figures: the transcendental deduction in both the first edition and in the second, the Analogies of Experience, the Paralogisms, and the second-edition refutation of idealism.