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178 - The reasonable and the rational
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- Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
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- 05 February 2015
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- 11 December 2014, pp 692-697
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Beginning with the Dewey Lectures (“Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory” (1980) in CP), Rawls distinguishes between the reasonable and the rational. The reasonable is a particular form of practical rationality, but it is not always easy to understand what distinguishes it from the rational. At times it seems that the reasonable is the broader category: Rawls explains that a course of action may be rational in the sense of being in a person’s narrow interest, but nonetheless unreasonable because unacceptable to others (LHMP 164). At other times, however, it seems that the rational is the broader category: especially in PL, the principles of justice are said to be merely reasonable, not rationally justified in some deeper sense. How can we make sense of these distinctions?
In TJ, Rawls writes that his contractarian theory of justice “conveys the idea that principles of justice may be conceived as principles that would be chosen by rational persons, and that in this way conceptions of justice may be explained and justified. The theory of justice is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice” (TJ 3, 16). This striking claim was soon subject to severe criticism, and Rawls eventually abandoned it (PL 53 n.7). Even in TJ, it is clear that Rawls is operating with more than one conception of rationality, and much of his later work is devoted to clarifying their differences.
104 - Kant, Immanuel
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- Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
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- 11 December 2014, pp 395-398
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Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is widely acknowledged to be Rawls’s most important philosophical influence. There is no hope of doing justice to Kant’s philosophical arguments in this short space; we will have to be content to list the features of Kant’s practical philosophy which have been most influential for Rawls.
A crucial claim of Kant (and Rawls) is that moral and political philosophy constitutes an autonomous, specifically practical branch of inquiry, essentially independent of theoretical claims about the nature of things, both scientific and metaphysical. For Kant, ordinary moral consciousness already understands itself as bound by unconditional duties, by claims about what we ought to do, independent of empirical facts about what anyone does or the way the world is. Moral philosophy is then the clarification of the conceptual presuppositions of this commitment to unconditional duty, a clarification which aims to show that our moral beliefs are coherent. In Rawls, the analogous claim is that the citizens of constitutional democracies already possess a sense of justice which then merely needs to be clarified in reflective equilibrium to produce an ordered set of principles that can serve as the basis of political justification in a well-ordered society.
45 - Constructivism: Kantian/political
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- Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
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- 11 December 2014, pp 149-156
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In the title of his 1980 Dewey Lectures, Rawls famously characterizes his theory of justice as fairness as an example of “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.” This description clearly identiies constructivism as a particular option in moral philosophy, to be contrasted with other “familiar traditional moral conceptions, such as utilitarianism, perfectionism, and intuitionism” (CP 303). The description also implies that there can be different versions of constructivism, of which the Kantian form is only one. Since the Dewey Lectures, there has been great interest in constructivism as a potentially distinct option in moral theorizing, but little agreement about what constructivism actually is, or about whether it can ever be fairly described as Kantian.
The dificulties can be traced back to Rawls’s own deinition. “What distinguishes the Kantian form of constructivism is essentially this: it speciies a particular conception of the person as an element in a reasonable procedure of construction, the outcome of which determines the content of the irst principles of justice” (CP 304). It is not so hard to see how this deinition applies to Rawls’s own theory of justice. He speciies a particular conception of persons as characterized by the two moral powers, possessing both a conception of the good and a sense of justice, and thus to be treated as free and equal. He then uses this conception of the person as an element in a procedure of construction, the original position, in which the free and equal persons themselves choose the two fundamental principles of justice, the principle of equal liberty and the difference principle. So a natural interpretation of Rawls’s deinition would seem be: a constructivist moral theory is one in which some suitably characterized set of persons selects moral principles for themselves, and the Kantian form of constructivism is one in which the set of persons is characterized in a speciically Kantian way.
105 - Kantian interpretation
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- Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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- 11 December 2014, pp 399-402
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In TJ §40, Rawls claims that his theory of justice can be given a Kantian interpretation. This formulation refers more to the justification than to the content of the theory. In an earlier but quite clearly separate discussion (TJ 29), Rawls points out that the content of his theory, the argument for the two principles of justice, expresses a version of Kant’s principle that persons are to be treated not as mere means, but also as ends in themselves. Utilitarianism, Rawls argues, violates this Kantian principle by allowing the happiness of a minority to be traded off for the greater happiness of a greater number. The principle of utility could not be chosen by the parties in the original position, since they cannot rule out that they will occupy the position of the minority. Here the substantively Kantian, anti-utilitarian content of the theory is dictated by the specific constraints of the original position. How these constraints themselves are to be justified is a separate and deeper question, and it is this question that the Kantian interpretation is meant to address.
According to TJ §40, the original position can be understood as a procedural interpretation of Kant’s idea of autonomy. Rawls notes that the central idea of Kant’s moral philosophy is that “moral principles are the object of rational choice” (TJ 221). The parties in the original position are of course understood as making a rational choice of the two principles of justice under conditions of uncertainty. In an early critical article, Oliver Johnson objected to Rawls’s appeal to a Kantian interpretation, arguing that because parties in the original position are clearly trying to advance their own interests, their choices are, in Kant’s terms, heteronomous rather than autonomous (Johnson 1974).
211 - Stability
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- Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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- The Cambridge Rawls Lexicon
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- 11 December 2014, pp 804-810
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Rawls consistently maintains that a theory of justice must be shown to be stable. Rawls famously declares that justice is “the first virtue of social institutions” (TJ 3). But after explaining that the goal of his work is to vindicate this conviction by showing that there can be a set of just principles that could regulate the actions and institutions of a well-ordered society, Rawls goes on to note that such a conception of justice is “not the only prerequisite for a viable human community. There are other fundamental social problems, in particular those of coordination, efficiency, and stability” (TJ 5). Of these three, stability poses the most challenging problem for Rawls’s theory of justice.
“It is evident,” continues Rawls, “that these three problems are connected with that of justice.” But Rawls’s two principles of justice address the first two problems directly, by explaining how the goals of coordination and efficiency are to be made consistent with the priority of justice. According to the first principle, individuals can justly coordinate their plans of action by recognizing a scheme of equal basic liberties which allow each person to pursue a conception of the good. According to the second principle, a society can justly pursue efficiency by permitting a scheme of competitive economic incentives, and their resulting inequalities, only to the extent that this scheme improves the situation of the worst off. But nothing in the two principles shows that Rawls’s proposed scheme of social cooperation must be stable – which for Rawls means that the scheme “must be more or less regularly complied with and its basic rules willingly acted upon; and when infractions occur, stabilizing forces should exist that prevent further violations and tend to restore the arrangement” (TJ 6).
163 - Practical reason
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- Edited by Jon Mandle, State University of New York, Albany, David A. Reidy, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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- 11 December 2014, pp 635-639
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Practical reasons are reasons for action, while theoretical reasons are reasons for belief. The former direct us to what is good to do, while the latter direct us to what is true about the world. To make this standard distinction is not yet to say anything about the nature of either practical or theoretical reasons, or about how they do or do not relate to one another. In PL Rawls explains that his theory of justice is grounded in a distinctive view about the nature and independence of practical reason, one which Rawls explicitly associates with Kant, and which Rawls calls constructivist.
Rawls contrasts this view with a kind of moral realism illustrated by rational intuitionism (PL 91–94; see also CP 343–346). On this opposing view, practical reasons, or at least moral reasons, are just a special case of theoretical reasons: the moral good is an object of knowledge, “gained in part by a kind of perception or intuition, as well as organized by first principles found acceptable on due reflection” (PL 92). By contrast, Rawls associates his own political constructivism with the (Kantian) view that there are distinctly practical reasons which are not grounded in theoretical knowledge.
[T]he procedure of construction is based essentially on practical reason and not on theoretical reason. Following Kant’s way of making the distinction, we say: practical reason is concerned with the production of objects according to a conception of those objects – for example, the conception of a just constitutional regime taken as the aim of political endeavor – while theoretical reason is concerned with the knowledge of given objects.(PL 93)
5 - Method
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 23 December 2009
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- 28 April 2008, pp 62-76
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The central principle of his philosophy, Hegel announces at the start of the Phenomenology, is that of subjectivity. “In my view, which can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself, everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (17). Notice the double task: to grasp and to express. This means, first, that the goal of philosophical inquiry must be conceived of as an inquiry into the nature of subjectivity. But it also means, second, that philosophical inquiry must simultaneously take the form of subjectivity, exhibiting the nature of subjectivity itself. The object of philosophical inquiry is now the subject, but for this very reason, philosophical inquiry cannot stand about from its object in a traditional contemplative stance. For this would undermine the Hegelian claim that philosophy is concerned with the subject and not with objects external to the subject. Rather, philosophy must be simply the expression of the subject itself. But what kind of expression? What exactly is the subject, and how must its nature be manifested in philosophy itself?
CONTEMPLATIVE AND ACTIVE SUBJECTIVITY
We have already seen that the concern with subjectivity is not new: it is a dominant theme of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. But Hegel thinks that only his philosophy can rid this tradition of its incoherencies and misunderstandings.
8 - Culture
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 23 December 2009
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- 28 April 2008, pp 113-147
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To this point our presentation, though highly compressed, has managed to track the main arguments of the first two chapters of the Phenomenology, “Consciousness” and “Self-Consciousness.” As we approach the later, mainly historical chapters of the book, however, the length and complexity of Hegel's discussions, together with the limited aims and length of this book, make even a compressed summary impossible. Since we will not be able to follow the specifics of all of Hegel's historical discussions, I am going to adopt a two-part approach to the remainder of the text in this long chapter. On the one hand, my focus will be on the general issue of what Hegel's turn to history is meant to accomplish. In what sense is his developmental account of Western culture intended to advance the philosophical argument of the first two chapters of the Phenomenology? On the other hand, my answer to that question will include a kind of sketch of the developmental account itself, a more sweeping and general version of the historical narrative that Hegel offers in his text. That sketch will reference several of the best-known discussions of the later parts of the book: Hegel's discussion of Antigone; his account of the transition from ancient Greek religion “in the form of art” to Christian, revealed religion; the descriptions of faith, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution; and, finally, Hegel's discussion of morality.
7 - Practice
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 23 December 2009
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- 28 April 2008, pp 93-112
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In Hegel's skeptical argument against the purely theoretical standpoint, we learned that a subject cannot attain anything that would count as knowledge by ridding itself of its subjective character, by simply attending to objects in their purest and most unmediated form. We saw that actual theoretical knowledge is impossible without the transcendental conditions that characterize any knowing self: its conceptual, descriptive nature, and then its practical interest in explanation. But it is important to see that we came to understand the nature of the knowing self in a serial or developmental manner. By examining the efforts of the theoretical self as it attempts to shake off its own, subjective character, we came to learn just what that character is, and why it is essential to theoretical knowledge. We came to understand the nature of the subject only through the subject's own efforts to deny that nature.
Now, as we have seen, Hegel's task is to describe the nature of the active or practical self, since on his account it is this practical self that is essential to the successful knowing of the theoretical self. To complete his account of explanation, and thus of theoretical knowledge, Hegel must describe the character of the practical interests that (on his view) allow us to understand certain theoretical descriptions of the world as carrying explanatory power. So it would seem to follow that Hegel's account would plunge next into various accounts of the practice of explanation, of the practical interests that it serves.
Further reading
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 161-162
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Contents
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- 28 April 2008, pp vii-viii
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6 - Theory
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 77-92
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We have seen that Hegel's philosophical project is to vindicate a particular conception of subjectivity, and to demonstrate its essential connection to the idea of rational justification itself. To make this argument convincing, however, Hegel must not presuppose this conception of subjectivity. Rather he must consider and eliminate the possibility that there could be a rational conception of the world that does without it. And in fact a traditional aspiration of philosophy is to achieve a conception of the world that does without subjectivity of any kind. To know something, on this traditional view, is simply to know it as it is in itself, without any contribution from us. Call this a purely theoretical view of knowledge: to know the world as it truly is, we must stand apart from the world, in an entirely disinterested or contemplative posture.
Hegel's own view, of course, is that this view of knowledge is incoherent: were we to assume a purely theoretical standpoint, we could never achieve anything that we would count as knowledge. To show this, we subject the purely theoretical standpoint to skeptical critique. We imagine a person committed to the purely theoretical standpoint, and ask her how she might defend her beliefs as true.
SENSE-CERTAINTY
What would a purely theoretical view of the world look like? Hegel argues that we must begin with the theoretical aspiration in its simplest and most radical form.
Frontmatter
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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3 - Freedom
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 32-44
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I said in Chapter 1 that the German idealists saw the idea of freedom as the central concept of modern philosophy: as symbolic of the problem of rational justification, especially under modern conditions, and, if rightly conceived, as also the solution to this problem. In this chapter, I want to explain how the German idealists were able to use the idea of freedom to reformulate the project of modern philosophy in a new way, in a way that understood the full import of Hume's criticisms of Descartes' and Locke's attempts to establish the authority of our concepts. Hume's insistence on the contingency of all our beliefs suggested to Kant, and then to Hegel, that modern philosophy required a new and different account of authority, one that was centrally connected to the notion of human freedom.
Of course, the idea of freedom was already an important idea in modern moral and political philosophy, especially in the British tradition. By the time of the German idealists, Hobbes and Locke had already insisted on the natural rights of all human beings, and their claims were clearly at work in the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. So what more needed to be done? In what sense does freedom pose a philosophical problem, and in what sense does it require a philosophical solution of the sort offered by Kant or Hegel?
9 - Results
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 148-160
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If the reading given in the previous four chapters is right, we can say that Hegel takes himself to have established two main claims. First, he takes himself to have shown, negatively, that no general account of theoretical or practical reason is possible. Such an account would begin, in the theoretical case, with the bare idea of an objective account of the world, freed of any contribution by us as inquiring agents or, in the practical case, from the bare idea of an agent pursuing something that the agent claims to be of value, freed of any constraint imposed by the world. In similar fashion, Hegel argues that these bare conceptions will fall short of anything we would recognize as a determinate claim of knowledge or of value. Anything we would recognize as a justified theoretical or practical claim, Hegel takes himself to have shown, must take place within an existing context of norms of belief and of action. Reasoning, then, is culturally and historically constrained.
Second, Hegel takes himself to have shown that the fact of cultural constraint implies a philosophical problem about how anything can be justified at all. Here Hegel argues that the problem can neither be solved directly nor simply dismissed, because it arises from the collision of two irreducible features of our lives: first, our nature as free and rational beings who have the power and right to question any norm; and second, our nature as cultural and historical beings who think and act within a context of norms that have been imposed upon us.
Preface
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp ix-xiv
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I have long seen a need for a short introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but at the same time I have been acutely aware that such an introduction faces severe obstacles. The first of these are immediately obvious to anyone who even thumbs through the book: the work is especially long, and it is written in a dense, abstract language that seems as if it could be comprehensible only to Hegel himself. For all of that, the work is deeply connected to themes in the history not just of philosophy but also of religion, politics, and literature, and it has been highly influential in all of those areas. One would expect that a proper introduction to any philosophical work would have at least something to say about its terminology, its particular arguments, its historical background, and its subsequent historical influences. But in this case doing justice to even one of these topics would lead to a prohibitively long book.
The situation is only partially helped by a decision to focus on a specifically philosophical introduction, by which I mean to focus specifically on what the work can be said to attempt, and to accomplish, as an argument. That sort of focus relegates the matters of historical background and influence, and even the issue of terminology, to supporting roles: the task is to convey, in clear language accessible to contemporary readers, what Hegel's main claims are meant to be.
4 - Idealism
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 45-61
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In the previous chapter, I argued that Rousseau's challenge to Hobbes' contractarian account of normativity created a second, specifically philosophical problem of freedom. Freedom was a crucial category in Hobbes' and Locke's accounts of morality and politics, but their primary understanding of freedom was a straightforwardly physical and thus philosophically unproblematic notion of freedom: freedom from the physical restraints of external forces, and particularly of the physical violence of other human beings. This understanding of freedom poses no theoretical difficulties, and so the challenges that Hobbes and Locke faced were mainly practical or political: they had to convince people that moral norms and political institutions existed just to protect people from physical harm, and not to serve any “higher” ethical or religious ends. That project was quite radical, in its way, but carrying it out did not require any special philosophical work.
Rousseau's problem, by contrast, requires a very different sort of solution. Unlike Hobbes or Locke, he was not trying to argue for a new account of the end or goal of moral and political norms. Instead he was arguing that an essential feature of those norms – their socially imposed nature – suggested that they were all invalid, no matter what account anyone gave of their end or goal. For no matter what beneficial social purposes moral and political norms might be taken to serve, those purposes would still be social purposes, and thus they would be imposed on each of us as individuals.
Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
- An Introduction
- Larry Krasnoff
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- 28 April 2008
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This book introduces Hegel's best-known and most influential work, Phenomenology of Spirit, by interpreting it as a unified argument for a single philosophical claim: that human beings achieve their freedom through retrospective self-understanding. In clear, non-technical prose, Larry Krasnoff sets this claim in the context of the history of modern philosophy and shows how it is developed in the major sections of Hegel's text. The result is an accessible and engaging guide to one of the most complex and important works of nineteenth-century philosophy, which will be of interest to all students and teachers working in this area.
1 - Introduction
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 1-17
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Let's start with a familiar historical claim, a claim that is very general, very crude, but at the same time nearly impossible to deny. The way our world looks today was decisively shaped by a series of developments that began in northern Europe some centuries ago (we can argue about exactly how many), developments that transformed northern European societies from minor or even irrelevant outposts on the fringes of Roman and Islamic civilization to the most technologically, militarily, and culturally dominant societies that the world has ever seen. The name we give to this set of developments, of course, is “modernity.” Just how and when it happened is the subject of endless debate, but the debates tend to center on a series of things that happened during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries: the Protestant Reformation, the development of modern physics by Galileo and Newton, the exploration and conquest of the Americas, the liberalization of trade and the development of capitalist forms of exchange, the American and French Revolutions. In some combination, we can say, these developments produced a form of civilization devoted to the study and manipulation of the physical world for unapologetically material ends, in which religion is redefined as a matter of private conviction and pushed to the margins of public life, and in which politics is conceived of as grounded in democratic choice and individual human rights.
2 - Knowledge
- Larry Krasnoff, College of Charleston, South Carolina
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- Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit'
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- 28 April 2008, pp 18-31
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It is often said that the main task of early modern philosophy is the epistemological project of showing how knowledge is possible, of explaining how we as subjects can know the true nature of objects. At some general level, this formulation is almost certainly right. But there are ways of explaining this epistemological project that are more misleading than helpful. For instance, a familiar way of talking about early modern accounts of knowledge, especially in the context of survey courses that run from Descartes to Kant, is to emphasize the problem of the external world. According to this familiar narrative, the epistemological problem of early modern philosophy is to show how a conscious subject is entitled to infer that his or her own individual sensations and thoughts can amount to knowledge of an external world of objects.
Once the problem is posed in this form, it appears that the only solution is some sort of idealism, some claim to the effect that what we even mean by a physical object depends on the contribution of a subject. The bluntest version of this claim, of course, was that proposed by Berkeley: a material object is just a particular collection of ideas in our minds. On this view, to see a tree is just to have certain ideas in our minds, and as for why it is that you and I both seem to have the same ideas placed in our minds when we observe and discuss the tree, Berkeley appeals to the power and goodness of God, who causes these ideas to appear to us simultaneously, making a shared account of nature possible.