Notes

Introduction

1. Marxian constructivism is not often discussed. For his understanding of his relation to Vico, the Italian constructivist, see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 372n3.

2. According to Kelly, we must read Kant through Schopenhauer: “[A] short exposition of Transcendental Idealism with Schopenhauer’s constructive and destructive criticism may be of use to those that cannot make a simultaneous study of Kant and Schopenhauer in the original. To think that the former [Kant] can be understood without the latter [Schopenhauer] is a fatal delusion. If anybody should doubt this, let him try to make out what Kant meant by the ‘Schematismus,’ and he will soon find it advisable to avail himself of the assistance of a man who is worth ten times more than all the post-Kantian philosophers and professors put together.” Michael Kelly, Kant’s Philosophy as Rectified by Schopenhauer (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1909), p. 8.

3. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), §41, pp. 170–173.

4. See Rolf-Peter Horstmann, who writes: “Hier setzte ich voraus, dass sich leicht Einverständnis darüber erzielen lässt, dass es sich bei dem Terminus ‘Deutscher Idealismus’ um einen Klassifikationsbegriff handelt, der eine Anzahl philosophischer Positionen umfasst, von denen gilt, dass sie im Ausgang und in der Reaktion hauptsächlich auf die Kantische Philosophie einen sog. ‘idealististischen Monismus’ zu etablieren versucht haben, und als deren Hauptexponenten aus mehr oder weniger guten Gründen Fichte, Schelling und Hegel angesehen werden.” Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Zur Aktualität des Deutschen Idealismus,” Neue Philosophische Hefte 35 (1995): p. 3.

5. “The young romantics—Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel, Novalis, Schlegel, and Hülsen—were deeply impressed by Fichte, whose lectures some of them attended in Jena in 1795.” Karl Ameriks, ed., Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 31.

6. See Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (New York: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

7. See Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

8. See Paul Redding, Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

9. According to Heidegger, Schelling is single most important post-Kantian German idealist: “the truly creative and boldest thinker of this whole age of German philosophy. He is that to such an extent that he drives German Idealism from within right past its own fundamental position.” Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), p. 4. Views about the importance of this text vary widely. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, it is “the most titanic work of German idealism.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prometheus: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Idealismus (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1947), p. 240.

10. See Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des Deutschen Idealismus in der Spätphilosophie Schellings (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1955).

11. Gabriel, who thinks that the later Schelling is the peak of German idealism, makes this claim because of the latter’s development of a theory of being, though this Heideggerian approach is clearly not central to German idealism as such. See Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York : Continuum, 2011).

12. DK 28 B 3 Clem. Alex. Strom. 440, 12; Plot. Enn. 5, 1, 8.

13. For the claim that idealism did not exist before Decartes, see M. F. Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical Review 91, no. 1: pp. 3–40. For a critique of Burnyeat’s thesis, see Darren Hibbs, “On the Possibility of Pre-Cartesian Idealism,” Dialogue 48, no. 3 (September 2009): pp. 643–653.

14. For a brief account of some of the surrounding difficulties—including the question of how to translate the relevant fragments—see Jeremy Dunham, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Sean Watson, Idealism: The History of a Philosophy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), pp. 13–18.

15. See Myles Burnyeat, Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 255.

16. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 49.

17. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel-Werke, vol. 18, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and K. R. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 314.

18. See Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988).

19. According to Descombes, this view is self-contradictory. See Vincent Descombes, Le même et l’autre: Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933–1978) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979).

20. In his account of identity, Heidegger seems to follow Schelling in overlooking difference. See “The Principle of Identity,” in Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 23–42.

21. The most detailed account of the Copernican revolution comes to the conclusion that there is no relation to the critical philosophy. See “What Is Copernican in Kant’s Turning?” in Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 595–614.

22. Mathematical constructivism takes a different form in the twentieth century in intuitionist mathematics. See, for example, Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 238–241.

23. See, for example, J.-L. Le Moigne, Les épistémologies constructivistes (Paris: Que sais-je?, 2007); Einführung in den Konstruktivismus: Beiträge von Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Peter M. Hejl, Siegfried J. Schmidt, and Paul Watzlawick (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1992); and Bernhard Pörksen, ed., Schlüsselwerke des Konstruktivismus (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011).

Chapter One

1. The Platonic element in the critical philosophy is sometimes discussed with respect to moral theory. Scholars note that in the Inaugural Dissertation Kant advances a Platonic conception of God as moral perfection, which is still ingredient in the third Critique, but suggest—since he denies a grasp of the intelligible world—that Kant denies a Platonic conception of knowledge. Seung is closely identified with an approach to Kantian moral theory as normative Platonism. He sees Kant as struggling to combine normative Platonism and Cartesian a priorism in a single theory. See, for example, T. K. Seung, Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2007).

2. Rawls is well known for his attention to a constructivist approach to Kant’s moral theory. The term “constructivism” does not appear in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. It emerges only in later publications, such as “Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Eckart Förster, ed., Kant’s Transcendental Deductions: The Three “Critiques” and the “Opus postumum” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 81–113; and “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980): pp. 515–572, reprinted in John Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 303–358. According to Rawls, who links his view to Kant’s, “Kantian constructivism holds that moral objectivity is to be understood in terms of a suitably constructed social point of view that all can accept.” Rawls, Collected Papers, p. 307.

3. Immanuel Kant, Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–99, trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 71.

4. I will be following here the distinctions drawn in Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, Le concept et le lieu: Figures de la relation entre art et philosophie (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2008), pp. 296–300. She in turn follows Marin. See Louis Marin, Sublime Poussin (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995).

5. “La Logique élabore une théorie du signe en tant que doublon entre la chose représentée et la chose qui représente: le signe renferme deux idées: l’une de la chose qui représente; l’autre de la chose représentée; et sa nature consiste à exciter la seconde par la première.” Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, La logique ou l’art de penser, part 1, Le langage (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), p. 4. See also Marin, Sublime Poussin; and Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

6. The traditional “externalist” interpretation of Locke has been challenged by Ott. See Walter Ott, “What Is Locke’s Theory of Representation?” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 20, no. 6 (2012): pp. 1077–1095.

7. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 2, collated and annotated by A. C. Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), part 8, p. 169.

8. See, for example, Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

9. “The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence of God,” in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, trans. and ed. David Walford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 116.

10. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, ed. J. Michael Young (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 440.

11. For instance, at CPR, B 306, p. 360, Kant writes: “Nevertheless, if we call certain objects, as appearances, beings of sense (phaenomena), because we distinguish the way in which we intuit them from their constitution in itself . . . then it already follows from our concept that to these we as it were opposed, as objects thought merely through the understanding, either other objects conceived in accordance with the latter constitution, even though we do not intuit it in them, or else other possible things, which are not objects of our senses at all, and call these beings of understanding (noumena).”

12. By “appearance” Kant comprehends “that something must correspond to it which is not in itself appearance . . . [since] the word ‘appearance’ must already indicate a relation to something the immediate representation of which is, to be sure, sensible, which is in itself, without this constitution of our sensibility . . . must be something, i. e., an object independent of sensibility.” CPR, B 251–252, p. 348.

13. For the difference between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings of the critical philosophy, see Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 16n.

14. See Hans Vaihinger, Commentar zu Kants “Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” vol. 2 (Stuttgart/Berlin/Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1892), p. 53.

15. Erich Adickes, Kants Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres ich als Schlüssel zu seiner Erkenntnistheorie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1929).

16. See P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (London: Methuen, 1966).

17. See Henry Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale, 2004).

18. “Now the propositions of pure reason, especially when they venture beyond all boundaries of possible experience, admit of no test by experiment with their objects . . . thus to experiment will be feasible only with concepts and principles that we assume a priori by arranging the latter so that the same objects can be considered from two different sides, on the one side as objects of the sense and the understanding for experience, and on the other side as objects that are merely thought at most for isolated reason striving beyond the bounds of experience. If we now find that there is agreement with the principle of pure reason when things are considered from this twofold standpoint, but that an unavoidable conflict of reason with itself arises with a single standpoint, then the experiment decides for the correctness of that distinction.” CPR, B xviii-xix, p. 111.

19. See, for example, Henry E. Allison, “The Two-Aspect Theory,” in New Essays on Kant, ed. Bernard den Ouden and Marcia Moen (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 155–178.

20. See also J. S. Privette, “Must Theology Re-Kant?” Heythrop Journal (1999): pp. 166–183; James van Cleve, Problems from Kant (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); R. B. Pippin, “Idealism and Agency in Kant and Hegel,” The Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 10 (1991): pp. 448–472; Lewis White Beck, The Actor and the Spectator (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Ralph Meerbote, “The Weak, the Strong and the Mild: Readings of Kant’s Ontology,” Ratio 5, no. 2: pp. 160–176; Hoke Robinson, “Two Perspectives on Kant’s Appearances and Things in Themselves,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32, no. 3 (July 1994): pp. 411–441; Karl Ameriks, Interpreting Kant’s Critiques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 73–77; Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–2001 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 608.

21. See Beiser, German Idealism, p. 601n10.

22. See Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, p. 4.

23. For these criticisms and Allison’s responses, see ibid., passim.

24. See R 5554 (1778–1781) in Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 18 (Berlin: die Königlich-Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1902–), pp. 229–331.

25. Augustine’s conception of the moral subject is an important predecessor of the Cartesian cognitive subject. See Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. A. S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

26. See Ermanno Bencivenga, Kant’s Copernican Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). See also “What Is Copernican in Kant’s Turning?”, chapter 5 of Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 595–614; Daniel Bonevac, “Kant’s Copernican Revolution,” in Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins, The Age of German Idealism, New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 40–65; S. M. Engel, “Kant’s Copernican Analogy: A Re-Examination,” in Kant-Studien 54, 1963, pp. 243–251; David Ingram, “The Copernican Revolution Revisited: Paradigm, Metaphor and Incommensurability in the History of Science—Blumenberg’s Response to Kuhn and Davidson,” History of the Human Sciences 6 (1993): pp. 11–35; and Pierre Kerszberg, “Two Senses of Kant’s Copernican Revolution,” Kant-Studien 80 (1989): pp. 63–80.

27. Paton typically writes: “Copernicus explained the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies as due to the motion of the observer on earth. Kant similarly explains the apparent characteristics of reality as due to the mind of the knower.” H. J. Paton, Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience, vol. 2 (London and New York: George Allen and Unwin and Macmillan, 1961), p. 75.

28. Ewing similarly writes: “It may seem that Kant’s revolution was opposite rather than analogous to that of Copernicus since, while Copernicus put an end to the anthropocentric character of astronomy, Kant rather made philosophy anthropocentric. But Kant means that he resembles Copernicus in attributing to ourselves and so classing as appearance what his precedessors had attributed to reality.” A. C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 16.

29. Höffe in the same way writes: “Kant’s Copernican revolution maintains that the objects of knowledge do not appear of their own accord but must be brought to appearance by the (transcendental) subject. They are thus no longer to be referred to things which exist in themselves but instantiated as appearances.” Otfried Höffe, Immanuel Kant, trans. Marshall Farrier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 38.

30. See Michael Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

31. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 5, 9, 234.

32. See Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), §§2–3, pp. 6–12.

33. See Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

34. See A. N. Pavlenko, Evropeiskaja Kosmologija: Osnovanija epistemologicheskovo Povorota (Moscow: Intrada, 1997).

35. See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

36. According to Hans Blumenberg, this suggestion was made first by Cotes. See Blumenberg, Genesis, p. 603.

37. See Isaac Newton, Opera omnia, vol. 2, ed. S. Horsley (London: Excudebat J. Nichols, 1779–1785), p. xiv.

38. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). It is known that the mathematization of nature began much earlier with the Pythagorean school, and then later with the Oxford school and Oresme in the fourteenth century.

39. According to Weinberg, important scientific theories are refuted only very rarely. He claims that no such theory has been experimentally refuted in this century. See Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 102.

40. See Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1980), §21, p. 62.

41. See Immanuel Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, oder Versuch von der Verfassung und dem mechanischen Ursprunge des ganzen Weltgebäudes nach Newtonischen Grundsätzen abgehandelt, in Immanuel Kant, Werke in Zehn Bänden, vol. 1, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 219–396.

42. See Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. A. Motte, revised by F. Cajori (Berkeley: University of California, 1934), p. 550.

43. See Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, p. 228.

44. See ibid., p. 250.

45. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623), cited in E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City: Doubleday, 2003), p. 75.

46. According to Hintikka, who believes Kant’s view of mathematical methodology is conceptually prior to his philosophical account of cognition, Kant’s claim that mathematics differs from philosophy in the construction of concepts should be taken to mean that in mathematics, one is constantly confronted with the need to construct particular representatives—in a word, individuals—for general concepts. See Jaakko Hintikka, “Kant on the Mathematical Method,” The Monist 51, no. 3 (1967): p. 356.

47. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. with an introduction by James Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1970), p. 6.

48. Ibid.

49. See Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 81–88.

50. See, for example, Plotinus, The Enneads trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5th ennead, 3rd tractate, §5, pp. 85–89.

51. See G. W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Leibniz: Basic Writings, trans. George R. Montgomery (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1957), section 9, pp. 14–15.

52. See Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (Bradford Books, 1996).

53. “A correspondence, moreover, can only be perfect if the corresponding things coincide and so are just not different things. . . . It would only be possible to compare an idea with a thing if the thing were an idea too. And then, if the first did correspond perfectly with the second, they would coincide. But this is not at all what people intend when they define truth as the correspondence of an idea with something real. For in this case it is essential precisely that the reality shall be distinct from the idea. But then there can be no complete correspondence, no complete truth. So nothing at all would be true; for what is only half true is untrue. Truth does not admit of more and less.” “Thoughts,” in Gottlob Frege, Logical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 3.

54. Some observers (for instance, Pippin) think that identity arises only in Kant’s wake as a criticism of the critical philosophy. “Other attempts to make good on what their criticisms of Kant required did not fare much better. Claims that the problem of knowledge could be solved only by defending a ‘subject-object identity’ sounded like bizarre claims that in some way ontologically identified human judgments with objects in the world (or, worse, that such judging activity and the natural world were both aspectual or modal manifestations of an underlying substance and so originally, substantively, identical)” (Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], p. 44). I think, on the contrary, that Kant is already committed to an identity theory as a result of the so-called Copernican revolution.

55. Kant’s claim of twelve and only twelve logical functions (and thus the suggestion of closure) is often disputed. See, for example, Stephan Körner, Categorial Frameworks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970).

Chapter Two

1. “Gegen Reinhold bist Du ein Verächter Kants; den dieser behauptet, daß nach hundert Jahren die Reputation von Jesus Christus haben müsse.” Karl Leonhard Reinhold Korrespondenzausgabe, vol. 1, 1773–1788, ed. Reinhard Lauth, Eberhard Heller, and Kurt Hiller (Stuttgart:Frommann-Holzboog, 1983), p. 207.

2. In a letter from 1791, Schiller wrote that Reinhold had “dem Studium der Kantischen Philosophie mannigfaltigen Schaden gethan.” “Band III,” in Korrespondenz 1791, ed. Faustino Fabbianelli, Eberhard Heller, Kurt Hiller, Reinhard Lauth, and Ives Raddrizzani, with Christian Kauferstein, Petra Lohmann, and Claudius Strube, 2011, Korrespondenzausgabe, vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981), p. 116 Anmerkung.

3. See Karl Ameriks, introduction to the translation of Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, trans. James Hebbeler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. xi1.

4. For this view, see Karl Ameriks, “Reinhold, History, and the Foundations of Philosophy,” in Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, ed. George di Giovanni (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 113–130.

5. For this view, see Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

6. See “Descartes à Clerselier, Egmond, juin ou juillet 1646,” in René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 4, ed. Paul Adam and Charles Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1996), pp. 444–445; my translation.

7. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science: With Selections from the “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. and ed. by Gary Hatfield, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 60.

8. See Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie der neueren Zeit, vol. 3 (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Cassirer, 1920), p. 35.

9. On this point, see A. von der Stein, “Der Systembegriff in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung,” in A. Diemer, ed., System und Klassifikation in Wissenschaft und Dokumentation, (Meisenheim am Glan: A. Hain, 1968), S. 10ff; see also F. Kambartel, “‘System’ und ‘Begründung’ bei und vor Kant,” in Theorie und Begründung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 41 ff.

10. See Kant’s letter to Reinhold, December 28 and 31, 1787, Correspondence, trans. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 271–273.

11. See, for example, Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), pp. 14–15.

12. For an account of the evolution of Reinhold’s elementary philosophy, see Alfred Klemmt, Karl Leonhard Reinholds Elementarphilosophie: Eine Studie über den Ursprung des spekulativen deutschen Idealismus (Hamburg: Meiner, 1958); and Sven Bernecker, “Reinhold’s Road to Fichte: The Elementary-Philosophy of 1795/96,” in Giovanni, ed., Karl Leonhard Reinhold and the Enlightenment, pp. 221–239.

13. Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1961), pp. 315–16

14. See K. L. Reinhold, Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Prag/Jena, 1789), pp. 67–68.

15. See Nicolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1974), pp. 14–15.

16. See K. L. Michelet, Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel, vol. 1 (Berlin, 1837).

17. See Johann Eduard Erdmann, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Speculation seit Kant (Leipzig: Vogel, 1848), part 1, pp. 422–95; and Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, vol. 5, Fichte und seine Vorgänger (Heidelberg: Basserman, 1869), pp. 37–99 and pp. 443–46.

18. See Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem III, pp. 33–58.

19. “Introduction: The Facts of Consciousness,” in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. and annotated by George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 3.

20. Kant, Correspondence, pp. 264–68.

21. Ibid., pp. 264–68.

22. See ibid., pp. 389–91.

23. See ibid., pp. 391–93.

24. See ibid., pp. 94–95.

25. See Karl Leonard Reinhold, Letters on the Kantian Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. ix.

26. Letter, October 12, 1787, cited in Karl Vorländer, Kants Leben (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1921), p. 148.

27. See Reinhold, Letters, p. 16.

28. See ibid., p. 17.

29. This is surprisingly also not mentioned by James Hebbeler in his detailed introduction to the recent translation.

30. See Fourth Letter, Reinhold, Letters, p. 117n.

31. See Reinhold, Letters pp. 129–132.

32. K. L. Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Missverständnisse der Philosophen, vol. 1 (Jena: Manke, 1790), p. 267.

33. Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung, p. 167.

34. For a partial translation, see The Foundation of Philosophical Knowledge, trans. George di Giovonni, in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), pp. 52–106.

35. For a summary of Reinhold’s protean career, see René Wellek, “Review: Between Kant and Fichte: Karl Leonhard Reinhold,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 2 (April–June 1984): pp. 323–327.

36. See his “Rezension von Fichtes zur Wissenschaftslehre gehörenden Schriften,” in M. Selling, Studien zur Geschichte der Transcedentalphilosophie (PhD diss., Uppsala University, 1938), pp. 317ff.

37. For an account, see “Fichtes und Reinholds Verhältnis vom Anfange ihrer Bekanntschaft bis zu Reinholds Beitritt zum Standpunkt der Wissenschaftslehre Anfang 1797,” in Reinhard Lauth, Philosophie aus einem Princip (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), pp. 137ff.

38. See C. G. Bardilis und C. L. Reinholds Briefwechsel über das Wesen der Philosophie und als Unwesen der Spekulation, ed. C. L. Reinhold (Munich: J. Lentner, 1804); see also Reinhold’s Beyträge zur leichteren Übersicht des Zustandes der Philosophie bei dem Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: R. Perthes, 1801–1803).

39. See K. L. Reinhold, Sendschreiben an J. C. Lavater und J. G. Fichte über den Glauben an Gott (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1799).

40. See Reinhold, ed., C. G. Bardilis und C. L. Reinholds Briefwechsel.

41. For Fichte’s review of Bardili’s Grundriss der Logik, see Fichte-Werke, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1911), pp. 490–504. For Reinhold’s response, see Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung, vol. 1, pp. 113–134. For Fichte’s further reply, see Fichte-Werke, vol. 2, pp. 504–534.

42. See Fichte’s review of Bardili’s Grundriss in Erlanger Literatur-Zeitung, October 30–31, 1800, in Fichte-Werke, vol. 2, p. 491.

43. “First Letter” in Reinhold, Letters, p. 15.

44. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Über das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1978), p. xiii.

45. Ibid., p. xiv.

46. Ibid., p. 69.

47. See ibid., pp. 77–78 and 71–72.

48. See Bernhard Mensen, “Reinhold zur Frage des ersten Grundsatzes,” in Lauth, Philosophie, pp. 108–128.

49. See Reinhold, Fundament, pp. 27–49.

50. See Reinhold, Versuch, pp. 66, 120.

51. Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung, vol. 1, p. 367.

52. For comparison of Reinhold’s and Kant’s views of philosophy as system, see Wilhelm Teichner, Rekonstruktion oder Reproduktion des Grundes: Die Begründung der Philosophie als Wissenschaft durch Kant and Reinhold (Bonn: Bouvier, 1976).

53. See Jürgen Habermas, Rekonstruktion des historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976).

54. See Kant, Correspondence, pp. 311–16.

55. See Fichte’s letter to Karl Leonhard Reinhold, end of March–April 1795, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte Briefe (Leipzig: Reclam, 1986), p. 142

56. See Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 8–9.

57. In a letter, Maimon notes that the thing in itself is “nothing other than the complete cognition of appearances. Metaphysics is thus not the study of something apart from experience, but rather merely of the limits (Ideas) of experience itself.” Salomon Maimon, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, ed. Florian Ehrensperger (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004), 250–251.

58. Ibid., p. 251.

59. See Philosophischer Briefwechsel nebst einem demselben vorangeschickten Manifest, in Salomon Maimon, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Valerio Verra (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1970), pp. 204–205.

60. Cited in Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, trans. Brady Bowman, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 174n19.

61. See Maimon, Philosophischer Briefwechsel, p. 209.

62. See ibid.

63. See Kant, Correspondence, p. 441.

64. Maimon, Attempt at Transcendental Philosophy, p. xxii.

65. See Kant, Correspondence, pp. 387–89.

66. See ibid., pp. 440–44.

67. See Maimon, Philosophischer Briefwechsel, p. 224.

68. See Maimon’s letter to Reinhold, May 24, 1794, Berlin, in Maimon’s Gesammelte Schriften, p. 447.

Chapter Three

1. See Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967).

2. See Alexis Philonenko, La liberté humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte (Paris: Vrin, 1966).

3. See Marianne Weber, Fichtes Sozialismus und sein Verhältnis zur Marx’schen Doktrin (Tübingen: Mohr, 1900).

4. See “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 273–310.

5. J. G. Fichte, Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 73.

6. It is therefore ironic that Fichte was understood as a cognitive foundationalist by the early German romantics, who refuted the theory they attributed to him in opting for antifoundationalism. Hölderlin, Fichte’s former student, played an important early role in this anti-Fichtean reaction. See F. Hölderlin, “Judgement and Being” (1795), in Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. and ed. T. Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

7. On this point, see Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, Critique de la représentation: Étude sur Fichte (Paris: Vrin, 2000).

8. Alone among the great German idealists, Schelling does not expound his position through a logic. Fichte’s conception of logic has been much neglected. But see Wayne Martin, Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Chapter Four

1. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

2. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, “Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History,” in The New Schelling, ed. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 43–89.

3. See Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Fragment, trans. John Snodgrass (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 146.

4. For Fichte’s view of Schelling’s efforts to state his own position in independence of Fichte’s, see “Bemerkungen bei der Lektüre von Schellings Transzendentalem Idealismus (1800)” and “Zur Darstellung von Schellings Identitätssysteme” in Fichte-Werke, vol. 11 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1911), pp. 361–389.

5. I. H. Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 6.

6. For Schelling’s view of construction at the time he was still in the process of freeing himself from Fichte, see his review essay in Das kritische Journal der Philosophie (1802), entitled “Über die Construction in der Philosophie.” Schelling here reviews a book entitled Abhandlung über die philosophische Construktion, als Einleitung zu Vorlesungen in der Philosophie, by Benj. Carl H. Hoyer, Aus dem Schwedischen, Stockholm bey Sieverstolpen, in Kommmission bey Perthes in Hamburg, 1801. Both Schelling’s review and Hoyer’s book focus on Kant’s conception of construction in the account of transcendental method (CPR, B 740–766, pp. 630–643). For discussion, see Rainer Schäfer, Die Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in Hegels Logik—Entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen, in Hegel-Studien Beiheft 45 (2001): p. 84n214.

7. F. W. J. Schelling-Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, ed. K. F. A., Schelling (Stuttgart, 1586–1861), p. 107; Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, im Auftrag der Schelling-Kommission der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. H. M. Baumgartner, W. G. Jacobs, H. Krings (Stuttgart 1976; Eng. trans., p. 107).

8. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, “Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Prozesses oder Kategorien der Physik,” in Zeitschrift für speculative Physik, vol. I, ed. Manfred Durner (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), pp. 69–70.

9. Ibid., pp. 70–72.

10. Ibid., pp. 162–163.

11. F. W. J. Schelling, “Über das Verhältnis der Naturphilosophie zur Philosophie überhaupt” (1802), in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3, pp. 526–545.

12. See, for example, ibid., pp. 526–544.

13. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, pp. 459.

14. F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature as Introduction to the Study of This Science, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (New York: Cambridge, 1988), p. 171.

15. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johanna Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 4.

16. For an account of Schelling’s philosophy of nature against the historical background, see Dale Snow, Schelling and the End of the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 67–93. For an account of Schelling’s influence on later discussion of nature, see Grant, Philosophies of Nature.

17. F. W. J. Schelling, The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802), trans., ed., and with an introduction by Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), p. 146.

18. Schelling, Philosophical Rupture, p. 147.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 148.

21. Beierwaltes has studied the influence of this dialogue on Schelling and German idealism in general. See Werner Beierwaltes, “Plato’s Timaeus in German Idealism: Schelling and Windischmann,” in Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, ed. Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).

22. For this letter, see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler; with commentary by Clark Butler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 32–33.

23. See part 2, prop. VII, in Benedict de Spinoza, Works of Spinoza, vol. 2, trans. R. M. H. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 86.

24. In the wake of the great French Revolution, the problem of history attracted increasing attention from a variety of thinkers, including Herder and F. Schlegel. For Schlegel’s view of historicism, see “Lessings Gedanken und Meinungen,” in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 23, ed. Ernst Behler, J.-J. Anstett, and H. Eichner (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1958–), pp. 46–102, esp. 51–60.

25. See J. G. Fichte, Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag), 1956.

26. See Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), no. 566, pp. 167–168.

27. Cited in Schelling, Philosophical Rupture, p. 296n26.

28. Ibid., p. 146.

29. Ibid., p. 221.

30. See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).

31. See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau, 1789), esp. Beilage, appendix 7, pp. 398–434.

32. “Früh finden sich Geistiges und Leibliches als die zwey [ . . . ] Seiten derselben Existenz ein [ . . . ] Gäbe es nicht einen solchen Punkt, wo Geistiges und Physisches ganz in einander sind, so würde die Materie nicht, wie es unläugbar der Fall ist, der Wiederhöhung in dasselbe fähig seyn.” F. W. J. Schelling, Die Weltalter, Fragmente, in den Urfassungen von 1811 und 1813, ed. Manfred Schröter (Munich: Biederstein und Leibniz, 1946), p. 32.

33. See Schelling, Philosophy of Nature, p. 44.

34. Ibid., p. 44.

35. “Die Natur soll der sichtbare Geist, der Geist die unsichtbare Natur sein. Hier also, in der absoluten Identität des Geistes in uns und der Natur außer uns, muß sich das Problem, wie eine Natur außer uns möglich sei, auflösen.” F. W. J. Schelling, “Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur,” in Schelling-Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Schröter (München: Beck, 1927), p. 706.

36. Schelling writes: “Zwischen Realem und Idealem, Seyn und Denken ist kein Causalzusammenhang möglich, oder das Denken kann nie Ursache einer Bestimmung im Seyn, oder hinwiederum das Seyn Ursache einer Bestimmung im Denken seyn.–Denn Reales und Ideales sind nur verschiedene Ansichten einer und derselben Substanz, sie können also wenig etwas ineinander bewirken, al seine Substanz etwas in sich selbt bewirken kann.” Schröter, ed., Schelling-Werke, vol. 1, part 6, p. 500.

37. Schelling writes: “In ihm [diesem System] der Idealismus selbst einen Realismus zur Basis hatte und aus einem Realismus entwickelt wurde.” Schröter, ed., Schelling-Werke, vol. 1, part 10, p. 107.

Chapter Five

1. See Martin Thibodeau, Hegel et la tragédie grecque (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011), p. 76n.

2. See Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

3. See Plato, Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 596A, p. 265.

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), §16, p. 9. Hegel, who apparently liked this expression, reused it later in an attack on Newton in the Philosophy of Nature by writing that “at night all cows are black” (G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1970], p. 76). In the Phenomenology, without mentioning Schelling by name, Hegel charged that intellectual intuition annihilates concrete determinations “in the night when all cows are black” and produces a philosophy of identity in which “everything is the same in the absolute” (Hegel, Phenomenology, §16, p. 9). In other words, intellectual intuition transports reason into the mush of a monochromatic formalism. Hegel’s claim clearly echoes Schelling’s own words: “Most people see in the being of the absolute nothing but a pure night and are unable to know anything in it; it dwindles away for them into a mere negation of multiplicity.” Schelling’s text appeared in his 1803 Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy (Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie, in Schelling-Werke, vol. 1, ed. Manfred Schröter [München: Beck, 1927], part 4, p. 401). In the letter accompanying the Phenomenology, Hegel wrote to Schelling: “You will not find that I have been too hard on the shallowness that makes so much mischief with your forms in particular and degrades your science into a bare formalism” (G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler; with commentary by Clark Butler [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984], p. 80). Hegel’s critique of Schelling led to a break between the two former roommates. In Schelling’s response—which became his final letter to Hegel—he writes: “Insofar as you yourself mention the polemical part of the Preface, given my own justly measured opinion of myself I would have to think too little of myself to apply this polemic to my own person. It must therefore, as you expressed in your letter, apply only to a further bad use of my ideas and to those who parrot them without understanding, although in this writing itself the distinction is not made” (ibid., p. 80). Schelling is clearly suggesting that Hegel’s criticism is based on a misunderstanding of his own position.

5. In the preface to his Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801), which appeared only slightly before Hegel’s Differenzschrift, Schelling complains about those who comment on the ongoing debate but are unqualified to so: “Reinhold declares with the utmost candor that he ‘has never understood, either in the beginning or in the middle, not even shortly before the end (he says end) what was the real issue in the latest philosophical revolution.’ Where must it end when such a person—who in the beginning of this ‘Revolution’ was a blind follower of Kant, then in a theory of his own making proclaimed infallible, catholic philosophy, and toward the end gave himself over to the bosom of the Wissenschaftslehre (with an equally strenuous protestation of his deepest conviction)—when such a person, after all these proofs of philosophical imbecility, does not lack the courage to again (and as he himself surmises, for the last time) prophesy the ‘present’ end of the philosophical revolution” (cited in F. W. J. Schelling and J. G. Fichte, The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence [1800–1802], translated, edited, and with an introduction by Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood [Albany: State University New York Press, 2012], pp. 143–144). Schelling continues his diatribe in a very long footnote in which he writes about Reinhold: “Since he has continued to live in profound ignorance of the authentic core of all speculation, naturally nothing seems too grand for his power of judgment” (Schelling and Fichte, Philosophical Rupture, p. 144).

6. For instance, in the third Critique, Kant writes: “For when we analyzed the reflection of the power of judgment in these, we found in them a purposive relation of the cognitive faculties, which must ground the faculty of ends (the will) a priori, and hence is itself purposive a priori, which then immediately contains the deduction, i.e., the justification of the claim of such a judgment to universally necessary validity.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 161.

7. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” (1777), in Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 83–88.

8. See Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel, Critique de la représentation: Étude sur Fichte (Paris: Vrin, 2000).

9. See Daniel Breazeale, “Towards a Wissenschaftslehre more geometrico (1800/1),” in Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, eds., After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), p. 40.

10. J. G. Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke, vol. 2, ed. I. H. Fichte, (Bonn, 1834–1835), p. 195.

11. J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftlehre 1804 (second series, 1804), in The Science of Knowing: Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Walter E. Wright (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 107. See also J. G. Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre. Zweiter Vortrag im Jahre 1804 (cited in the text as WL 1804/II), ed. R. Lauth and J. Widmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1986), p. 138.

12. For a detailed study of this text, see Joachim Widmann, Die Grundstruktur des transzendentalen Wissens nach Joh. Gott. Fichtes Wissenschaftslhere 1804 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1977). See also Jean-François Goubet, “La phénoménologie de Fichte dans la WL-1804/II: Une approche historique,” in Fichte: La doctrine de la science de 1804, ed. J.-C. Goddard and A. Schnell (Paris: Vrin, 2009).

13. The relation between Husserl and Fichte has been explored in different ways. An early effort, which remains instructive, is Jean Hyppolite, “La doctrine de la science chez Fichte et Husserl,” in Husserl et la pensée moderne, ed. H. L. van Breda and Jacques Taminaux (Springer, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1960). See also H. Tietzen, Fichte und Husserl. Letzbegründung, Subjektivität und Praktische Vernunft im transzendentalen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980).

14. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 216.

15. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Hegel, Hegel-Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 3, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Rinus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 76.

16. The canonical form of this objection, which runs like a red thread throughout Marxism, is formulated by Engels. See Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1941).

17. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 78.

18. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

19. Putnam later adopted a similar view. See Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

20. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 181.

21. See ibid., p. 179.

22. Reinhold’s basic claim about Fichte’s interpretation is that representations are related both to subject and object, but distinguished from both. Aenesidemus, according to Fichte, objects that the relation of the representation to subject and object is different in each case. Fichte reformulates the same objection in different language as the claim that “the representation is related to the object as the effect to the cause, and to the subject as the accident to substance” (J. G. Fichte. Fichtes-Werke, vol. 1, ed. I. H. Fichte [Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971], p. 18). But he disagrees with—in fact, finds unthinkable—Aenesidemus’s assumption that the critical philosophy depends on a mind-independent thing in itself; that is, on something independent from a capacity for representation.

23. See “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (Reseda, CA: Ridgeview, 1991), pp. 127–196.

24. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, pp. 77–78.

25. See ibid., pp. 76–77.

26. See John McDowell, Mind and World, p. 83.

27. For Hegel as for such later thinkers as Putnam, truth is a limiting, or ideal, concept. See Putnam, Reason, p. 216.

28. See Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes,pp. 77–78.

29. See, for example, “concept” in Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 58–61.

30. See Matthias. J. Schleiden, Schellings und Hegels Verhältnis zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. O. Breidbach (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1844, repr. 1988), p.

31. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1945), p. 25.

32. See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 702.

33. See Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831–1933, trans. Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 76–77.

34. See Edward Craig and Michael Hoskin, “Hegel and the Seven Planets,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 23 (1992): pp. 208–210.

35. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 2, ed., trans., and with an introduction and explanatory notes by M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1842), pp. 128–41.

36. See Gerd Buchdahl, “Review of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” in British Journal of the Philosophy of Science (1972): pp. 257–290.

37. See Gerd Buchdahl, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and the Structure of Science,” in Michael Inwood, ed., Hegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 110.

38. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, ed., trans., and with an introduction and explanatory notes by M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1842), p. 60.

39. See, for example, Sebastian Rand, “The Importance and Relevance of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Nature,’” The Review of Metaphysics 61, no. 2 (December 2007): pp. 379–400.

40. See Alison Stone, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Overcoming the Division between Matter and Thought,” Dialogue 39 (2000): pp. 725–743.

41. Renate Wahsner stands out as someone who has spent decades studying Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature in relation to modern science.

42. See Buchdahl, “Review of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” p. 110.

43. Hinman argues that it is absurd to take the largely untrained and rapidly formulated views of Schelling as the peak of Naturphilosophie. See Edgar Lenderson Hinman, The Physics of Idealism (Lincoln, NE: State Journal, 1906).

44. See, for example, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait, Treatise on Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1867), a textbook that was important for orienting modern physics. The book begins with the observation that “the term Natural Philosophy was used by Newton and is still used in British universities, to denote the investigation of laws in the material world, and the deduction of results not directly observed.” P. v.

45. For this distinction, see chapter 6, “Scientific Revolutions,” in Vyacheslav Stepin, Theoretical Knowledge, trans. A. G. Georgiev and E. D. Rumiantseva (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 283–341.

46. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. and ed. Michael Friedman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 8.

47. See Michael Friedman, Kant’s Construction of Nature: A Reading of the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

48. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations, p. 8.

49. See ibid., p. 10.

50. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), part 2, p. 3.

51. “It remains to add some observations on the relations of planetary displacements, which appear to be a matter of experience alone. In truth, they cannot be measures or numbers of nature alien to reason. For our pursuit of the laws of nature, and our knowledge of them, is founded on nothing other than the belief that nature is shaped by reason, and that we are convinced of the identity of all natural laws. Whenever those who seek laws through experience and induction happen upon something that looks like a law, they rejoice at their find and the identity of nature and reason therein, and when other appearances are difficult to accommodate with that they feel some doubt in the earlier experiments and try in every way to establish harmony between the findings. Our topic, the planets’ orbits, offers a case in point: While the displacements of the planets suggest an arithmetic progression in which unfortunately, no planet in nature corresponds to the fifth member in the series, it is supposed that there really does exist between Mars and Jupiter, unbeknown to us, a planet moving through outer space. It is now being eagerly looked for.” G. W. F. Hegel, De orbitis planetarum, trans. from the Latin original by David Healan (Berlin and Yokohama, 2006), http://www.hegel.net/en/v2133healan.htm.

52. John Findlay, foreword to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. ix.

53. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. B. Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 382.

54. For discussion, see William L. Harper, Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method: Turning Data into Evidence about Gravity and Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

55. This view is held by Peirce, who studied Kant’s writings in detail. “Kant (whom I more than admire) is nothing but a somewhat confused pragmatist” (“Critical common-sensism,” in Justus Buchler, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, New York: Dover, 1955, p. 299).

56. “But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity from phaenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phaenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phaenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.” Newton, Principia, pp. 442–443.

57. Hegel, De orbitis planetarum.

58. See George Berkeley, “The Analyst” (Dublin, 1734). See also Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1, trans. and ed. M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin, and New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 351–353.

59. J. W. Goethe, Scientific Studies, in Goethe: The Collected Works, vol. 12, ed. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 57.

60. See J. W. Goethe, Goethe’s Theory of Colours, trans. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840), p. xxi.

61. See ibid., p. xxv.

62. See ibid., §727, p. 287.

63. See ibid., §720, pp. 284–285.

64. The Urphänomenon is Goethe’s speculative term for the basic phenomenon from which the other phenomena evolved, as the Urpflanze is the plant from which all plants supposedly later evolved. According to Clark Butler in his commentary on the letter quoted above: “Goethe’s Urphänomen became for Hegel sensory actualizations—or at least analogues—of the abstract schemata of his Logic. And Goethean natural science just as Goethean science in turn lends tangibility to the same logical abstractions, is considered inaccessible by Goethe. But he requests the poet’s indulgence for philosophy.” G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, p. 693.

65. See Newtoni Optices (London, 1706), part 3, p. 314.

66. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 24.

67. This familiar view is rejected by Jauernig, who sees Kant as ultimately a great defender if not of Wolff, at least of Leibniz. See Anja Jauernig, “Kant’s Critique of the Leibnizian Philosophy: Contra the Leibnizians, but Pro Leibniz, Kant and the Early Moderns,” in Kant and the Early Moderns, ed. Daniel Garber and Béatrice Longuenesse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 41–63.

68. See Paolo Perrini, L’empirismo logico: Aspetti storici e prospettive teoriche (Rome: Carocci, 2002).

69. See G. W. F. Hegel, “Relationship to Skepticism to Philosophy: Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison to the Latest Form with the Ancient One,” in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. and annotated by George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 311–362.

70. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 80.

71. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), part 1, p. 7.

72. For a Hegelian defense of dialectic, see Jonas Cohn, Theorie der Dialektik (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1923).

73. See Plato, Republic, 511 B-C, pp. 184–185, and 533 B-C, p. 205.

74. Hegel, Hegel-Werke, vol. 18, p. 320.

75. For discussion, see H. F. Fulda, Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1965).

Chapter Six

1. The first mention of constructivist epistemology apparently occurs in his book, La Construction du réel chez l’enfant (Neuchâtel and Paris: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1937). His approach, which is expounded in a large body of work, reaches a peak in “Nature et méthode de l’épistémologie,” in Jean Piaget, ed., Logique et connaissance scientifique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 1–132.

2. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 12: “Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate.”

3. See, for example, Ilkka Niiniluoto, “Realism, Relativism, and Constructivism,” in Synthese 89, no. 1 (October 1991): pp. 135–162. Niiniluoto’s critique is typical. He concentrates on the so-called Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes as well as the constructivism of Knorr-Cetina, which he regards as related. Following Moore, he believes that idealism denies the existence of the external world (see ibid., p. 144). He assumes but does not demonstrate that constructivism and scientific realism are incompatible. His main point is that the constructivist approach is comparatively less plausible than “the alternative realist account, which explains consensus by the pre-existence of mind-independent real entities” (ibid., p. 135).

4. Frege has this to say about historical investigations: “The historical approach, with its aim of detecting how things begin from which to understand their nature, is certainly legitimate; but it also has its limitations. If everything were in continual flux and nothing remained fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know anything about the world and everything would be plunged into confusion. We suppose, it would seem, that concepts sprout in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their birth: we seek to define them psychologically, in terms of the nature of the human mind. But this account makes everything subjective, and taken to its logical conclusion, abolishes truth. What is known as the history of concepts is really either a history of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words. Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, in stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eyes of the mind.” Gottlob Frege, introduction to The Foundations of Arithmetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. vii.

5. See Michael Dummett, “Realism,” repr. in Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 145–165.

6. He has in mind the supposedly intuitive view that “there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence regardless of their social or cultural perspective.” Paul A. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), p. 131.

7. See, for example, Russian artistic constructivism.