German Idealism as Constructivism

German Idealism as Constructivism PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635007X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
German Idealism as Constructivism is the culmination of many years of research by distinguished philosopher Tom Rockmore—it is his definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism that still plagues our grasp of the history of German idealism and the whole epistemological project today. Rockmore argues that German idealism—which includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—can best be understood as a constructivist project, one that asserts that we cannot know the mind-independent world as it is but only our own mental construction of it. Since ancient Greece philosophers have tried to know the world in itself, an effort that Kant believed had failed. His alternative strategy—which came to be known as the Copernican revolution—was that the world as we experience and know it depends on the mind. Rockmore shows that this project was central to Kant’s critical philosophy and the later German idealists who would follow him. He traces the different ways philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel formulated their own versions of constructivism. Offering a sweeping but deeply attuned analysis of a crucial part of the legacy of German idealism, Rockmore reinvigorates this school of philosophy and opens up promising new avenues for its study.

German Idealism as Constructivism

German Idealism as Constructivism PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635007X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book

Book Description
German Idealism as Constructivism is the culmination of many years of research by distinguished philosopher Tom Rockmore—it is his definitive statement on the debate about German idealism between proponents of representationalism and those of constructivism that still plagues our grasp of the history of German idealism and the whole epistemological project today. Rockmore argues that German idealism—which includes iconic thinkers such as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel—can best be understood as a constructivist project, one that asserts that we cannot know the mind-independent world as it is but only our own mental construction of it. Since ancient Greece philosophers have tried to know the world in itself, an effort that Kant believed had failed. His alternative strategy—which came to be known as the Copernican revolution—was that the world as we experience and know it depends on the mind. Rockmore shows that this project was central to Kant’s critical philosophy and the later German idealists who would follow him. He traces the different ways philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel formulated their own versions of constructivism. Offering a sweeping but deeply attuned analysis of a crucial part of the legacy of German idealism, Rockmore reinvigorates this school of philosophy and opens up promising new avenues for its study.

German Idealism as Constructivism

German Idealism as Constructivism PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634990X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The culmination and distillation of distinguished philosopher Tom Rockmore's researches over some forty years, this book is his definitive statement on the debate between representationalism and constructivism that plagues both the history of German Idealism and the whole epistemological project today. Rockmore contends against prevailing opinion that Kant himself is an idealist and that his idealism centers on the Copernican revolution or a constructivist approach to knowledge. He shows that despite what Kant says in the first Critique he is not and cannot be a representationalist, and that the so-called double aspect thesis also fails. Positioning Kant as responding to Plato, he reads Plato as in turn responding to Parmenides. In Rockmore's view the Parmenidean intervention has two singularly important consequences: it focuses attention, running throughout the entire tradition, on the grasp of the mind-independent world--metaphysical realism--and it points toward the criterion of knowledge as the identity of identity and difference, a thesis that becomes explicit in Hegel. Rockmore examines the constructivist dimensions of the views of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in detail, pointing out that Fichte's effort to reformulate constructivism while intended to solve a residual difficulty in Kant's version of constructivism actually undermines the claim for objective cognition. Moreover Schelling's view of the parallel between transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature, which is influenced by Spinoza, is based on a different kind of identity and it follows that Schelling does not later leave German idealism behind since in a deep sense he was never a German idealist. The book concludes with a short discussion of cognitive constructivism arguing that it remains viable at the present time as an alternative to metaphysical realism, while preserving the other Parmenidean suggestion, the identity of identity and difference.

Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy

Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy PDF Author: James Gledhill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351205536
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
While Kantian constructivism has become one of the most influential and systematic schools of thought in analytic moral and political philosophy, Hegelian approaches to practical normativity hold out the promise of building upon Kantian insights into individual self-determination while avoiding their dualistic tendencies. James Gledhill and Sebastian Stein unite distinguished scholars of German idealism and contemporary Anglophone practical philosophy with rising stars in the field, to explore whether Hegelian idealist philosophy can offer the categories that analytic practical philosophy requires to overcome the contradictions that have so far plagued Kantian constructivism. The volume organizes the contributions into three parts. The first of these engages debates in metaethics regarding the relationship between realism and constructivism. The second part sees contributors draw on debates about the nature of political normativity, focusing primarily on the problems of historical contextualism, relativism, and critical reflection. The concluding part considers the application of the Hegelian framework to contemporary debates about specific ethical issues, including multiculturalism, democracy, and human rights. Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy contributes to the on-going debate about the importance of systematic philosophy in the context of practical philosophy, engages with contemporary discussions about the shape of a rational social order, and gauges the timeliness of Hegelian philosophy. This book is a must read for scholars interested in Hegel and in the contemporary tradition of Kantian constructivism in moral and political philosophy.

After Parmenides

After Parmenides PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022679542X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
"In After Parmenides, Tom Rockmore takes us all the way back to the beginning of philosophy. Parmenides held that thought and being are one: what we know is what is. For Rockmore, this established both the good view that we should think of the world in terms of what the mind constructs as knowable entities as well as the bad view that there is some non-mind-dependent "thing"-the world, the real-which we can know or fail to know. No, Rockmore says: what we need to do is give up on the idea that there is any extra-mental "real" for us to know. We know and become acquainted with the objects of cognition that our mind constructs. After Parmenides illustrates the contest between variants of the "standard" view and variants of the "non-standard, constructivist view" in the history of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Locke, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, post-Kantians including Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, Marx, the early pragmatists, analytic philosophy, contemporary French speculative realism, and more. This ambitious but accessibly written book shows how new connections can be made in the history of philosophy when it is reread through a new lens"--

The Politics of German Idealism

The Politics of German Idealism PDF Author: Christopher Yeomans
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197667309
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Politics of German Idealism reconstructs the political philosophies of Kant, Fichte and Hegel against the background of their social-historical context. Christopher Yeomans' guiding thought is to understand German Idealist political philosophy as political, i.e., as a set of policy options and institutional designs aimed at a broadly but distinctively German set of social problems. 'Political' here refers to use of the state's power to enforce law, and 'social' to the norms and groups which are regulated by that enforcement, but which also antedate or exceed that enforcement. Because the power to enforce law is very much still being actualized by state-building in the period at issue, 'political' refers quite narrowly to a certain kind of practical legal project rather than to a perennial set of problems from the history of philosophy. By way of method, Yeomans claims that to reveal the political nature of German Idealist political philosophy requires understanding German Idealism as both taking place in and conceptualizing its own historical present--this is the sense in which it is not only political, but political philosophy. The most important general feature of the historical present of the German Idealists is the way in which the period from 1770 to 1830 was a transitional period between early and late modernity, a so-called saddle period (Sattelzeit) in which the metaphor is of a Bergsattel or shallow valley between two mountain peaks.

"I that is We, We that is I." Perspectives on Contemporary Hegel

Author: Italo Testa
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004322965
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
In "I that is We, We that is I" leading scholars analyze the many facets of Hegel’s formula for the intersubjective structure of human life and explores its relevance for debates on social ontology, recognition, action theory, constructivism, and naturalism.

Kant and Idealism

Kant and Idealism PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300134738
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This much-needed book examines one of the great lacunae of contemporary philosophical discussion - idealism. Addressing the widespread confusion about the meaning and use of the term, Tom Rockmore surveys and classifies some of its major forms. He argues that Kant provides the essential link between three main types of idealism associated with Plato, the new way of ideas, and German idealism. The author also makes a case for the contemporary relevance of at least one strand in the tangled idealist web, a strand most clearly identified with Kant. In terms of the philosophical tradition, Rockmore contends, constructivism offers a lively, interesting, and important approach to knowledge after the decline of metaphysical realism.

Nietzsche's Constructivism

Nietzsche's Constructivism PDF Author: Justin Remhof
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315410036
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects impact commitments in many areas of philosophy—not just metaphysics, but also language, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. In this book, Remhof presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s material object metaphysics. He argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial constructivist view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading Nietzsche as a constructivist, Remhof contends, provides fresh insight into Nietzsche’s views on truth, science, naturalism, and nihilism. The book also investigates how Nietzsche’s view of objects compares with views offered by influential American pragmatists and explores the implications of Nietzsche’s constructivism for debates in contemporary material object metaphysics. Nietzsche’s Constructivism is a highly original and timely contribution to the steadily growing literature on Nietzsche’s thought.

Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism

Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism PDF Author: Halla Kim
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739182366
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism contains ten new essays by leading and rising scholars from the United States, Europe, and Asia who explore the historical development and conceptual contours of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy.

Kant and Phenomenology

Kant and Phenomenology PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226817857
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Kant and Phenomenology traces the formulation of Kant's phenomenological approach back to the second edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In response to various criticisms of the first edition, Kant more forcefully put forth a constructivist theory of knowledge. This shift in Kant's thinking challenged the representational approach to epistemology, and it is this turn, Rockmore contends, that makes Kant the first great phenomenologist. He then follows and evaluates the epistemological usefulness of this phenomenological line through the work of Kant's idealist successors, Fichte and Hegel, and through the work of his phenomenological successors, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Steeped in the sources and literature it examines, Kant and Phenomenology persuasively reshapes our conception of both of its main subjects. --Page [4] of cover.