German Idealism

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through nineteenth-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of agency and morality. Kant’s famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority and instead grounds moral obligations in the very idea of freedom conceived as something that is for everyone. This thought ultimately leads to the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century thought-–for the first time in the history of philosophy, history comes to be a topic for philosophy. We will study how these ideas are taken up and transformed in the works of philosophers like J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. 

We will study the foundations of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Our central text will be his Critique of Practical Reason. We will also draw on key passages from his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, his Metaphysics of Morals, his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

This course will look carefully at some of Sellars’s most important philosophical writings, focusing especially his classic monograph Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind and various closely related writings, with an eye toward those aspects of his treatment of topics that have continued to prove influential in recent philosophy. We will end the course with a closer look at Sellars’s interpretation of Kant, with special attention to how his own philosophy builds on and reworks a number of Kantian themes. Throughout the course, we will attend to those contemporaneous philosophers whom Sellars himself engaged most with (e.g., Lewis, Ayer, Schlick, Chisolm) in order better to understand his criticisms of them, as well as to those philosophers who over the past several decades have contributed most to the revival of Sellars’s thought (e.g.  Rorty, Brandom, McDowell) in order to compare and assess the very different strands of Sellarsian philosophy currently on offer in the contemporary journal literature.

Kant’s first Critique, and the Critical philosophy as a whole, appeared relatively late within Kant’s own philosophical career. An understanding of Kant’s philosophical trajectory during the 1750s, 1760s, and through 1770 is an essential foundation for grasping the problems and positions that appear in Kant’s most famous work. Readings will include the Nova Dilucidatio, the essay on negative magnitudes, and the Inaugural Dissertation. 

Topic: Heidegger’s Critique of German Idealism

Martin Heidegger claimed that the entire western philosophical tradition reached its ‘culmination’ (Vollendung) in the philosophy of German Idealism. In this course we will take this diagnosis seriously, work to understand its presuppositions and implications, and attempt to assess its cogency. This will involve an intensive study of Heidegger’s interpretations of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics. We will read Heidegger’s most significant works on Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy from the 1920s through the 1960s, as well as his central writings on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic. We will also take into account some secondary literature by Sebastian Gardner, Dieter Henrich, Robert Pippin and others. A coda to the course may consider the connection between freedom and system in German Idealism via Heidegger’s major interpretation of F.W.J. Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809).

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through nineteenth-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of agency and morality. Kant’s famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority and instead grounds moral obligations in the very idea of freedom conceived as something that is for everyone. This thought ultimately leads to the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century thought-–for the first time in the history of philosophy, history comes to be a topic for philosophy. We will study how these ideas are taken up and transformed in the works of philosophers like J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy.  We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing specifically on the influence of Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy and its lasting influence on discussions of ethics and political philosophy.  We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he announces his project of grounding all ethical obligation in the very idea of a free will.  We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life".  We will conclude with an examination of some important challenges to the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical and political theory: Karl Marx’s re-interpretation of the idea of freedom in the economic sphere; Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill’s radicalizations of the ideas of political liberty and equality; and the appropriation and critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom by writers on racial oppression including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.

In this class we explore the debate about moral evil in German Idealism. Kant teaches that the moral law is the law of freedom while also holding that immoral activity is entirely imputable to the subject and therefore free. How are the two claims compatible? We will reconstruct Kant’s own answer to this question as well as its discussion in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. And we will trace connections between the debate among the German Idealists and certain developments in contemporary moral constitutivism. Special attention will be given to Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, according to which actual immorality is a condition of human freedom, our capacity for moral goodness. We will examine Kant’s case for this doctrine and its role in the moral philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. (A) (IV)

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy.  We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing specifically on the influence of Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy and its lasting influence on discussions of ethics and political philosophy.  We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he announces his project of grounding all ethical obligation in the very idea of a free will.  We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life".  We will conclude with an examination of some important challenges to the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical and political theory: Karl Marx’s re-interpretation of the idea of freedom in the economic sphere; Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill’s radicalizations of the ideas of political liberty and equality; and the appropriation and critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom by writers on racial oppression including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of philosophical ethics. Kant’s famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority grounding all ethical obligations in the very notion of freedom conceived as something that is for everyone. We will study how these ideas are taken up and transformed in the works of philosophers like J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and W.E.B. Du Bois.