Is Obama a Kantian?

In his speech at his first state dinner honoring the prime minister of India, Obama approvingly quotes Kant: "For it's been said that 'the most beautiful things in the universe are the starry heavens above us and the feeling of duty within us.' Mr. Prime Minister, today we worked to fulfill our duty --bring our countries closer together than ever before. Tonight, under the stars, we celebrate the spirit that will sustain our partnership -- the bonds of friendship between our people." Transcript here.

Maybe this is the influence of Rahm Emanuel, who happened to admire Hegel and "the nineteenth-century German thinkers" during his student days.

(Thanks to David Wood for the tip)

NY German Idealism Workshop, Nov. 20th

The NY German Idealism Workshop will hold its next meeting on Friday, November 20th. Patricia Kitcher (Columbia University) will be giving a paper entitled:

“Kant’s Spontaneous Thinker and (More) Spontaneous Agent.” Robert Howell (SUNY Albany) will respond.

Date: Friday, November 20th
Location: Columbia University, Philosophy Hall, Room 716
Time: 4:30-6:30pm

Light refreshments will be served.

To receive a copy of Kitcher's paper in advance, email Matt Congdon at matt.congdon@gmail.com

Hegel and Herder

Mitchell Verter, a student at the New School for Social Research, is creating an online bilingual edition of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I'm sure many will find this useful.

For the many readers in the NY area, Katie Terezakis, a graduate of the New School and now at Rochester Institute of Technology, will give a talk October 15, 2009 at Columbia University: "Meaning and Authority in the Thought of J.G. Herder".

German Idealism Workshop

The NY German Idealism Workshop, organized this year jointly by The New School for Social Research and Columbia, will hold its next meeting on Friday, October 16th.

Allegra de Laurentiis (Stonybrook) will be giving a paper entitled, "Garve, Kant and Hegel on the Right and the Useful in International Politics." Martin Stone (Cardozo and The New School) will respond.

Date: Friday, October 16th
Location: The New School, 80 Fifth Ave., Rm. 529
Time: 4-6pm

Light refreshments will be served.

New SEP Articles

There are some new Kant and Kant related articles up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Kant's Transcendental Arguments

Kant's Views on Space and Time

Peter Frederick Strawson

Henrich Book Review

Terry Pinkard reviews Dieter Henrich's Denken and Selbstsein at NDPR.

Hegel After Spinoza (CFP)

Here you will find a CFP for a volume of essays on the topic of Hegel and Spinoza.

The Relevance of Romanticism (CFP)

The Relevance of Romanticism

A conference sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium (GPPC)

April 16-17, 2010

Villanova University

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Manfred Frank, Universität Tübingen

Frederick Beiser, Syracuse University

With the recent increase of interest in philosophical romanticism, it seems appropriate to ask the question, why romanticism now. What were the philosophical questions and concerns of Romanticism, and why do they seem particularly apt for contemporary philosophical and non-philosophical discussions? What is the value of Romanticism as a philosophical movement, both within the history of philosophy, and for philosophy today? Is Romanticism a fundamentally distinct movement, which offers something to the history of philosophy or to contemporary philosophical discussions, which other movements (Idealism, for example) do not? Can we speak of “philosophical Romanticism” at all? What is philosophical about Romanticism?

The conference is dedicated to raising and attempting to answer some of these questions, in light of the work of the two keynote speakers, Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser. We are seeking papers which address the theme of philosophical Romanticism and its relevance, from a historical or a contemporary perspective. Interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between philosophical Romanticism and other disciplines (art, science, literature, theology) are also welcome. Papers should exhibit some familiarity with the works of Manfred Frank and/or Frederick Beiser, and, to some degree, engage with their contributions to the field.

In addition to the keynote addresses, Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser will participate in a roundtable discussion with the conference participants.

Submissions: Please submit a completed paper (3,500 words) no later than January 31, 2010 to dalia.nassar@villanova.edu. Papers should be prepared for blind-review. Submissions should be in .doc or .pdf format. Questions: contact Dalia Nassar at:
dalia.nassar@villanova.edu.

Analytic Kantianism

The new issue of Philosophical Topics is dedicated to Kant and it includes essays by excellent philosophers.

Philosophical Topics, Volume 34, Numbers 1 & 2
Analytic Kantianism

Issue Editor: James Conant

Contributors: Robert Brandom, Eli Friedlander, Michael Friedman, Hannah Ginsborg, Arata Hamawaki, Andrea Kern, Michael Kremer, Thomas Land, Thomas Lockhart, Béatrice Longuenesse, John McDowell, A.W. Moore, Sebastian Rödl, and Clinton Tolley.

Notes from Hamann Conference

Jonathan Gray posted his notes from the Hamann Conference hosted by Hunter College in the spring. I was only able to attend the first day, but it was a great line up and it is clear there is some strong scholarship being done on Hamann. Hopefully more events like this will be organized in the future.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Subscription

I'm a big fan of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I noticed they have a new initiative that I think many readers will be interested in. For a very reasonable sum of money, you can subscribe to the encyclopedia and download clean Pdfs of their articles. More here.

Also, check out the new Novalis entry by Kristin Gjedal.

Update

Posting has been light over the last month or so, and I expect light posting to continue. I'm moving to Cincinnati in a month for a visiting position at Xavier University, and I need to get a lot of writing done before and just after the move. If you have any news you would like posted contact me by email and I'd be happy to post it here. Happy Summer!

A Fichte Fugue

Exposition: Fichtestube, a Fichte themed restaurant.

Development: A new edition of Fichte's Attempt at at Critique of All Revelation is being edited by Allen Wood and expected sometime next year.

Recapitulation: Fichte TV.

Kant Congress (CFP)

Here the CFP for the International Kant Congress is posted. The deadline for papers has been extended to September 15, 2009.

Book Reviews

Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and Biology: An Interpretation of the Critique of Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Robert B. Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Fichte Conference on Vocation of Man

The new Fichtenana, the newsletter of the North American Fichte Society, is now available online. Check it out to see what's new in the world of Fichte studies. Below I'm posting from the newsletter the call for papers for the next conference hosted by NAFS.

Fichte's Vocation of Man (1800)
Tenth Biannual Meeting of the North American Fichte Society
Lisbon, Portugal
April 27-30 2010

The Tenth Biennial Meeting of the North American Fichte Society will be held at Lisbon, Portugal from April 27-30, 2010. Local arrangements will be coordinated by Professor Mário Jorge de Almeida Carvalho (University of Lisbon). The theme of this conference will be Fichte's Bestimmung des Menschen (Vocation of Man) of 1800. Historical, comparative, and systematic approaches to and interpretations of the text are all welcome.

As is the practice of the North American Fichte Society, this event is open to all interested Fichte scholars, both in North America and elsewhere, though English will be the language of the conference and of the presentations. Please send paper proposals, including titles and brief descriptions of contents to Daniel Breazeale, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40508 USA <breazeal@uky.edu> no later than September 1, 2009.

Conference papers should have a maximum reading time of 30 minutes. As in the past, we intend to publish a volume of selected papers from this conference. Though it may not prove possible to publish all of the conference papers, we nevertheless request that anyone presenting a paper formally grant the North American Fichte Society the "right of first refusal" for the publication of the same.

Please note that no funds will be available from the conference sponsors to support either travel costs or living expenses of the conference participants. However, an official "letter of invitation" for the purposes of obtaining travel support from one's own institution, can easily be arranged. Further details concerning lodging, program, etc. will be circulated at a later date to those who have expressed interest in participating.

End the University as We Know It?

Today there is an op-ed piece in the The New York Times titled "End the University as we know it" by Mark C. Taylor, a professor in the religion department at Columbia. He employs the old argument that specialization has destroyed the idea of the university that is built around faculties functioning somewhat autonomously. He even cites Kant, a figure he sees as defending a "mass production" view of the university that requires a certain "division of labor" among the faculties. Kant's essays that make up his Conflict of the Faculties were written in response to threats of censorship on the part of Frederick II. Kant's aim, in part, is to defend academic freedom for the broadly conceived philosophical faculty.

Taylor's essay is far too nearsighted. He anchors a number of suggestions directed at revising the university structure in people's fears of an unknown economic future. He has six suggestions: 1) Restructure the curriculum (the idea is to get rid of specialization and the division of labor model, and put in its place an interdisciplinary model); 2) Abolish permanent departments; 3) Increase collaboration among institutions; 4) Transform the dissertation (by taking advantage of new technologies); 5) Expand the range of professional options for graduate students; 6) Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.

The problem with many of these suggestions is that they would place constraints on academic research and destroy academic freedom. I think there is a misunderstanding of the problem of specialization motivating Taylor's piece. He seems to think that when research, dissertations, essays, and books become so focused they lose all practical import. It is as if this is an essential element of specialization. That is just absurd. Certainly, many books and dissertations do have little practical import. My dissertation on Fichte will not solve the world's water problems, racism, or even the mind/body problem. There may be only a few scholars who have a serious interest in it. That's fine. Why must everything have an immediate practical import? What specialization provides is not solutions, but ways of looking at larger issues from unique perspectives. The hope is that these varying perspectives provide a deeper analysis of the issues. Sometimes they don't. That's fine too. I also find the idea of interdisciplinary work based on the destruction of faculties where disciplines emerge and debates, methodologies, and theses are developed and revised to be an incoherent idea. Taylor's remarks on abolishing tenure, the very institution meant to maintain academic freedom, I think are unfortunate. If the problem with tenure is that older faculty do not publish or "develop professionally" then some internal mechanism could be established to encourage such things. Faculty turnover is a problem, but destroying tenure does not seem to be the right response at all. As far as turnover goes, do we really want our universities to takeover the business model of Walmart? Taylor essentially has an applied and instrumental idea of the university, and I think his suggestions are deeply troubling.

The major problem with the university system is its cost. Education is a right, not a luxury. Making universities affordable (or just free) would solve some of these problems.

Ameriks on Fichtean Influences

I spent a good bit of this afternoon reading a series of exchanges between Karl Ameriks, Daniel Breazeale, and Charles Larmore published by Inquiry in 2003. The exchange is over Ameriks' book Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge, 2000), a book that takes issue with how Reinhold, Fichte, and Hegel understood, interpreted, and appropriated Kant. Ameriks blames the influence of Reinhold and Fichte for muddying the waters of Kant interpretation by taking Kant's starting point in his Transcendental Deduction to be the concept of representation, and not, what Ameriks calls "common sense judgment", that is, judgments about public objects found in space and time. The issue here is that Reinhold and Fichte have set up a shortcut to their idealist conclusions, one that bypasses the complexities of Kant's own argument for Transcendental Idealism. Ameriks is well-known for introducing the short arguments to idealism, and his book is largely an attempt to show why this mode of argumentation obscures the meaning and importance of Kant’s project.

What I find interesting about Ameriks' take on Fichte is that he sees his influence on contemporary philosophy to be more profound than most philosophers and scholars are willing to recognize. The problem with this Fichtean influence, for Ameriks, is that he takes Fichte to be at best a bad Kantian, and at worst a bad philosopher, so his influence can only be deleterious. Breazeale admirably comes to the defense of Fichte, but in doing so he questions Ameriks' assumption that Fichte's work has been influential:

I am deeply gratified—as well as somewhat amused—by Ameriks' undisguised alarm at the 'growing interest' among contemporary philosophers in post-Kant idealism in general and in Fichte in particular. Even if it represents a considerable exaggeration of the actual situation, I am still flattered to read that 'enough has been written in recent years to make this one-exotic strand of thought familiar and even attractive to many English-language readers' (Ameriks, p. 4). Indeed, it seems to be part of Ameriks' rhetorical strategy to exaggerate in this way the threat represented by contemporary interest in the work of the post-Kantians in order thereby to emphasize the timeliness and significance of his effort to vindicate 'orthodox Kantianism'. (Breazeale, "Two Cheers for Post Kantianism", Inquiry, v. 46, p. 240)

Ameriks finds Fichtean influences in the way in which scholars like Robert Pippin interpret Kant. A lot of this criticism from Ameriks is aimed at defending what he takes to be the right interpretation of Kant’s work, one that is not metaphysically deflationary in its orientation. Ameriks takes issue with more than just scholars of Kant and post-Kantianism. He also finds that a certain kind of Fichteanism has begun to take hold in analytic circles. In a footnote he writes, "An impressive recent indication of the 'analytic' trend I have in mind is Susan Hurley aptly titled Consciousness in Action, a work that does not directly invoke Fichte but provides an extensive discussion of 'action-oriented' readings of Kantian apperception, with an insightful critique of 'the myth of the giving'"(Ameriks, 188). Hurley also defends another thesis, one Hector-Neri Castañeda called 'the Fichtean thesis': a necessary condition of consciousness is self-consciousness. Action-oriented theories of apperception, perception, knowledge, and consciousness are becoming more and more influential in certain circles in philosophy of mind. I think Breazeale is probably right to be skeptical about such trends resulting from philosophers having read Fichte. However, Ameriks is, I think, right to insist that there is a post-Kantian influence on contemporary analytic philosophy. This influence should be traced back to the post-Kantianism of Sellars. Post-Kantianism of the Sellarisan variety is quite influential today. Ameriks book was published in 2000, just a few years after the wave making works of McDowell and Brandom. I think in this respect Ameriks is right to see Fichtean influences in contemporary analytic philosophy and Kant interpretation, even when they come by way of Hegel and Sellars rather than directly from Fichte himself. Like Breazeale, I don't, however, takes these influences to be toxic.

Book Reviews

Two reviews at NDPR:

Béatrice Longuenesse, Hegel's Critique of Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Scott Stapleford, Kant's Transcendental Arguments: Disciplining Pure Reason, Continuum, 2008.

Pete Mandik posted an entry on transcendental arguments he wrote for a book he is working on. And over at Philosophy, et cetra, Richard Chappell has created a feed for NDPR so you can receive their reviews through your blog reader, rather than via email.

German Idealism Workshop, April 17

On Friday, April 17, the next German Idealism Workshop will take place at the New School. Below are the details:

Andreja Novakovic (Columbia) will present a paper on Hegel titled, "Second Nature and Ethical Life".

Matt Congdon (New School) will respond.

Time: 4:30
Place: The New School, 65 5th Ave (14th St. and 5th ave).
Room: Wolf Conference Room, 2nd Floor (This is the old Wolf, not the new one)

If you plan to attend and would like to receive a copy of the paper, email me.