THE SOCIETY FOR GERMAN
IDEALISM
The
SGI had a paper session at the 2003 Pacific
APA, 6:00-9:00 PM on March 27, in San Francisco.
Eric
Entrican Wilson (Emory University)
Am Anfang war die Tat: Fichte's Early Move Away From Representationalism
This paper explores an important connection between Fichte's 1793 "Review of Aenesidemus" and his 1794 Grundlage
der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. In the course of writing the
former, Fichte realizes that it is theoretically unacceptable to take
for granted the ability to have representations (or "ideas").
This ability must be explained in more basic terms. I argue
that Fichte's call for such an explanation in 1793 is answered in
the "Deduction of Representation" section of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre.
This constitutes his decisive turn away from the dominant representationalist
tradition in modern philosophy, and marks one of his most important
contributions to German Idealism.
James
Kreines (Yale University)
Hegel’s Critique of Pure Mechanism
Hegel's complaint about mechanistic explanation is not, as is
commonly held, that it cannot account for the entire universe as a
whole. Nearly the opposite is true. To suppose that mechanism alone
is explanatory -- Hegel argues -- would be to dissolve everything
into one single undifferentiated whole, leaving no way to grasp what
it would be to explain anything in particular. This argument suggests
that Hegel's broader philosophical project is an investigation of
the status of specific explanatory "notions" -- and that
this project can be understood neither in terms of the most familiar
metaphysical interpretations, nor the most popular non-metaphysical
alternatives.
Mason
Richey (SUNY Binghamton)
Freedom, the Good, the Non-Identical: Schelling and Adorno
In this paper, I seek to outline briefly what I consider to be
an overlooked affinity between Adorno's critique of reason (his reclamation
of the nonidentical,) and Schelling's middle and late period works,
whose uncovering of narcissistic reason, a reason with false claims
to totality, prefigure what Adorno referred to as dialectic of Enlightenment.
A central claim of this paper is that both Schelling and Adorno subordinate
epistemology and ontology to ethics. Both are striving to conceptualize
a thought of the good that does not require reference to the totalizing
project of Hegel's transitive use of the concept.
Chair:
Aaron Bunch (Loyola University
Chicago)