THE SOCIETY FOR GERMAN
IDEALISM
The
SGI had three sessions at the 2004 Pacific
APA, on March 25-27, at the Sheraton/Hilton
Hotels in Pasadena, California.
Thursday
evening, March 25, 8:00-11:00
Author-meets-critics
session
Challenges
to German Idealism: Schelling, Fichte, and Kant
Critic:
Richard Findler (Slippery
Rock University)
Critic:
Jason Wirth (Oglethorpe
University)
Chair:
J. M. Fritzman (Lewis & Clark College)
Friday
evening, March 26, 7:30-10:30
Author-meets-critics
session
German
Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and
German Jewish Responses
Critic:
Arthur Jacobson (Benjamin
N. Cardozo School of Law)
Critic:
John McCumber (University
of California, Los Angeles)
Chair:
Aaron Bunch (Loyola
University Chicago)
Saturday
evening, March 27, 7:00-10:00
Paper
session
Jennifer
Bates (University of Guelph)
"The Moral Chemist of the Corpus Mysticum: Why
Some Version of Kant's Practical Postulates is Necessary, Even
for Hegel"
In order to defend a functional notion of Kant's practical postulates
against Hegel's attack in the Phenomenology of Spirit,
I discuss these synthetic a priori practical judgments in terms
of: Kant's differentiation between hoping and knowing, and between
practical and theoretical thinking; I clarify their nature as "possible" by comparing them with the postulates of
empirical experience and with mathematical postulates; I discuss
their function in order to show they are not limited to monotheism;
I conclude that the synthetic a priori practical judgment is moral
imagination, and that Hegel's highest ethical act, forgiveness,
cannot be thought without it.
Matthew
C. Altman (Central Washington University)
"The Prescience of Fichte's Anstoß: German
Idealism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy"
Fichte's idealism is based on the notion that we cannot simply
be held by some static truth independently of how we relate ourselves
to it. However, for Fichte this self-determination is necessarily
in tension with a limit -- an Anstoß or Aufforderung
-- that resists rational incorporation. Hegel cites this as a
sign of the Wissenschaftslehre's failure, but in light
of recent criticisms of Hegelianism, Fichte's account of the self-alienation
inherent to human subjectivity seems prescient. His treatment
of the original limit on the I's activity provides an important
historical touchstone for understanding our post-Nietzschean ambivalence
toward the Hegelian project.
Michael
Allen (Saint Louis University)
"Hegel Between Non-Domination and Expressive Freedom"
Frederick Neuhouser and Robert Brandom present original but divergent
interpretation of Hegel on freedom, in terms of the ideas of non-domination
and expressive freedom respectively. Both ideas are of social
freedom realized through transformations mediated by norms. But
otherwise it remains unclear how non-domination and expressive
freedom are related. For Hegel, it would appear than expressive
freedom is consistent with domination and indeed threatens the
well-ordered republican regime of non-domination. I argue, however,
that this is not ultimately a tenable position and that non-domination
and expressive freedom are integrally related ideas.
Chair:
Jeffrey A. Gauthier (University
of Portland)
The
Society for German Idealism
Updated
on 2 April 2004
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